When Thomas Jefferson said a new revolution would be needed every twenty years he was cavalierly shrugging his shoulders at the effects of the Shays’ Rebellion. Certainly at no other time did he call for a new revolution to throw off the government. The tree of liberty has been watered with enough blood to consider adding any more.
Perhaps we can rationalize Mr. Jefferson’s words by assuming that he was proposing not an armed a revolution but a revolution of thought, a revolution of ideas. While emotions run high in this country today and at times rhetoric escalates to disturbing levels, surely no reasoning person today envisions armed conflict in the streets of American cities. Such inflammatory talk from either the right or the left ought to rightfully be condemned.
We are long overdue, however, for a revolution in our thinking. It’s an interesting exercise to go back to James Madison’s words about how to prevent a majority from emerging:
“Enlarge the sphere and thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties that in the first place a majority will not be likely….”
Madison, of course, was thinking of the political community and how to prevent a majority from forming within government which would pose a threat to the liberty of the minority. But ponder for moment: has such a strategy, consciously or not, in our day been successfully applied against the American people? Are we now so sliced and diced as a nation, so skillfully divided into competing interests and constituencies that we have essentially been defeated as a counterweight to our own government? We are divvied up into irreconcilable factions on issues for which there are truly no political solutions: pro-gun and anti-gun; pro-abortion and anti-abortion; pro-gay marriage and anti-gay marriage – the list goes on. Even these issues have been sliced and diced into an infinity of subcategories: abortion, right to life, right to choose, reproductive rights, rights of the unborn, women’s rights, first trimester, partial birth, infanticide, life of the mother, incest, rape, taxpayer funded, gun control, second amendment rights, weapons bans, registration, waiting periods, licensing and so on. If we keep electing legislators based on their positions on such social issues we will keep populating Congress and our state legislatures with incompetent, self-serving charlatans.
It is precisely because our community has been divided into special interests and parties that we need a new revolution in thought in America today. While we squabble over insoluble issues, a majority is unable to emerge to wage battle with the piracy that is taking place on our governmental high seas. We point and accuse and insult each other while our pockets are being picked clean. Too many Americans – some estimates run as high as 75% – are living day to day, hour to hour, paycheck to paycheck after lifetimes of work and nothing to show for it in a $15 trillion economy, yet we choose to divide each other along ideological lines and hurl invectives based upon where we stand on immigration or gay marriage instead of working together to solve the very real problems the country faces. What we must do is reverse what has been done to us.
We must decrease the sphere.
If majorities are prevented from emerging because of “so great a number of interests or parties” then it stands to reason that reducing the number of interests will permit the emergence of a majority. Accomplishing this will not be easy but it can be done if we together as a society will set aside those things which divide us and embrace those things which unite us.
The challenge will be how small we can make the sphere. There are obviously social issues which inflame passions that will not be easily set aside. So we will want a platform broad enough to include a majority of Americans without compromising principles. The new American Revolution mustn’t launch with another Three Fifths Compromise.
Madison described the sphere as consisting of “interests and parties” and so the obvious place to begin is to no longer identify ourselves by political parties. That might be a difficult leap for some but we must keep in mind that in 1787 there were no political parties. In fact, the Founders believed political parties (what they called “factions”) were anathema to representative government. George Washington warned that competition between political parties “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another.” It was, perhaps, naïve of the Founders to not anticipate the emergence of political alliances (they thought alliances would form among states, not parties. It was actually Jefferson who in 1793 left Washington’s cabinet and formed the first opposition faction, the Republicans.) but they correctly predicted that parties would disintegrate into smaller groups putting self-interest above the common good, creating battles rather than consensus. That is certainly the situation we find ourselves in today in which governance of the nation has become an eternal struggle by both the Democratic and Republican parties for supremacy, the common good be damned. As a result, the two parties have very nearly destroyed the country.
Once we have shed our political labels we can begin a dialogue which is cooperative and collaborative rather than competitive. We cannot expect to agree on everything but we can create an atmosphere conducive to reasoned, rational debate that puts the interests of the whole above the interests of the few.
Can we do away with political parties? No, we’re stuck with them but we can make the existing ones responsive to the general welfare of the entire community and in doing so we can return to the people of this nation what is rightfully ours: the government of the United States of America.
We can begin by breathing new life into some of the most famous words in American history:
WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to perfect the vision of our Founders to ensure justice and domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity, do ordain and establish the institution known as Common Ground America.
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