Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, November 3, 2024
“America is great because America is good.” Or so the oft-quoted saying about our country goes. Except the person that it’s been ascribed to, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, never said or believed anything of the sort.
Nor were the Founding Fathers under any illusions of American wisdom or moral superiority. “Our countrymen have never merited the character of very exalted virtue,” John Adams wrote. “The natural lust for power is so inherent in man,” George Mason lamented. Or as John Jay said, “the mass of men are neither wise nor good.”
How’s that for an election rah-rah?
I stumbled across these sayings in historian Robert Tracy McKenzie’s book We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy. McKenzie argues that what makes the system of government in America special are dueling Judeo-Christian beliefs in the dignity and innate value of each human being, and that each human being makes lots of mistakes.
Thus, the genius of America is not putting faith in a singular person, be it a dictator or monarch, or putting power into the hands of the majority because lots of people can get things wrong at the same time (recall the institution of slavery, popular support for the Trail of Tears, overwhelming belief that women shouldn’t vote or opposition to our involvement in World War II, to name a few).
Instead, American politics is a unique interlocking set of government structures, popular representation and elite leadership, majority rule and minority accommodations, big states and small states, multiple legislative bodies at multiple levels, intended to thwart or at least slow misguided passions running roughshod over others — to allow for peace and for representation and to keep negotiations churning in the longest running, most diverse, multiracial, democratic project in humanity’s history………
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