The Challenge of Retrieving the American Founding

American audiences applaud King George III's bravura performance in Hamilton. But however much we may sing his song and secretly wonder whether what he was saying would turn out to be the truth, we all know who is going to win and whom we are supposed to be rooting for. After the Revolution, the Loyalists largely left, and there was really no one left to challenge the fundamentals of the founding consensus. 

According to the common view that Louis Hartz famously formulated in 1955 in The Liberal Tradition in America, the U.S. had no feudal past and hence no French-style social revolution - and no Tory-like political party to propose alternatives to the established Liberal consensus. Americans might be federalists or anti-federalists, Republicans or Democrats, but they are all classical Liberals at heart, all operating within the commonly accepted liberal republican consensus.

And how could it be otherwise? Without a monarch and a shared history of centuries of common experiences and values, with what could this new nation hold itself together, especially as more and more people from all over the world with all sorts of different historical experiences kept joining? It had to be some sort of common civic identity rooted in a common consensus based on the foundation the founders had laid.

The one conspicuous exception was, of course, the ante-bellum South, whose slave-owning ruling elite fancied themselves faux aristocrats and self-consciously developed a distinctly anti-Liberal ideology in order to justify slavery and eventually secession. But that exception was eradicated - at least in theory - by the Union victory in the Civil War.

Another philosophical framework that might have offered a somewhat more subtle alternative to ideological American Liberalism - focused less on the individual and more on social solidarity and the common good - might have been Catholicism. But the Catholics who immigrated to America for the most part knew next to nothing about such ideas. And what Catholics came to care most about politically was becoming as American as possible - Catholic Americans but primarily Americans.

So there never has been any significant ethical and philosophical foundation on which to build American society other than the founding narrative. It may be flawed, but all narratives are  at least to some degree. Think of the French Republic’s famous history textbook, taught throughout the French colonial empire, which began its narrative with the words Nos ancêtres les Gaulois (" Our ancestors the Gauls").

The issue then is not inventing some new national narrative, as 20th-century totalitarians tired so hard to do. (That they were notoriously unsuccessful was evident, for example, in how much about the Soviet State could be best explained by remembering Russia.) The issue is rather how to retrieve our already very powerful and attractive national narrative with some mix of honesty and inclusion. A musical like Hamilton is admittedly entertainment, but it is also a powerful and effective exercise in civic education, which attempts to retrieve the founding narrative in an accessible and inclusive manner.

Retrieving the founding narrative in an accessible and inclusive direction differs from destroying or undermining that narrative. That (ironically) is what our present president seems intent on doing, not only by his undermining of traditional American liberal political norms but by his thoughtless identification of that narrative with its ideological enemies, the Confederates whose statues and flag he is so ridiculously defending.

The same could be said of the other extreme for which vandalizing statues and symbols seems a substitute for serious engagement with the  removed issues at hand. Of course, Confederate monuments should never have ben erected, ere eventually erected with malevolent intent, and should certainly be promptly removed. But vandalizing statues of other historic figures is a largely pointless exercise which substitutes exhilarating destruction for the harder work of constructing something new. The structures that actually do need to be undone are such social evils as over-policing, zoning laws and other policies that maintain residential and educational segregation, a distorted health care system that spends more than other nations with poorer outcomes, etc. Such efforts at political and social reconstruction would be best undertaken within a common commitment to the long-term promise of the founding narrative and would in turn renew that narrative for a better national future.

SCOTUS Gets It Right on the Electoral College

Ever since the disastrous elections of 2000 and 2016, in which the candidate rejected by the popular vote received a majority of the electoral college vote, there has been increased dissatisfaction expressed about our electoral college system. It is not quite clear how best to reform or replace it, what form of direct popular election would work best, or what its unintended side effects might be. But there is probably a considerable consensus that the present system should at least operate the way we expect it to - with electors voting for their party's nominee. That's what we presume will happen when we call the election in November, a full month before the electors actually cast their ballots.

Apparently the Supreme Court agrees with this common expectation. According to yesterday's unanimous decision in Chiafalo v. Washington, states may (as 32 states plus DC now do) require electors to vote as expected and also (if the state chooses to) sanction them if they don't. By 1832, every state except one (South Carolina) had switched to popular election of electors, and the system we have since come to take for granted has assumed that the electors will vote as expected. Citing an earlier precedent, Justice Kagan's opinion allows this "long settled and established practice" to have "great weight in a proper interpretation of constitutional provisions" - in this case the provision allowing states to appoint electors  "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct."

Undoubtedly, it was the intent of the Framers for electors to exercise their own judgment. They would, Alexander Hamilton wrote, "possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations." Already by the election of 1800, however, the political party system had developed to provide that "information and discernment" for voters.

There were several so-called "faithless electors" in 2016. What on election night in November had seemed like a 306-232 win for Trump turned into a 304-227 tally - not enough to alter the expected result, but certainly one additional discredit to our system (in trouble enough already).

Making it more likely that that the system will work the way we expect it to may be small consolation to the increasing number of Americans who no longer want a system which works in effect to disenfranchise so many citizens and which twice in two decades has produced a president rejected by the majority of voters. But surely improving that system should not depend on the arbitrary caprice of individual electors displaying even greater contempt for the will of the voters. That much, at least, we should all be able to agree on.

"The $10 Founding Father"

I've always admired Alexander Hamilton. Back in the 1970s, my American political thought professor suggested a show should be made about him, heroically titled "Alexander." I never quite expected that to happen and was accordingly surprised and pleased when "the $10 Founding Father" became the subject of a Broadway hit. Of course, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's masterpiece may not have been stylistically what any 1970s professor or student might have expected. But, as everyone now knows, it has succeeded, both as art and repurposed history. (And it may also have happily helped save Hamilton's honored place on the $10 bill.)

Needless to say, until now I have never seen or ever expected to see the show - Broadway being well beyond my price range. But now, for a modest fee (infinitesimal compared to theater prices), a filmed version of the theatrical production (with the original cast) is now available for streaming. So I spent some significant part of July 4 watching what I'd admired from afar but had never expected to see for myself.

Obviously, watching on my laptop cannot compete with or really compare with watching it live in a theater. Nor, since it is a filmed version of a particular live performance, is it a proper "movie," with all that that experience entails. I will leave it to the theater and film critics to analyze those aspects of this unique production. Even so, the performance - its music, its lyrics, its acting - is fantastic.

As always, it helps to know some history already. Undoubtedly, it helps to have read Ron Chernow's 2004 biography of Hamilton, on which Lin-Manule Miranda based his musical. But even the viewer with no knowledge of American history at all could learn a lot from this pop version of Hamilton's life - from his arrival as an immigrant in New York to his service on Washington's staff in the Revolutionary War, his marriage, his authorship of The Federalist Papers, his service as Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, his rivalries with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, his affair with Maria Reynolds, the death of his son, his role in the 1801 election of Jefferson over Burr, and his death in a duel with Burr.

Hamilton, the immigrant outsider who made his way inside and became a great nation-builder, has always embodied a special sense of America's promise. Hamilton, the Broadway hit, transposes that perennial promise into the cultural expression of Obama-era multicultural progressivism, a novel take to be sure, but one well within the ultimate logic of Hamilton's story. In this repressive nightmare which we are now living through, that seems almost as far away as the founding era itself. Optimistic Obama-era multicultural progressivism appears almost as distant as the founders in their knee-breeches, and in its own measure flawed like them. Yet it speaks so eloquently of the power of America's founding promise that we can keep reverting to both the founding event and the founders themselves in new and imaginative ways, a retrieval which we will have to try to do again, on a much bigger stage, if and when our current national nightmare ever ends.

After Independence

It has been said that there are two truly American holidays. Thanksgiving Day (in late autumn) looks inward to the heart and soul of America, and so is celebrated at home, at table, among family and friends. Independence Day (in summer) looks outward to the world of nations and states, and so is celebrated (as John Adams said it should be) “by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

Well, maybe not this year, a year conspicuously lacking in a lot of those things, those social activities Adams – and many of us – just took for granted until a few months ago. Even our gathering for Mass today takes place under unusual circumstances, which reflect the reality and the ongoing virulence of this pandemic, and its multiple effects on our spiritual and religious experience as well as on our social existence as citizens. Meanwhile, especially in the last several weeks, our awareness of the pandemic’s different impacts on different groups and of other past and present unjust social circumstances have increasingly forced us to face up to the moral dilemmas and unfinished business of our often painful national history. Not for the first time – and probably not the last – all Americans are being challenged to come to terms with our problematic past and its poisonous effects on our present, so as to be better able to face our future united in a common life with a common purpose.

It is always challenging to reexamine our history - just as challenging as it is to reconsider our own personal stories. We are all always more comfortable with whatever versions of our national and personal stories we have gotten used to telling ourselves. But however awkward, it is a perennial challenge to be faced – all the more so when we really take seriously our citizenship in the kingdom of God and how the additional demands of God’s kingdom alter all our other commitments, all our earthly loyalties, all our ethnic and national histories, all our personal and racial stories.

As Pope Saint Paul VI once said, "Jesus Christ is … Lord of the new universe, the great hidden key to human history and the part we play in it." [Homily, Manila, 1970]

Indeed, Saint Paul, in our second reading today from his letter to the early Christian community in Rome, at that time the imperial capital of the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever then known, reminds us that, even while we remain thoroughly engaged in the otherwise ordinary-seeming life of our world, we are simultaneously living a new life, given to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul’s idea is that Christ’s new life has become our new life too, thereby reversing the death-ward direction of our ordinary existence and empowering us to allow ourselves and our entire lives – public and private - to be re-shaped by the Gospel’s stirring call to a total reorientation of our lives.

As Catholics, of course, we have a long history (going back to Roman times) of thinking seriously about how to relate our faith to civil society – a long tradition of practical wisdom which we need to take seriously both as disciples and as citizens.

What resources does our faith offer to help us heal our civic life this Independence Day? What lessons have we learned from the past, and what can we do together – now - both to promote the common good of our country and to care for our common home this planet earth?

Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, July 5, 2020.

Independence Day 2020

In the 1760s colonial elites objected to paying their share of taxes to cover the cost of keeping North America British rather than French. By the mid-1770s this movement had developed into a full-scale armed rebellion. And in July 1776 representatives of the rebellious faction, expressing their "decent respect for the opinions of mankind," declared "the causes which impel them" to independence from Great Britain. 

It has been estimated that they represented perhaps 1/3 of the colonists, another 1/3 remaining loyal to the legitimate government in London, the rest probably waiting to see how things turned out. How it turned out was determined militarily, as such issues of sovereignty and borders almost invariably are, by victory in war. The war for independence was a long war, won in the end thanks to the military and naval support of King Louis XVI of France, who may or may not have been inspired by the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence but who certainly saw the opportunity to weaken his British rival. Many of the "loyalists," as they came to be remembered, left. Many went north to what remained of British North America and helped populate what became English-speaking Canada. The rest of the former colonists accommodated themselves to the new realities and started to build a new country.

Old conflicts about whether to be British or American gave way to new battles about crafting a constitution, conflicts between "federalists" and "anti-federalists." A series of great and small compromises cobbled together an amazingly resilient constitution and "a more perfect union" got off to a hopeful start under the providential leadership of George Washington, whom his former sovereign, King George III, reportedly called "the greatest man in the world." But conflicts continued, as Hamiltonian Federalists fought Jeffersonian Republicans. If I could go back in time, I would certainly be a Hamiltonian and vote for John Adams, never for the aristocratic, pseudo-populist Jefferson. But, no matter, Hamiltonian nationalism and Jeffersonian populism both survived and in various ways have animated American political debates and divisions ever since.

There was one other division, of course, which predated the constitution, predated independence - America's "original sin" of slavery, which finally brought the young, socially and economically energetic, relatively egalitarian republic to an impasse, to be resolved, as such conflicts almost invariably tend to be resolved, by another war, a traumatic Civil War. A decisive victory in 1865 should have resolved the conflict; but, after a short interval of relatively successful "Reconstruction," the defeated confederates were allowed to regain power and reimpose a racist regime, which would take yet another century to be dismantled - and even now remains a force to be reckoned with in the hearts and minds of too many.

Meanwhile millions of newcomers, many unwanted, came to this new nation, seeking mainly freedom from want but in the process embracing other freedoms as well. When we celebrated our Bicentennial in 1976, I was struck by how the celebrations in New York that day were as much about this country's diverse immigrant experience as about what happened in Philadelphia in 1776, although what had been proclaimed back then in Philadelphia had been amazingly assimilated by the immigrants the nation had itself assimilated, creating a country uniquely based more on a civic identity than on a racial or ethnic one. 

But, of course, the racial and ethnic divides remained real, to the detriment of the acquired civic identity. And especially in times of stress, demagogic appeals to the militarily defeated but still living religion of white supremacy still have power to undermine the national unity promised by our unique civic identity, as has so dramatically been evident in recent years.

So 244 years later, that same "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" demands a continued accounting, a continued resolve to attend to the unfinished business of both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, to fulfill the promise of "a more perfect union" proposed by the Constitution, a promise turned into a possibility by the transformed Constitution created by the Civil War.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.