President Barack Obama

Americans have lived up to their founding principles and elected Barack Obama president. The fact that Mr. Obama is the first black president is, on its own, reason enough to celebrate eternally. But there is more.

The greatest thing about Barack Obama is that he appealed to those American founding principles, consistently and openly. He called on us to fulfill our mandate to offer justice and liberty and equality to all Americans, and to offer all the world honesty, fairness, and democracy. Barack Obama reminded us constantly that as Americans we are called to fulfill very lofty and demanding principles, and that we can only achieve happiness, security, and success when we do so.

In an election where there was so much talk about who was a “real” American, we learned once again that the only real American, the only true American, is the American who upholds our founding principles.

I can only quote the man himself, in his victory speech of November 5, 2008:

“And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”

Who could have said it better? Every Founding American is alive again in our country today with these words.

Country First–but first…

I see that Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain’s slogan is, as of late August 2008, “Country First.” This is clearly a slight reworking of the old “My country right or wrong.” And that’s a problem.

“My country right or wrong” is a sentiment going back millennia, but it was first recorded for posterity as coming from the mouth of Stephen Decatur, a U.S. naval commander who went to the North African port of Algiers, headquarters of the Barbary States (extending from Tangiers to Tripoli), during the Second Barbary War in 1815. Decatur was to negotiate with the Barbary States for the release of some American sailors who had been captured by pirates and held in slavery, and also for the end of the practice of paying tribute to the Barbary States (European and American states paid the Barbary States annual tributes of gold, arms, and other supplies in return for protection from Barbary pirates).

Decatur’s way of negotiating was to capture two Barbary ships, including their flagship Mashouda, and then blow into Algiers with guns leveled at the city and demand the American prisoners and an end to tribute. It was perhaps the first example of the U.S. using “gunboat diplomacy”. Decatur got everything he wanted. (This is why the Marine Hymn begins with the lines “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli; we will fight our country’s battles in the air, on land, and sea”.)

When Decatur returned to the U.S., as a great hero, he was given a banquet in Norfolk, Virginia, during which he gave a speech that included these words: “Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”

This was morphed into “My country right or wrong” so quickly that by 1872, Wisconsin Senator Carl Shurz could refer to the phrase in a Senate speech and know that his audience would understand what it meant. Decatur’s qualifying “may she always be in the right” had been rapidly dropped, leaving “my country right or wrong” as the philosophy of the zealous American patriot. Shurz knew “my country right or wrong” was pulled out to at once kill any questions about American political policies (particularly overseas) and assert the justice of those policies.

But Shurz chose to reiterate the qualifier. His words are far more stirring to the real patriot than Decatur’s:

“‘My country, right or wrong.’ In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Shurz elaborated this further in an 1899 speech:

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

The true American patriot knows that what she is proud of is the principles this nation was founded on, and on our willingness and commitment to live up to them. America will go astray, because living up to those principles is hard. But true patriots will use all their energy when America goes astray to get it back on course. The first step, of course, is to admit America has gone wrong, and veered off course.

And that’s exactly what cannot happen if one’s slogan is “Country First.” Because this slogan assumes that anything America does is right, and anyone who questions that is putting something else–fear, weakness, ignorance–ahead of America and its interests. Country can only come first in the sense that we work tirelessly to put our founding principles of equality and justice first. “Principles First” would be a more heartening slogan for the American patriot.

“Country First” assumes somehow that Americans are separate from the country of America, and that we must put our needs and values aside to promote our country. And then maybe the country will check in with us later. That’s not how a democracy works. We are America, and so must put ourselves first, and always vote for the policies that promote the justice and equality we are founded on.

So let’s vote with the slogan “Principles First” as we go to the polls in November, and let’s remember that the most patriotic thing is to set one’s country right when it stumbles, not to enshrine the stumbling as a principle.

We all have a dream

“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

This could have been Barack Obama’s opening line at the DNC on August 28, 2008, as he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination to run for president. But it was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s opening line on August 28, 1963, as he addressed the Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

That 1963 gathering was a “demonstration for freedom” because Americans of all backgrounds met to demand the fulfillment of our nation’s founding principles of freedom of opportunity and justice for all. The 2008 gathering was also a demonstration for freedom, because again Americans met to demand that our nation’s leaders respect and obey the Constitution and Bill of Rights when governing.

But it was also a demonstration of freedom, of the enormous progress this country has made since 1963. In that year, if you had said that in 45 years, within the lifetimes of most of the people there at the Lincoln Monument, a black American would be close to winning the presidency, you would have been ridiculed. Few could have believed that King’s three little children would live to see a black American close to becoming president (by narrowly beating out a heavily favored female candidate; throwing that in would have made people in 1963 wonder what parallel universe was coming). It wouldn’t have been cynicism or despair that fueled the disbelief, but a pragmatic understanding of how much would have to change to reach that moment.

So a lot has changed. But, more accurately, Americans have grown and evolved, challenged their own prejudices, and worked for change. It’s true that some Americans simply submitted to change, others grudgingly went along with change, and others refuse to change.

But even more miraculous than those who worked hard for change are those who were simply born into it. Americans born in 1990 find it hard to believe that restaurants were really segregated, that they wouldn’t have gone to schools filled with kids of all races, that mixed-race marriage was once illegal. Much as they can’t believe you once couldn’t talk about homosexuality, let alone have gay TV or movie heroes, American young people can’t believe racism was once government policy.

Are many young Americans still racist? Sure. But for most Americans, racism is becoming more and more a personal thing, a private prejudice that one might feel comfortable sharing only with a few others, or expressing obliquely. Like sexism, and homophobia, racism is becoming something fringe, that only a radical element is willing to pronounce publicly. Rather than having one’s racism comfortably mesh with a full personality, now if one is publicly racist, at the office or on the stump, one is labeled a wacko and marginalized.

Nineteen sixty-three was indeed not an end, but a beginning. Beating racism underground to a shameful lair in the soul is just the start. But we can celebrate our progress. Barack Obama’s nomination is a watershed we can act on to destroy racism. Children born in this year will find it hard to believe a black American had never been nominated by a major party for president until 2008, because by 2026 it will be a commonplace. Women, gay Americans, Jewish and Muslim Americans will all be able to become president. This is a moment to push more change, and it would be fatal, as Dr. King said, to overlook the urgency of the moment.

Does that sound ridiculous? As ridiculous as saying in 1963 that a black American would be the Democratic candidate for president in 2008?

Posting bail is un-American

One of the great founding principles of the United States is the right of equal opportunity. This means that no one is born with political advantages; for example, in a monarchic society, someone who is born into the nobility has political rights and protections from the law that “commoners” don’t have. Therefore, people outside the nobility do not have equal opportunity to succeed in their society.

In the U.S., equal opportunity has been popularly enshrined in the notion of every American having the chance to live the “American dream”: everyone has equal opportunity to work, vote, succeed, own a home, go to school, and more. Ideally, no American is barred from these things because of their social class, income, color, or anything else.

We of course fight a constant good fight to make sure this is true in America. There are always some people who want to set up barriers to equal opportunity. But we can never let this happen, for, as Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in the 1830s, later wrote in Democracy in America, equality of opportunity is the thing that truly sets America apart, the jewel of our democracy.

de Tocqueville was bothered, therefore, by one commonplace in the American system that he felt was a slap in the face to equality of opportunity. Was it slavery? Unequal wealth? City slums? No. While he saw those things were aberrations in our democracy, one thing he chose to comment on in particular was posting bail.

This seems like a very small thing. If you’re arrested, you can post bail to stay out of jail until your trial. That seems fair.

But it’s not fair, because it gives those who have money an advantage over those who don’t. If you’re not poor you can post bail; if you’re poor, you can’t. So poor people go to jail, while others don’t.

And if you are accused of a horrendous crime, like murder or child sexual assault, you have to post a much larger bail, maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. This only guarantees that wealthy people will not be imprisoned while awaiting trial no matter what they are accused of.

Currently, this inequality of opportunity has come up in the context of immigration. If you are accused of being an illegal immigrant, you are most likely poor. Therefore, you can never post bail when you are arrested. And so you sit in jail until you are deported. Or, worse, you don’t even sit in jail, but are immediately put on a bus or a plane back to your native country.

This means your loved ones have no idea where you are. If you are never in a police station, you can’t make a phone call home to tell them. At least if you’re sitting in jail, your family knows what has happened. But illegal immigrants cannot post bail, and legal authorities know this, and so the whole process is skipped.

Even if an illegal immigrant is given a chance to post bail, everyone knows s/he will not be able to pay. Therefore, there is no real chance to protect oneself from immediate repatriation, no chance of having a trial.

One might argue that since illegal immigrants are not U.S. citizens, they cannot complain about not receiving due process. And one might feel that the problems of illegal immigrants are worlds away; U.S. citizens will never face this problem.

But you might. No one is guaranteed that they will never be arrested. Anything can happen. And if it does, will your wealth qualify you for justice, or will you sit in jail?

Proving citizenship proves difficult

Some states are ratcheting up the requirements for getting a driver’s license–and I mean way up.

In Massachusetts right now, you must present four distinct pieces of ID to prove your identity. What are they? The web site for the Commonwealth Registry of Motor Vehicles actually does not say. You have to take your chances. Since most people’s main form of ID is a driver’s license, those without one must bring in a passport, birth certificate, bank statement, social security card, report card, bank signature guaranty… I suppose the list goes on. I can’t think of anything else.

Ironically, most people seeking their first driver’s license are teenagers who most likely do not have a passport, bank statement, or social security card. And few people of any age have a copy of their birth certificate handy (and it’s not quick or easy or cheap to get one).

All this to prove your identity as a state resident? Of course not. It is really to prove U.S. citizenship, and part of our extremely inefficient war on terror.

The problem with this sudden expansion of requirements for getting a license is that it is really part of the eroding our of founding principle of equality of opportunity. This is the right of all Americans to have an equal opportunity to succeed, and equal access to necessary tools for success. One traditional example of this is that in the U.S. there is no aristocracy, no group that is born with access to power that no one else has.

In a climate of fear about terrorist attack, it is easy to start setting up barriers to equality of opportunity. Suddenly you need difficult-to-obtain identification to get a driver’s license. No one ever explains why, or tells you how to access this information, or even, in the case of the Massachusetts RMV, what this identification is. You are just meant to accept it.

Suddenly you will also need proof of citizenship to vote. Suddenly you have to undergo a special process not to appear on a potential flight risk/terrorist list kept by the government at airports.

When rules like this are made without notice, explanation, or justification, they destroy equality of opportunity. They intimidate many people into giving up what they were trying to get (a driver’s license) or to do (vote), and no one protests because they either don’t know about the new rules or they are afraid of how they will look if they protest.

Look into your state’s requirements for a driver’s license. Seem familiar? Or has there been a change?

The real “Greatest Generation”

I was going to say that it would have to be the Founding generation. But then I changed my mind.

TV news anchor Tom Brokaw put out a book a few years ago called The Greatest Generation, in which he identified Americans who grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, then fought the Second World War in the 1940s, as the greatest generation of Americans.

Great as the difficulties were for this generation of Americans, they must pale in comparison to those facing the Founding generation. If you were 20 years old in 1780, you would have trouble remembering a time before the crises of the 1770s, and then the Revolutionary War. As you lived on, you would experience a failed U.S. government (that operating under the Articles of Confederation) that was dismantled in 1787, a referendum to vote on the new and radical Constitution, desperate poverty and inflation, two armed citizen rebellions (Whiskey and Shays), and then when you were 52, the British would invade the U.S. and burn down the White House.

That’s a lot to face, especially with no history, really no inkling of experience with a democratic government. You would be building democratic government with your own hands and brain. There were no guideposts to reassure you, and several times the whole experiment of your new nation seemed on the brink of failure.

People growing up in the 1930s had a long history of being American, long experience of our form of government, and generally clear and well-established standards of American/democratic behavior to guide them. If they were tempted to abandon these, that might be understandable, but the fact that they did not simply speaks to their historical advantages over the Founding Americans.

Well, that’s the case for calling the Founders the greatest generation. But after all, I did change my mind about the whole idea of choosing one group to be the greatest Americans.

The real Greatest Generation of Americans is each and every one that lives up to the principles this nation was founded on, the principles of promoting and protecting natural rights and equality of opportunity for all Americans. Every generation that does this is truly the greatest, simply because it’s very hard to do. Our founding principles demand that we rise above human nature in many ways, and offer justice and freedom to all. Any generation that does this deserves our praise.

That opens up the opportunity to those of us living in America right now to be the next greatest generation. Rather than thinking we missed the boat and cannot partake of the glory of any past generation of our ancestors, we must see that they simply carried the baton for a while, and have now passed it to us. It can’t go out on our watch, lest we fail the next greatest generation coming after us.

Warren Harding and his “Negro” percentage

Someone somewhere has once again rolled out the old story of President Warren Harding (1921-23) having a great-grandfather who was black.

John McLaughlin apparently barged into the comments of a guest on his news show “The McLaughlin Group” who was expressing excitement about Barack Obama running for president by saying, sternly and loudly, “You act like there’s never been a black president before.” As the guest paused in confusion, McLaughlin shouted, “Warren Harding was a Negro!”

Why he chose to say “Negro” is unclear. Suffice it to say McLaughlin looked absolutely crazy when he said it. But the saddest thing about his comment is that now people will once again pointlessly debate whether one of Harding’s great-grandfathers was black (something that should be pretty easy to prove or disprove).

I find this at once sad and hilarious because it gets all of us 21st century modernites talking and thinking like 19th century quack doctors. Grown, modern American adults start talking about what “percent” black blood Harding may have had, what “percent” of black blood makes you black, etc.

While you can have percentages of ancestors (for example, one can say “50% of my ancestors were black, 20% were Chinese, and 30% were white”), you cannot have a percentage of blood. The blood in a body is not 50% or 10% or 1% anything but blood.

It’s also sad and hilarious, but more sad, that Barack Obama, whose father was black, is not considered black by some Americans, while Harding, who may or may not have had one multiracial great-grandfather, is considered black therefore by some Americans.

What we all are is 100% American, and presidents should be judged on how well they uphold our founding principles, and nothing else.

National security v. elites at the Constitutional Convention

We tend to think that our politics in the 21st century are uniquely characterized by fears that powerful elites are in control of the government, robbing the people of their voice. But whenever this fear is raised, and people question those in power, those in power turn the conversation toward national security, justifying their grasping power by saying it is necessary to protect the nation.

But all this is as old as the United States. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution claimed that it empowered elites to run the government at the expense of the “real” people, mainly the yeoman farmers. Jefferson was of this group. The problem as they saw it was that by centralizing the government in Washington, the Constitution took representatives out of their states, far from the poverty and problems of their constituents. In Washington, surrounded by men of privilege, those representatives to Congress would start making laws that benefited the rich.

The Federalists who supported the Constitution decided that the best way to win this argument was to ignore it and turn the subject to national defense. A strong centralized government was needed, they said, to maintain national security by observing treaties, protecting American shipping, and dealing with other national governments. In fact, the majority of the enumerated powers of the federal government laid out in the Constitution have to do with national defense.

At a time when the young United States were vulnerable to outside attack or harrassment by more powerful nations, this was a strong argument, and it won out over fear of elitism.

The difference between then and now is that the security of the country was not guaranteed by violation of the rights of the people, or of the checks and balances of the government. The early federal government observed the terms and spirit of the Constitution Congress had written, and accepted the Bill of Rights the people wrote (through their state assemblies) as an addendum or even a corrective to that Constitution.

Let’s hope we are returning to that system, our original and founding principle of democracy.

Truth v. Myth: Andrew Jackson

Part 2 of my analysis of the History International show on Andrew Jackson. In part 1, I mentioned the depressing rationales for admiring Jackson given by two of the “experts” giving commentary during the series. Let’s look at them in depth here.

First up, H.W. Brands, author of Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. Brands’ first egregious comment came in the analysis of the Indian Removal and the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Here’s what Brands had to say about it:

“Jackson’s policy was at peace with the policies of adminstrations before and after his. It’s easy to pin the label [of genocidal monster] on Jackson because he took a more visible position. But Jackson probably would have said, this was not merely my policy but the policy of the United States government, for better or worse.”

Hm. The show had earlier claimed that Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and J. Q. Adams had all wanted Native Americans removed from their lands. This, apparently, clears Jackson of the shame of actually doing it. It’s the “he’s just doing what everyone else was thinking” argument.

But there’s a reason why none of those presidents actually did it: it was so inhuman they could not see how to do it and retain any integrity at all.

Let’s examine Brands’ “it’s not Jackson’s policy, it’s the policy of the U.S. government” line. First of all, the U.S. government had multiple treaties with the southeastern Native Americans saying they could stay on their land. Second, the U.S. Supreme Court had just struck down a move to void those treaties and remove the rightful inhabitants of the southeast. Jackson famously ignored the Supreme Court ruling, thus in two ways trampling rather than helplessly going along with the “policy of the U.S. government.”

Brands is joined in his benediction of the Indian Removal Act by Andrew Burstein, author of The Passions of Andrew Jackson:

“It’s easy for us to attack Jackson for his lack of humanity… he should have known better. But it’s too easy for us to do that because we didn’t live in their world. And their world, Jackson’s world, was a very brutal world.”

I remember a friend of mine once reacting to this kind of reasoning; someone had said people in the antebellum period just didn’t understand that slavery was wrong, they couldn’t have known that because slavery had always existed. And my friend said, Really? Do you think in 200 years people will say about us, ‘Oh, people in 1995 didn’t understand that racism was wrong because it had always existed. They just weren’t able to see a different reality”?

I didn’t live in the Nazis’ world, so am I unable to say that killing Jewish people is wrong? Of course not. I know it’s wrong, and so did those Nazis during their own time. Americans in the 1830s knew lying to people and putting them on a deadly forced march was wrong.

If Jackson’s “world” was a “very brutal world,” maybe it was because men like Jackson did terrible, brutal things in the name of money, power, and land, and not because people back then were just different than we are and didn’t understand that people could live in peace. We “don’t live in Jackson’s world” because we have made strenuous efforts to outlaw the kind of brutality that people have always known is wrong. We’ve tried to rid the world of it, and especially to rid America of it because America is supposed to be better than that, and not because something changed in the genetic makeup of humanity between 1830 and 2008.

Finally, it’s back to Brands, who says this about Jacksonian democracy: “Jacksonion democracy sums up the idea that power belongs in the hands of the people, that ordinary people should run this [America’s] government.”

I think Jacksonian democracy shows us that power belongs in the hands of those who uphold the founding principles of representative democracy and natural rights that this nation was founded on, and if someone like Jackson, who tramples those principles, takes power, terrible things happen. If “ordinary people” uphold our founding principles, then by all means give them power. If “unordinary people” (whom I take to mean the rich, the educated, or the thoughtful and cosmopolitan) uphold those principles, then give them power.

Brands’ statement is simply another airing of the tired idea that the (ideally western frontier) outsider is The Common Man, decent and straightforward, independent and tough, uneducated and honest. Jackson was straightforward and tough, but that’s about it.

This myth that headstrong people who won’t listen to anyone else and never admit they’re wrong about anything are Real Americans, and the kind of leaders we need to preserve Americanness, is so dangerous. An egomanianc who won’t be told when he’s going off the rails is not a good leader. From Jackson to Bush, we have seen the terrible results when someone like this holds the presidency.

Now is not the time to idolize Andrew Jackson, but to learn a lesson from his terrible example.

Time to retire “An American Original”

I was watching a History International program on Andrew Jackson last night, and as the experts who were interviewed throughout tried to sum up Jackson’s accomplishments (more on that in a later post), all but two of them encountered the difficulty of being Jackson fans yet having to explain the Native American genocide he happily instigated. They each fell back on disreputable arguments to support their case as fans, and one of them used the old tried-and-true: “Well, Jackson was an American original.”

I notice that this phrase is always dragged out to describe/boost someone whose main quality is that he does not ever think he is wrong. Jackson defied the Supreme Court and overreached the powers allocated to the executive in order to mercilessly betray and kill Native Americans, and never once betrayed the slightest regret or doubt about that. So what do you say about him if you admire his in-your-face independence and confidence? He was an American Original.

This seems to mean someone who did bad things but was charismatic. Someone who never once admitted they were wrong. We translate this into confidence, and independence, and being a maverick who doesn’t kow-tow to the powers that be. A rebel. These are qualities we like, and so we decide they are only exhibited by Americans.

But there is a difference between rebelling against injustice and rebelling against justice, and anyone who does the latter is not an “American original” but a criminal. Yes, the person may be irritatingly charismatic. But there’s no excusing or forgiving the crimes.

So if Jackson’s slate can be washed clean by calling him an “American Original”, it’s time to retire the phrase when used as a compliment.

Thinking you are never wrong is not admirable. It’s not a strength. And no American should ever be that way, because never admitting fault is anti-democratic. It’s saying one person knows what’s right and whatever they do is right and everyone else can just shut up. When the executive won’t ever admit fault, it means his entire administration must support his wrongheaded policies because there’s no other option. And that’s not good for democracy.

Jackson was many things, but in a world filled with criminals and anti-democratic leaders, original is not one of them.

See part 2 for a full analysis of the harmful mythmaking in this program.