Last month, the Supreme Court of the United States decreed the presidential powers extend to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, and rendered prosecution for any act by a president extremely difficult. Last week, President Biden announced he would forego a presidential nomination that was his for the good of the country. Both decisions, in their way, stand to shape the nature of the American experiment.
In 1984, George Orwell has "the Party" makes the hollow claim to control the past, by having the power to lie about what happened in the past and to murder anyone who tells or even remembers the truth. Over the seventy six years since the publication of Orwell's dystopia we have come to see the strength of memory, and come to understand, with the author of the miniseries Chernobyl, that every lie we tell does indeed incur a debt to the truth, and in a multitude of political circumstance in a multitude of ways we have seen that debt paid.
Yet the past does depend on the present in one specific way: the choices we make in the present, the choices shaping our reality, determine the outcome of the choices made in the past, from the most recent past to the highest antiquity we can record. Those outcomes light, or shade, the judgments we make about the choices of the past. Consider the events, and the choices, which brought Hitler to power. If people had made different choices at any of these points, we would remember the Weimar Republic very differently. Likewise, if we manage to achieve a measure of justice and reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples of this continent, history will remember the events of first contact and the history following it as halting steps in the building of a social order with room for the gifts of the many peoples who live here. If we fail, history will remember the same events as the beginning of a successful genocide.
This holds true, as well, for the beginnings of the United States at that meeting in Philadelphia, now only two years short of a quarter millennium ago. Thomas Jefferson's authorship of the Declaration of Independence anchored that beginning in and idea we have often ascribed to the Enlightenment following the Renaissance. The truest origins of the revolutionary idea Jefferson set out in political terms lie much farther in the past. Saint Irenaeus articulated it near the very beginning of the Christian era as "Gloria Dei vivens homo": the Glory of God is man alive. This concept, that human societies exist, not for conquest or glory, not for monuments to the leader or the tribe, but for the flourishing of the ordinary human person, is both ancient and permanently revolutionary. It holds that governments, laws, and even religious institutions exist only as means to serve this end.
Thomas Jefferson used this idea as his theory of government, justification for American independence, and foundational concept for the new state. He wrote:
"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 instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
The American poet Archibald MacLeish, looking back in 1949 at what was then 173 years of American history, and in particular the four years following the end of the Second World War, saw his country at risk of developing into a mirror image of its enemy, the Soviet Union. In an essay for the Atlantic titled The Conquest of America, he wrote movingly of his country as a new thing in human history, a country with no object, no real destiny other than the flourishing of its individual citizens. He wrote:
It is this seed, this influence, this force, this force of revolution, which is the living thing in the Republic. Without it, the United States is so much land, so many people, such an accumulation of wealth.With it the United States is a stage upon the journey of mankind.
From the very beginning, two readings of the Declaration of Independence have existed as possibilities. The men who met in Independence Hall in Philadelphia were men of property and power; many of them were slaveholders. Their practical grievances included the British refusal to allow them to simply appropriate the lands and resources of the Indigenous peoples of the continent. They objected to "taxation without representation"; at least to some extent, these taxes aimed to defray the cost of the Seven Years War, which the Americans had to a significant extent pulled Britain into by engaging in military operations against New France.
In short, plenty of evidence exists to support a view of the Declaration of Independence as a shabby, cynical pretense, an effort by merchant princes and slave-holding landowners to cast off their debts and plunder a continent in which, thanks to the British victories in the Seven Years War, they had no rival equipped with advanced military technology. Whether the descendants of Americans alive today accept this view, or whether they believe Jefferson and his contemporaries, for all their faults, for all the weaknesses and contradictions in their project, did indeed set out on a new path with a new theory of government depends, as it always has, on the choices Americans make now.
In common with all the world's peoples, Americans have faced the temptation to place prosperity, ease, the glory of the tribe or nation, some form of blood and soil, before freedom. Archibald MacLeish wrote of these temptations 75 years ago. In our own time, both the Right and Left in the United States have their own temptations to put the tribe or the leader or the nation or the glorious future over the life and flourishing of the individual citizen, the individual person. But this month, the leaders of the two parties seriously contending for power clearly signalled the direction Americans, and the world, can expect them to take. The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, pursued a legal appeal based on a broad claim of immunity from prosecution, one the United States Supreme Court and its Republican majority largely granted him. Joe Biden, the Democrat candidate, accepted his time to lead needed to end for the good of the American public.
American history is fixed safely in the past. Its meaning is in the hands of Americans today.
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