Don’t forget the basic ideals that really did make this country great
- Guest contributor
- Sep 20
- 3 min read
By Jamison Paul
There is a rot at the heart of our Republic, a canker that has been slowly eviscerating our rights as individuals, our standing as an electorate, and our ability as citizens to address our government and act as a check to the way it conducts itself on the world stage and at home. I’m not talking about our current president, though his egocentrism and hubris is slowly but surely transferring the idea of “We the People” to one populist, himself, who relies on sensationalism to drive the news cycle and thus the issues confronting us. Nor am I talking about party politics: Both political parties have led us to where we are as a nation.
No, the decay that afflicts us has been there from the beginning, right alongside the promise that once made the U.S. a beacon of liberty, equality and justice to the world: Even as our founders opened the franchise of government to the people, via representation and the vote, the struggle to include all Americans in that franchise has been a long and painful one, involving more than one bloody war, many concessions, and a back-and-forth political process which has many times stoked divisions rather than unity and made us our own worst enemy.
That a degree of justice and equality, not to mention relative liberty, has come out of that process is a miracle in itself: We have a Bill of Rights in a Constitution that has turned out to be a living document, one which now includes women, Native Americans, once enslaved African-Americans, and immigrant ethnic minorities from across the globe in the promise of what America is and could be. “All men are created equal” has become “All people are equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
That diversity has fueled the American enterprise with a range of legal, cultural and technical innovations which have made us the envy of the world and placed us in a position of power and influence unequaled in history.
In Ben Franklin’s famous quote, when asked by Elizabeth Willing Powel what kind of government the delegates had created, the answer of, “A Republic, if you can keep it,” was strangely tone-deaf for Franklin, given that he was speaking to a woman.
But here we are, 250 years later, still fleshing out the promise implicit in documents like the Declaration and the Constitution, the basic promise of equality, justice, and liberty for all, which I believe to be our true national mission, to which things like “Energy Independence,” “Economic Prosperity,” and “Strategic Dominance” are all secondary: Our position as a world superpower came from those concepts in our founding documents, not the other way around, and our status as an electorate giving our consent to a government that conducts itself on the world stage still exists, in writing if nothing else.
I don’t need to list the ways our rights have eroded but to anyone interested I suggest rereading the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution, and then looking around at what we’ve created with our consent, with one important provision, the filter of the American Dream: That all people are equal, endowed with inalienable rights to life and liberty, that our government of the people succeeds or fails on our consent, and that the only way we’re going to get to where that promise is leading us is through unity rather than conformity: We succeed in working together, across all the diverse groups that make up what it is to be American — we fail on the fragmentation which divides us along cultural, ethnic, and religious lines, not to mention issues of gender and sexual preference: transgender, women, men, “white,” “black” and “brown,” immigrant and Native, we are all Americans and our duty, rather than lording it over the Earth, is to bring the promise of freedom, justice and equality to all — before we forget the basic ideals that really did make this country great.
• Jamison Paul is a Juneau resident.
