Nick Biddle is a retired professor of Latin American history who lives in Brattleboro and works with nonprofits in Vermont and Ecuador. He and Tim Kipp, a retired Brattleboro Union High School social studies teacher, will present a discussion, “How Did We Get Here? Democracy in Peril,” on Thursday, Dec. 4, at 6 p.m. at 118 Elliot Gallery.
BRATTLEBORO-A small group of billionaires, headed by Donald Trump, have captured the federal government. Their authoritarian, hyperpartisan actions make a mockery of democracy. They are breaking the American social contract, which, ironically, is itself an anti-democratic bargain.
The United States was founded by rich, white men, the most important of whom — Washington, Jefferson, Madison —were slave owners.
Democracy has been a struggle from the founding days of the United States to now. It started as the Boston Tea Company, a rebellion designed by a very rich colonist, Sam Adams, to disrupt the corporate monopoly of the East India Company.
England’s reaction was to house and quarter British soldiers throughout Boston, an occupation not unlike that which is occurring today in Chicago; Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Adams and his confrères in the Committees of Correspondence — a network of organizations resisting the monarchy — conspired to incite a war of independence.
To that end, they formed the Continental Congress, made up of more rich, white men looking to craft a new future.
I’m glad they did so. To this day, I’m proud to be a citizen of the United States.
The struggle for democracy, however, is never-ending.
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The well-educated elites who convened in Boston to craft the Declaration of Independence understood well that they were inciting English colonists from agricultural, artisan, and merchant classes to shed their connection to king and country. They didn’t have money to offer. In what was for sure a revolutionary time born of Enlightenment theory, they offered ideals.
“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[.]”
There is much to love in that small passage, but often the least recognized and perhaps most important phrase is the last — “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That sounded to most colonists like democracy, and it was enough to galvanize the colonial working classes to war against the mother country and its monarchy.
Five years after its proclamation, the 13 states won independence, and a new nation began. At that point, the real meaning of the phrase “deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed” became contested.
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While middle- and working-class colonists fought the Revolutionary War to create democracy, bankers, plantation owners, and rich merchants saw it otherwise.
A democratic government ruled by the majority of citizens opened the possibility for an equalitarian distribution of taxes and debt. Surely, if given the opportunity, the working and middle classes would vote to place a heavier burden of taxes and debt on the wealthy than on themselves.
When that scenario started to occur in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in 1786, the wealthy delegates of the former Continental Congress conspired to meet again.
Gov. Edmund Randolph of Virginia opened the closed-door proceedings to what is now called the Constitutional Convention on May 25, 1787. His judgment was that “our chief danger arises from the democratic parts” of government. In public comments made immediately after the Constitutional Convention, Randolph reiterated:
“The general object was to produce a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origins, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
Nevertheless, Convention delegates recognized two points. The first was that the majority of citizens and Revolutionary war veterans were certain to react strongly against the Constitution because of the strictures against democracy baked into it. Secondly, delegates had agreed that nine of the 13 state legislatures would have to ratify the document for it to become the law of the land.
To address these obstacles, the Convention’s delegates offered a new promise to the American people — one quite different from the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. It comes in the preamble:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
This is a mouthful and a heady set of ideals to live up to, which was the point. The founders, as they are called, wished to garner the consent of the governed — not democratically, but instead with this promise.
The preamble is America’s social contract. If “We the People” (e.g., middle and working classes) live peaceably within the laws written by upper-class representatives, they, in turn, promise to enact a unified nation with justice and liberty for all. Think Pledge of Allegiance.
Much hinges upon virtue. Of course, as they say, the devil is in the details.
The democratic ideal of the Declaration of Independence and the elite-centered promise of its preamble — to establish justice and promote the general welfare — have very often clashed and have nearly torn asunder.
The closest the nation came to that outcome was the Civil War, which, at its end, after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Battle of Gettysburg, culminated in the biggest commitment to democracy ever taken in our history when President Abraham Lincoln declared in his Gettysburg Address:
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us […] that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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And that, my friends, is what we are doing today: seeking that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.
The brazen behaviors of the current regime — such as kidnapping American citizens in our streets, denying food and medical care to many millions, and speeding climate crisis into ecocide — constitute a complete rupture of the social contract.
There is no virtue in this government.
Only a renewed commitment of the People to the ideals that inspired the Revolution can turn back the forces of destruction in front of us.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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