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Prologue

In the annals of human inventions, the story of the United States of America stands as a testament to the enduring spirit of resilience, transformation, and the ceaseless pursuit of a more perfect union. From its humble beginnings as a colonial outpost on the eastern seaboard, this land has witnessed a metamorphosis, a remarkable evolution that has molded it into the diverse, dynamic, and democratic constitutional republic we know today.

The foundations of this grand experiment were laid in the crucible of revolutionary ideals, penned with ink that carried the dreams of freedom and equality. The very words that echoed through the hallowed halls of Independence Hall in 1776 spoke of unalienable rights – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, as the fledgling nation emerged, it faced the daunting challenge of defining the boundaries of these rights and ensuring that they were not mere platitudes, but rather the living, breathing essence of a truly inclusive society.

As the fledgling republic spread its wings, it found itself entangled in the paradox of liberty and inequality. The institution of slavery, a dark stain on the parchment of freedom, stood as a glaring contradiction to the lofty principles articulated by the founding fathers. The struggles of African-Americans for recognition as equal citizens unfolded against a backdrop of brutal oppression, where the very notion of liberty seemed reserved for a privileged few.

Yet, within the folds of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, marginalized voices found the tools for their emancipation. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave turned abolitionist, eloquently wielded the words of the founding documents to argue for the inherent rights of all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin. The echoes of his speeches resonated not only in the hearts of those in chains but reverberated through the corridors of power, igniting the flames of change.

The 19th century bore witness to the relentless westward expansion, as pioneers and settlers sought new frontiers in the pursuit of prosperity. However, this expansion came at a grievous cost to the indigenous peoples who had inhabited these lands for centuries. The cries of Native Americans, relegated to reservations and stripped of their ancestral homes, rang through the canyons and plains. Yet, within the folds of treaties and constitutional guarantees, a nascent movement for indigenous rights took root.

The struggle for recognition and justice extended beyond race, encapsulating the experiences of Chinese and Japanese immigrants who labored tirelessly to build the transcontinental railroad, only to face discrimination and xenophobia. In the face of adversity, these communities turned to the promises embedded in the Constitution to assert their right to dignity and opportunity.

The 20th century brought seismic shifts in the landscape of civil rights, as the echoes of the Declaration of Independence reverberated once again. The struggles for women's suffrage, the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights, and the fight against discrimination became integral threads woven into the fabric of the American narrative. Figures like Susan B. Anthony, Harvey Milk, and countless others invoked the principles of equality, appealing to the nation's conscience to redefine its commitment to justice.

In the crucible of World War II, the nation faced its own contradictions as it grappled with the internment of Japanese-Americans, a dark chapter in its history. Yet, amidst the shadows of injustice, figures like Fred Korematsu emerged to challenge the constitutionality of such actions, reminding the nation that even in times of crisis, the ideals of liberty must remain steadfast.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s stands as a watershed moment in the nation's journey towards inclusion. Figures like Martin Luther King Jr. championed the transformative power of nonviolent resistance, invoking the principles of the Declaration of Independence to demand an end to segregation and systemic racism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the fruits of this tireless struggle, reshaping the contours of American society.

The quest for belonging and equality continued to evolve in subsequent decades, as the LGBTQ+ community demanded recognition and protection under the law. The Stonewall riots of 1969 marked a turning point, sparking a movement that would eventually lead to the recognition of same-sex marriage as a constitutional right in 2015.

The journey towards a more inclusive America has been arduous, marked by setbacks and triumphs, but the indomitable spirit of those who sought to expand the boundaries of liberty prevailed. The stories of those who fought for their place in the tapestry of American society illustrate the transformative power of words – the words penned by the founding fathers, the words etched in court decisions, and the words shouted in the streets during moments of protest.

As we embark on this exploration of America's odyssey, we must confront the complex interplay of ideals and realities that have shaped the nation's identity. This prologue sets the stage for a deep dive into the narratives of individuals and communities who, against all odds, claimed their rightful place in the mosaic of American life. Their stories, woven together, create a rich and vibrant tapestry – a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the ever-evolving promise of a nation where everyone belongs, with opportunities to thrive.

In the sermon on the civic mount that follows, we will traverse through pivotal moments in American history, witnessing the struggles, triumphs, and the ongoing quest for a more perfect union. The narrative will illuminate the path towards a society that cherishes diversity, embraces equality, and embodies the enduring spirit of a nation built on the bedrock principles of liberty and justice for all.

Part 1: Who is “We”?

Since late 2016, I’ve been engaged in a labor of love for my country and that which we love, we chastise. It is as much a labor of hope, however, as of love. I’ve been leading a text-based seminar entitled “Becoming an Inclusive Republic,” which I’m now honored to share with you in book form. Here’s how it came about.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I was a 2016 Eisenhower Zhi-Xing Fellow to  China during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. The Eisenhower Fellowship was a much-needed month-long break from my then-startup, TechTown Foundation (Chattanooga), and provided me with an opportunity to learn more about this emerging superpower, China. Certain of the election’s outcome, I mailed my absentee ballot and hopped on a long flight.

Once settled in China, colleagues in eight different cities kept telling me, in effect, that I had no right to my certainty, that my electoral expectations would be disappointed. I had assumed that the Democratic candidate would win just because of who the Republican candidate was. I was as surprised as I was wrong.

Surprised on two counts: by the result, of course, but also by the reaction it generated. For the preceding fifteen years I had bemoaned the poor state of civics education in the United States, but now the impact of that deficit was hitting home.

We know neither how our institutions, laws or customs work nor whence they come. About our country we tell ourselves and our children a woefully inaccurate story, whose inaccuracies spawn acrimony and frustration, especially when different facts are presented.

We are, generally speaking, unmindful of the bigger story of which our era is but a chapter: the evolutionary path that every nation state travels along towards a better version of itself. Americans are no exception. We’re on such a path, I’m convinced, and the better version of ourselves toward which we’re evolving is an inclusive republic.

We’ve evolved a great deal already, of course, but we’d discern its contours more clearly if we could block out the noise. A lot of that noise emanates from the social media platforms that billions seem unwilling to live without. If you’ve watched the Netflix documentary A Social Dilemma, you’d learn that our two-million-year-old brains are no match for algorithms that discover our biases, confirm them, and only feed us information that accord with them. One unintended consequence is that each of us tends to be “siloed” off from everyone else and lives solely in the bubble of our preferred news.

That’s the polar opposite of civil discourse. Civil discourse happens when people intentionally (not accidentally) engage each other about issues on which they don’t agree, but who genuinely want to understand why. They want to understand the basis of their disagreement. They don’t disagree about everything: meaningful disagreement presupposes shared values, things about which civil society depends on there being agreement. On the latter’s basis, they can wrangle over a contentious matter. The bases of agreement—e.g., national history, the land on which both parties were raised, texts both hold sacred—form the launchpad for the expression of differences with mutual respect.

That’s what I had in mind when I conceived “Becoming an Inclusive Republic,” first the seminar, the digital course, and now this book. I wanted to call attention to and gather in one place the sources of ideas with which most Americans can identify. I began with material written almost 250 years ago in Philadelphia and ended with recent bestsellers that speak to what Americans are now experiencing.

Let’s begin this conversation by focusing, as suggested in the introduction, on three questions:

(1)   Who is “WE”?

(2)  How has our notion of “WE” evolved?

(3)  Where do WE go from here?

Nation-states are but ideas. They start and are maintained by mutual agreement about values, intentions, and so forth of those that purposely avail themselves to the idea. This compact, if you will, is supported by text deemed sacred, text here could take a variety of forms - from a single liberating event, natural disaster, or riveting oratory, etc. In the case of the United States of America, our sacred text, the document we point to as a North Star, is the Declaration of Independence.

Let’s begin at the beginning, post-Revolutionary War, the tie that bound the thirteen states together was the U.S. Constitution. A compromise document meant to contend with known representational and governance issues amongst smaller, manufacturing states and large, planting states. Think of the Constitution as the operational plan, whereas the Declaration of Independence was the visionary statement.

However in 1863, President Lincoln, standing graveside for more than 25,000 fallen combatants in Gettysburg, perhaps reasoning that the compromised document - Constitution got us into the Civil War,  permanently fixed the Declaration of Independence as the national project worthy of battle. 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Those 248 words permanently changed the course of our national evolution as President Lincoln clearly articulated the purpose of our struggle.  The reason we must start any conversation about our country with the Declaration of Independence is that it was the first document to name that country and affirm its existence. It has functioned, in effect, as our North Star. Literally, the North Star is a sky marker, a compass for travelers over land, sea, or air. The subtitle of Martha Beck’s well-received book, Finding Your North Star is Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live. The Declaration, our North Star, can help us claim the country we were meant to create and live in. 

The Declaration of Independence served as the North Star not only for the Founding Fathers, but also for heroes of the civil rights, women’s suffrage, indigenous peoples and abolitionist movements and many notable men and women in between and after. The Continental Congress approved it on July 4, 1776, the day they sent the parchment to the printers. Independence had been declared, however, two days earlier. Before the “we” in the Preamble to the Constitution, there was the “we” of the Declaration, as in

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 . . . .

There’s a lot going on in those two lines, which invites the first question, “Who is “we”?” “We hold” implies general agreement: “We agree that something is true.” The line ends with a reference to what is “self-evident.” What is self-evident is not up for debate. One allows a self-evident proposition to manifest its truth, but one does not argue for it. Self-evident truth is the basis upon which one might argue for something else. It has, therefore, a connotation like that of a religious dogma. To say you know something because it’s self-evident means you know it directly, that is, upon grasping its meaning, not by inferring it from something known better. It’s not that you know something without evidence, but that you evaluate the evidence, rationally, not empirically. Let me give an example.

It’s self-evident to me that I’m conscious. Not necessarily indubitably true, but obvious to me enough for me to act on its being true. It’s also obvious to me, for practical purposes, that you, too, are conscious. It’s also self-evident, in a stricter sense, that two things that are equal to a third thing (in some respect) are equal to each other. I know this by thinking about the meanings of the words in that proposition and relating them logically. I’m never going to find two things equal to third that are not equal to each other! It’s a matter of thinking, not data-gathering or experimentation.

God—or at least, something other than men—created trees. How do we know? Because men, who are not as tall as trees, couldn’t have. It’s self-evident that some creative agency other than humanity had to create trees.

Therefore, when the founders declared that something was self-evident, they were saying they didn’t discover it empirically, that is, by means of their senses. Any person of normal intelligence can see the proposition in question to be true upon reflection. Here’s another consideration, one that brings us closer to that key proposition in the Declaration: every member of a class is equal to every other member by virtue of being a member. Every member of the class, “dog,” for example, is equal to every other member. I wouldn’t race a Yorkie against a Greyhound, but with respect to “dogness,” that is, being a member of the class Canis familiaris, every dog is equal in every respect that makes it a member of that class. Trivially true, perhaps, but true.

The same goes for Homo sapiens, “men,” human beings as distinct from dogs, apes, and other mammals, sub-terrestrials, extra-terrestrials, and so on. All men as members of the class “human beings” are equal in possessing rights, that is, their mutual claims upon each other. My claim to my life, my liberty, and my pursuit of happiness (to be discussed below) deserves no more or less consideration than your claims. It is unjust, but also illogical to grade anyone’s right to life, liberty, and happiness-pursuit higher than anyone else’s. Why? Because the state of having rights is a divine arrangement. My claim on you (and yours on me) comes from our creator. God demands that we mutually recognize each other as created bearers of rights.

For Thomas Jefferson and the other men (yes, the propertied males) in the room, it was obvious that all people are not only equal, but created equal, “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Creator-endowed rights are unalienable: they cannot be alienated, “othered,” or separated from you.

There’s the construct. It’s not hard to see its revolutionary implications in 1776. They were not lost on those from whom independence was declared. To secure these rights (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” These were fighting words in 1776.

Why? Because traditionally, one became a monarch by birth or by might. In 911 (over eleven hundred years ago!), the King of West Francia, Charles the Simple, gifted certain lands to the Viking Rollo who, after the Siege of Chartres, agreed to end his brigandage. Thus began the House of Normandy, which runs the United Kingdom to this day, and ran it when King George reigned. Men with big arms and bigger clubs may have created royal lines, but to gain legitimacy (apart from which they were no better than a gang of robbers), they claimed that God put his divine housekeeping seal of approval upon that arrangement. After all, as the Bible says, the powers that be are ordained of God (Romans 13:1). Might may not make right, but it does reveal who has the right to rule.

Those so ordained cannot be justly resisted, according to this story. They decide what type of government their subjects will have and who among their loyal allies will become noblemen. The men in that Philadelphia room in 1776 were noblemen: as we know from Hamilton, at least from the musical if not from history, they owned whatever land they owned by the King’s permission.

Benjamin Franklin prevailed upon the young Thomas Jefferson to replace the word “property” with “happiness.” They were virtually synonyms, but there was a difference in connotation. Your experience (“pursuit”) of happiness depends on your ownership of scarce resources from whose employment you derive income. If you’re a blacksmith, however, or roofer, or bricklayer, you may own your tools and sell your services, but unless you own land and its potential increase, you cannot earn income, the key to enjoying what life has to offer. By income, they meant rents collected from folks who lived on and worked the land in question.

King George conferred upon noblemen the right to earn income in colonial America. He set conditions of ownership: evacuate a given portion (say, 20,000 acres, which he never saw) of its indigenous inhabitants and claim it in the name of the king. He granted the noblemen who satisfied that condition the right to import (at their expense) the labor necessary to ensure that the land would be income-producing. What remained was his receipt of his “cut” of the enterprise’s profits, that is, the duties he leveled. All was well.

Until it wasn’t. Something facilitated the rebellion of the colonists. What was it? The King of England was pursuing war with France, and wars are expensive. The colonial rebels changed the course of the history of Western democracies, but they were able to do so because of certain historical contingencies like King George’s predicament. The best time to fight a powerful opponent is when he’s already fighting someone else. The colonists were not going to politely wait their turn behind the French (like the hapless thugs surrounding Bruce Lee in The Chinese Connection). No, they knew 1776 was the time to strike.

King George III faced troubling trends in the American colonies: in his royal opinion, the colonists were getting too big for their britches. Their population was growing, and their ethnic and religious diversity presaged problems of distant rule. They were also getting wealthy, and the King eyed his “cut,” which would fund (among other things) his European military adventures. He aimed to raise a hundred thousand pounds to replenish his strategic reserve, but only reached 40 percent of that goal. Soldiers, essentially mercenaries, were paid a percentage of the tax revenues. Reports suggested that people who are thousands of miles, and that the domineered, the colonists, were getting away with a lot under the very noses of British soldiers. In a clumsy attempt to mulct the colonists, the Crown’s most valuable asset, the Stamp Act of 1765 was declared in March. The Crown sought to make a lucrative business of official seals (“stamps”) that certified that products were legal. The colonists had to pay for that paper, or he couldn’t buy or sell what it stamped.

To make a long story short, the colonists refused to pay the tax. The King’s short-sighted attempt to raise money backfired and provoked the Stamp Act Rebellion. In October 1765, the month before the Act was to “commence” or take effect, delegates of nine of the thirteen colonies convened the Stamp Act Congress in Federal Hall to lay out their Declaration of Rights and Grievances against the Crown. All they wanted, they protested, was the same rights as subjects, which included the right to parliamentary representation before being taxed. Their pithy slogan, “No taxation without representation,” has a contemporary ring.

In affirming their status as subjects, not secessionists, they ironically took their first step on the road to independence. Having asserted their right to self-government, they awaited the Crown’s response. For reasons of expediency, the British Parliament repealed the Act the following March, but then imposed a Declaratory Act, which reaffirmed the status quo of distant, and arrogant, rule while imposing a slew of new taxes and regulation. Eight years later, in 1774, future signatories of the Declaration of Independence would meet at the First Continental Congress.

The Stamp Act Rebellion spawned guerrilla warfare, which didn’t always take the form of discharging firearms. Ebenezer Macintosh, for example, a member of Fire Engine Company No. 9 in Boston's South End, disassembled the homes of tax collectors, knowing there was no way to bring fire-dousing water in the middle of the city.  The colonists weren’t thrilled to undertake such an expensive and risky enterprise as revolution, but King George was profiting from their labor, thereby impeding their pursuit of happiness, just to pursue war against France. Enough was enough! Almost at once, they realized that they had long stopped being Englishmen and started being Americans. Reflecting on their Christian inheritance and the natural law basis of the natural rights they claimed, they concluded they didn’t need anyone’s permission to be free. As the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews declared, “we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15, NKJV). The colonists planned to tear this temple’s veil from top to bottom, for no longer would anyone crunch, kneel and crawl backwards into this nation’s holy of holies. The king’s permission was no longer required as the creator endowed each and every one of them, they reasoned, with rights or claims that no monarch can negate, and they determined to  force those claims on him. They said, “We’re going to create a government.” This was the most revolutionary thing the American colonists could say to King George, but they did, and they prevailed - with a help from Britain’s nemesis, France.

The result was a republic of thirteen colonies, about fifteen million people. So far, so great. Apart from opposition to the British empire, however, what would bind them together going forward? Thirteen colonies, thirteen different currencies, thirteen different sets of laws, more than one language. This is all right, perhaps, for thirteen countries, but for one country, it was an unmanageable mess.

Thus, the impetus for constitutional conventions, about a half dozen of which convened between 1776 and 1789. In those thirteen years the day’s thought leaders—from the landed gentry, of course, but also landless scholars and gentlemen like Alexander Hamilton—got together to hammer out the details of the government that should federate or bind all Americans in the spirit expressed in the Declaration.

We turn to Federalist Paper 10. There were 85 Federalist Papers, two-thirds of them written by Alexander Hamilton. Of the 29 that James Madison penned, one was a jewel: No. 10. In it he expressed grave concern about the danger that the faction posed to the majority. By “faction,” he meant a small group of passionate people who could change the order of things for the majority. Does this ring a bell in our current political discourse? This was in 1776.

James Madison was “all in” for the idea of a republic, but a constitutional republic, one wherein passionate individuals could not overturn the majority’s will. The faction that created this country was the exception to Madison’s anti-faction rule: no factions can come after and undo what we did. Because we say so. James Madison denied that what was good for the monarchical goose was now good for the republican gander.

The issue of this dialectical wrangling over what being a constitutional republic  means was the Constitution of 1789. It has endured since then without significant alteration. It has been amended (changed or added to), and the Constitution provides for the very process of amendment. Moreover, our Constitution has inspired more than a hundred others around the world.

Clearly, these enlightened men of the late 18th century were onto something: the ideal of democracy, in the form a democratic republic (not a “mobocracy”). Holding ourselves to the standard expressed in words penned in the late 18th century, we ought to measure America’s failures by whether, and if so, how far, we have departed from that standard.

The Constitution, which combines the Massachusetts Plan and the Virginia Plan, defined who was “in” and who was “out.” It was concerned that Virginia would be overrepresented in Congress due to its slave population, whereas Massachusetts was more industrial. Thus did anti-democratic notions inform our democratic documents. (Currently, 20 senators represent 80% of America’s population; 80 senators represent 20% of America’s population. That was probably not the founders’ intent.)

In 1787 a Constitutional Convention arrived at a compromise between these sectional interests whereby three-fifths of a state’s slaves counted for its total population when apportioning the House of Representatives. This compromise (which the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly superseded) indicated what America’s leaders thought of men who were not white, or free, or propertied, those leaders being all three. Here surfaces the tension between the “we” of American’s North Star and the reality of power politics and sectional interests far removed from insights into self-evidence that inspired a rebellion against a king.

For the four score years plus one from 1776 to 1857, the year of the Dred Scott decision, we know the answer to “Who is ‘we’?” Now we’ll explore how “we” started to evolve. It was not a smooth evolution. There were fits and starts and uneven developments, but they yielded a measure of progress for millions.

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