Two and half ideas
In honor of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,1 I offer you two and a half ideas about our country.
First, the United States is special in being founded under an ideal. We are not a “nation” in the strictest sense of the word. A nation is a race of people with common ancestry and language, from the Latin natus, “having been born,” where we get words like natal or the Spanish nacer. The foundation for most of the world’s countries is nationalism, the idea that humanity can and should be divided into ethnic groups that occupy non-overlapping portions of the Earth’s surface. The logical end of nationalism is things like ethnic cleansing or the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. For hundreds of years, communities of people, Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking, Orthodox Christian and Muslim, lived in a social and geographic patchwork inside the Ottoman Empire. I don’t claim that the Ottomans were just or fair rulers, or the fact that different people coexisted inside an empire meant it was anything like the “melting pot” of recent American invention. But when the Ottoman Empire fell, and it was decided there were such things as Greeks and Turks, and that they should each have a country, it was a logical conclusion that the Greeks should ship the Turks inside their borders to Turkey, and that the Turks should ship the Greeks inside their borders to Greece. The real losers in the nationalism that led to the exchange weren’t the Greeks or the Turks but the Armenians, Albanians, Jews, and everyone else who didn’t fit in this neat nationalist picture.
I once read a book, whose title I can’t remember, but was something like Who are the Greeks? The argument was that Greeks have, for more than a hundred years, had a narrow, nationalistic view of themselves. They’ve been a country of ten million people for a long time, locked in a zero-sum struggle with Turkey and neighboring Balkan countries. This narrow vision failed to grasp what Greece could be, not for Greeks, but for the world, that Greekness could be about trade and networks and innovation and philosophy, all the great things that Greeks say they are proudest about, but then neglect in the pursuit of nationalistic territorialism.
I love our country in large part because of its people, who I should love because they are my neighbors and family. But I also love that America can stand for something. We can debate what we stand for, and how well we have stood by what we claim to stand for, but no one can doubt that it is a thoroughly American thing to stand for something. Even if what we stand for, is simply the idea that a country can stand for something, beyond being a mere collection of its citizens, then it is a thing I want to stand for.
Second, that our notion of representational democracy is young and changing. The ancient Greeks did have a thing called “democracy” (literally, rule by the people) and they distinguished it from “aristocracy” (literally, rule by the best people), but their democracy would have seemed an awful lot what we would call aristocracy. We Americans are perfectly accustomed to the idea that members of Congress should each be elected by districts of similar size, originally 30,000 citizens each and more than 750,000 today. But as late as 1832 the United Kingdom passed a law that moved toward anything close to equal representation. Before the reform, electoral districts varied widely in size. The most egregious had only eleven voters. The United States ended property requirements for voting at around the same time, allowing most adult white men to vote regardless of wealth. The stories of enfranchisement for women and Black people are more familiar. The idea that every adult, really every adult, should have a voice in running a country, is only a few generations old.
Third, that our notion of democracy is founded on a philosophical ideal about human reasoning. When setting up our country, the founders took inspiration from ancient Greece, but they really leaned on John Locke and his ideas about humans and how we work together. Democracy only makes sense if you believe certain things about what people deserve and what they are capable of. Citizens in a democracy should be, among other things, rational and capable of learning. I am not arguing that Americans are not this, but merely that we live in a world very different than what a 17th century philosophy would have imagined, and that we know more about the human mind and methods of human organization than we did hundreds of years ago. Our current system, in which I go to a big room and fill in bubbles on a piece of paper, to select which other person will go to a bigger room, and debate other people, while yet other people who really should be wearing wigs decide if what happened in an oval room is in accordance with what the people in the bigger room wanted—it all starts to feel very 17th century. Good or bad, I do expect it to change.
It’s worth remembering that the Declaration was in 1776, and we only got the Articles of Confederation in 1781, and then the Constitution in 1789.