Political Polarization: Part One

The Founding Documents

I learned the preamble to the constitution in seventh grade history class. Not only was it covered as a topic in class, but the teacher would regularly get frustrated by the class’s lack of attention. When her frustration got to be too much, she ordered us to take out a piece of paper and write out the preamble to the constitution ten or twenty times. So I really learned the preamble.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, 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 statement generally encompasses what I think of as the role of our national government. But other people have a much more minimalist view of the federal government.

I’ve been reading various books exploring our political polarization over the last couple of years. The arguments are all compelling regarding the sources of our challenges. Causal arguments run the gamut; from social changes, demographic changes, the challenges of rural America, economic insecurity, cable television, social media, partisan tribalism, and the nature of campaigning. I will explore many of these arguments over the coming weeks.

To begin this series, I’m focusing on our founding documents. Specifically, I want to explore the impacts of a focus on the Declaration of Independence or the Preamble as conflicting sources of the social contract. I’m indebted to Our Divided Political Heart by E. J. Dionne for introducing me to the conflict between individualist and communitarian views of society. I had the joy of teaching this book in the early 2010s and it has stuck in my thinking.

We’ve just come through another July 4th. Were it not for the tragedy in Highland Park, the local news might have read the Declaration of Independence.¹ The phrases are all familiar: “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…”

It goes on to describe government as being in service of these truths and that, if government fails to do that (as the British Crown had done) then the people will throw off that government as illegitimate. The Declaration then provides a laundry list of grievances against King George and stipulates that hereafter instead of colonies there are “Free and Independent States.” It does not suggest how those states will function collectively. Because that wasn’t its purpose — it was simply breaking from Britain.

Thirteen years later, the revolutionary war has been won and the Continental Congress adopted a new American constitution with the above preamble as its framing device. Some of the same people worked on both documents.

And yet, they seem to be one of the foundational sources of our political discontent. Listen to conservative politicians and pundits and they will readily quote the passage above. Often, they invest lots of contemporary meanings in Life, Liberty, and Happiness. Their focus is on individual rights and how those should be protected against more collective understandings of governing. They rarely mention the rest of the Declaration.²

Progressive (like me) start with those first words in the preamble: We The People. It suggests a mutuality and collaboration needed in pursuit of the rest of the stated goals. The end-point of our activities in the More Perfect Union. To do that we need to establish justice, protect the well being of the citizens, protect against internal strife, provide for the national defense, and secure the collective blessings of liberty.

It’s often messy. The individual tasks laid out don’t always reconcile well. Furthermore, we have too often given away the We The People part and simply gone ahead with whatever politicians, pundits, and justices tell us that a More Perfect Union looks like. But we always have the potential to push back through elections or community organizing or civic protests.

As conservatives have used the Declaration as a lens to think about government, it feels like they would like to rewrite the Preamble to better fit their interests. My tongue in cheek edit would go something like this:

We the [Right] People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union [approach to government], establish [law enforcement] Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility [by limiting dissent], provide for the common [an overwhelming] defense [industry], promote the general Welfare [support those who support themselves], and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity [but no one else], do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

If polarization arises from these two very different founding documents, the only solution is to find ways of holding the individualism and communitarianism in creative tension. It will require us as citizens to talk to our family, friends, and neighbors and to wrestle with those tensions³.

I’ll close with an extended quote from E. J. Dionne:

The American experiment has from the beginning recognized both sides of our character, and successful American politicians understood with Tocqueville that we are a nation of private striving and public engagement, of rights and responsibilities. Americans understood that individualism needed to be protected to be protected from concentrated power in both the private marketplace and the government. They also understood that individuality seeks expression in communal acts as well as individual deeds and that the self longs for autonomy but also freely embraces the encumbrances and responsibilities of family, friendship, community, and country. These truths have usually been accepted, albeit in different ways by progressives and conservatives alike. It is this deep American consensus that is now in jeopardy, and its disappearance threatens to block constructive action at the very moment when our position in the world is precarious (251-252, italics in original).

While I would agree with Dionne that these tensions have been with us since the founding, there are many components of contemporary political life which has exacerbated those tensions and made the hoped for “deep American consensus” that much harder to achieve. I’ll explore these varied components in future newsletters.

1. Although for some reason, my twitter feed on Monday was full of people celebrating the movie Independence Day instead.

2. Except when they through out the Overthrowing Tyrants as a defense of Second Amendment rights.

3. This requires us to abstain from performative politics, handy talking points, funny memes, and owning the other side.