Semiquincentennial Thoughts: Is America Still Young?

Right at the very beginning of Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July Oration, delivered some one hundred and seventy-four years ago today, he remarked that he was "glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation." Douglass was glad of America's youth, there was "hope in the thought," because a young nation might yet learn, might yet change its ways.

Today, of course, is not the seventy-sixth anniversary of our nation's founding, but the two hundred and fiftieth. And while certainly Douglass's hopes for America's future have largely been born out, it is still true in our times that the "eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times." It is not unfair, I venture, to say that we are governed today by men less sympathetic to Douglass's cause, to his indictment of the America of 1852, than has been the case in many generations. We are ruled by a man whose supporters, for good reason, take the words of the Declaration of Independence as an insult to him! A man whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant.

We have occasion, then, on this semiquincentennial anniversary, to wonder whether America is still young, as it was in Douglass's day. Because it feels, today, like it is all coming apart, like the "ring-bolt" of the Declaration, as Douglass termed it, is coming loose. Not just because we are ruled by a tyrant, but because we have let ourselves be ruled by a tyrant. Because we chose him to be our head of state after he had long since revealed himself as such, after he had already made war on our seat of government to steal our highest office for himself. Because his daily provocations provoke little in us. We have become accustomed to being ruled over. The energy of the Revolution feels spent.

I am inclined to think, however, that America is still young. Or, if not the American nation, then the American experiment. That we are, in other words, still only in the infancy of the democratic age. And yes, I regard that age as having begun on July 4th, 1776. Not before that, not in, say, ancient Athens or in Rome, which were no true democracies in my estimation. But also not any later, for all that America was not really a democracy for centuries yet after its Founding. There is a reason we all care so much about the Declaration, why Douglass and Lincoln and King all linked their own greatest oratory back to it. There is a reason why, in the classic anime Legend of the Galactic Heroes – unironically perhaps my favorite tract of political theory – the anthem of the "Free Planets Alliance," founded some fifteen hundred years after the American Revolution, is called "Oh Hail! Liberty Bell!"

What reason? It is tempting to think that it is about the principles, the political philosophy expressed in the famous second paragraph. But none of the ideas in the Declaration are particularly novel! They track John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, quite closely, with a handful of innovations from thinkers like Francis Hutcheson from the intervening century. Ironically, by 1776 these ideas are already taken as the organizing principles of the British state, the very thing against which we were rebelling. Locke's Treatises, after all, had been written largely to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688. And as the British constitution had consolidated around the principle of parliamentary supremacy during the eighteenth century, the Lockean account of the Revolution had become more or less official.

(Why, then, were we rebelling at all? The answer, as I understand it anyway, is genuinely fascinating. Basically the way that ideas about popular sovereignty had evolved on each side of the Atlantic from ~1620 through to 1776 had created two very different understandings of the British constitution, and in particular of the structure of the British Empire. Although they were both rooted in Lockean ideas, the American view of things and the London view of things could not actually be reconciled.)

At the same time, the principles are hardly irrelevant to why we care so much about this document. Simply for one part of an empire to declare independence is not epochal or earth-shattering. No, it is the combination that matters: action rooted in principles, in these principles. The idea that people ought to be free, that they ought to rule themselves, was not new. It is, honestly, not a very hard idea to come up with! But it had no purchase; it had never really had any purchase. David Hume said as much, in his 1748 essay mocking Lockean social contract theory: the whole world over, people were ruled by kings and princes, by whoever had the strength to claim their allegiance. The American Declaration of Independence was the beginning of the project of changing all that, of pointedly and purposefully remaking the world of kings and tyrants in light of the principles of human freedom and equality. It is, therefore, properly considered the start of the democratic age.

And I think we have learned, in these last few years, that this project is still in its infancy. Yes, in these two and a half centuries we have established electoral government over something like half the planet. This is a staggering accomplishment! But it is not enough, not particularly close to enough, and not just because of that other half of the globe. The first quarter-millennium of the democratic age, you could say, has been an experiment in something like Burkean democracy – by which I mean a democracy that is not, or at least need not be, much of a threat to the established social order. This was almost certainly needful, for democracy could not have taken hold without the acquiescence of the conservative faction (which, by its nature, tends to be quite powerful!).

And yet it is fundamentally wrong, and I don't just mean morally. "Conservative democracy" is a contradiction in terms, for democracy is by its nature a radical thing. The principles of the Declaration are inconsistent with all hierarchy and oppression, and these contradictions will make themselves felt. There is, indeed, not a man (or woman, or enby) beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for them. And, therefore, universal suffrage democracy will tend to level all distinctions between different classes of persons. Those who are invested in maintaining those distinctions, therefore, are right to fear the Declaration's truths. Democracy is a threat to that "way of life."

And when we embrace the radicalism of democracy, we can see just how much work remains to be done. If democracy is radical, then the work of democracy is the work of feminism, of racial equality, of queer liberation. If democracy is inescapably in conflict with these systems of oppression, then the thing is to win the fight. What we have to build is a world where no one grows up invested in preserving their position on the totem poll, where, like Lincoln, they would no sooner be a master than a slave.

In so many ways, ours is still a world shaped by all the ancient injustices, albeit with the roughest edges sanded down. It is difficult even to imagine what it would look like if this were not so, if our society had been organized from the ground up around the principle of human equality. This is not really surprising, for there has not been that much time for these ideas to remake the world. I like to imagine that the democratic age might span millennia, not merely centuries. I hope it will cover all of human history, into the deepest future. And if that is so, then it will hardly be surprising when they look back in a thousand years, or ten thousand, and see that, way back in 2026, on only the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, it was all still just getting started.