Image by Debby Hudson.
For 10 years we have heard the far right’s cry to Make America Great Again. But how did America become a superpower; what is it that made America a great nation? I contend that it is the founding principles declared in the Declaration of Independence. They were written by Jefferson, who embraced Enlightenment philosophy.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
America is rooted in three basic principles, freedom, equality, and democracy. Guided by these principles America became great. The sad paradox for this generation is that the MAGA faction does not value the very things that made America great.
The driving force behind the American Revolution was freedom, freedom from the tyranny of King George and the oppressive system he represented: an alliance of popes, bishops, monarchs, and oligarchs who claimed authority by divine right. For nearly two thousand years people were denied basic human rights that we take for granted. The Revolution brought an end to that tyranny and created a nation where people would be free to think independently and to live and believe according to their conscience.
The US was the first nation to embrace the freedom envisioned in Enlightenment philosophy and reap its benefits. That freedom released the creative energy of the American population. No longer constrained by arbitrary and irrational rules and norms, the people were free to develop and promote their ideas, skills and resources. Immigrants from every part of the world were drawn to American liberty and opportunity, and the US became the leading nation economically and technically, and a model, however imperfect, for governance.
Other western nations followed. Today, liberal democracies are the envy of the world, while the autocratic and theocratic nations, who continue to restrict freedom, languish. By any measure, the quality of life in the liberal democracies far surpasses that in the autocratic and theocratic nations.
Liberal democracies allow the best ideas to emerge. The advances in our understanding of the natural world, human nature, the environment, transportation, medicine, information systems and artificial intelligence were developed in the free world. They seldom came from the repressed theocratic and autocratic societies.
And democracies make better choices. James Surowiecki in the The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few shows that the estimates of crowds are often surprisingly accurate. Provided the sampling is independent, this phenomenon holds for estimating the number of beans in a jar to stock valuations. And it supports the idea that a voting democratic majority will make better choices than a single autocrat. An obvious reason is that extreme views are sidelined.
Fifty years ago, it seemed certain that liberal democracy would at last bring peace a security to the world. That is no longer a safe assumption. The American experiment is in crisis.
What Went Wrong
Following WWII, the negative consequences of depriving people of freedom became obvious. That threatened the stability of the theocratic and autocratic governments. To defend their obsolete, fundamentalist ideologies and protect their self-interest, religious leaders roused their followers, moralizing that the live-and-let-live freedoms of western world are depraved, especially those pertaining to abortion, gay and transgender rights. In the extreme, Muslim leaders resorted to terrorism. In America, Christian fundamentalists commandeered a political party.
Authoritarian leaders used brute force to deny freedom. Take for example Putin’s war with Ukraine. A liberal democracy, former member of the USSR, thriving on the Russian border is something Putin could not abide. His solution? Invade Ukraine and force them into submission. To quell dissent within Russia, he linked arms with the Russian Orthodox Church, justifying the invasion as an attack on western decadence.
Other violent tactics include: Russian dissident Alexei Navalny – murdered for speaking out against Putin’s corrupt regime, journalist Jamal Khashoggi- killed by agents of the Saudi government, and the brilliant Muslim writer Salmon Rushdie – two assassination attempts by religious zealots for blasphemy. Such atrocities committed by governments themselves have been almost unthinkable in democracies where people are free to think and promote their ideas and beliefs, even when they are unconventional or unpopular.
The autocratic regimes have undertaken a coordinated effort to diminish the standing of democracies. By spreading misinformation and disinformation on social media they ferment unrest and support fascist leaning politicians. The United States, France, Italy, and Germany have all moved to the right.
And our democracy is failing. An unelected South African multi-billionaire Lex Luthor-type, aka Elon Musk, controls congressional Republicans and apparently Trump as well. The convicted felon, soon to be president, plans to install loyalists to manage the federal bureaucracy so that it will benefit businesses and oligarchs at the expense of the people. Musk’s ambition is to slash two trillion (30 percent) from the federal budget, while Trump plans to reduce taxes. Those who depend on the social safety net will suffer.
How did this happen in our democracy? Money and religious fundamentalism. The key premise of the “Wisdom of Crowds,” independent sampling, another way of saying freedom from bias, has been compromised. Profit-driven propaganda from Fox News and other sources has infected audiences with distorted views of reality; special interests fund disinformation and misinformation on social media, and fundamentalist religious preachers terrify their congregations with the notion god hates the freedom advocated by liberalism.
The outcome is bias, which, coupled with gerrymandered districts and the allocation of two Senate seats per state, has perverted our democracy. Election outcomes no longer reflect the will of the majority. We seem destined to live in the kind of world the Enlightenment thinkers and our country’s founders rejected.
What Must be Done
We need only get money and religion out of our politics and our courts. But doing that will be extremely difficult, just as it was in 1776. Then as now, this is a struggle between the people and the powerful who have vast resources.
The principles that made America great have not changed. The question is, will this generation protect them for generations that follow? Will the people finally realize that special interests are manipulating them?
