In his U.S. church history class at Yale Divinity School, Harry Stout drove home the radical political nature of the United States by asking us, his students, to think about the first three words of the Declaration of Independence: “We the People.” The world of 1776 was one where nearly all people were under the rule of a prince or aristocratic oligarchy. Stout argued that those opening words stated that our republic was our responsibility to sustain. If we fail, we cannot blame any hereditary ruler or aristocracy. We can only blame ourselves. John Courtney Murray drove home the perennial difficulty of this ambitious task of self-government among a people who were plural in religious views, ethnicity, and national origin. Unity could never be achieved with anything other than a shared philosophical consensus. He was not alone in making that observation. Margaret Thatcher repeatedly stated how the United States was founded on a philosophy.
Our elected officials often make the claim that what they do, or what the president has done or will do, is done for the U.S. people or sanctioned by its people. This is a problematic claim, implying that an action by a member of Congress or by a sitting president carries either the unanimous endorsement of 340.1 million citizens, or the endorsement of a plurality of them. Ominously, it implies that such decisions are made without the consideration of the views of substantial minorities of our country who think differently. This claim is even more problematic considering that according to the U.S. Elections Project of the University of Florida, not since the 1908 presidential election has electoral turnout for subsequent elections exceeded 65% of registered voters. Turnout for midterm elections since 1900 reached or breached the 50% mark a mere five times. Those voters who do participate in elections find gerrymandered legislatures where elected officials often have uncompetitive seats. According to the Cook Political Report, in the 2024 election, out of the 435 House of Representative seats, a mere 39 were considered competitive. Besides gerrymandering, a pay-to-play culture of moneyed influence courses through the halls of our legislatures, where groups who can marshal the most money can deploy resources to influence the crafting of legislation at the expense of those who cannot afford such influence. In most electoral cycles, most of the nation’s people are not heard consistently by most levels of government.
As for “the people” themselves, it can be argued that most are neither equipped to articulate or understand a philosophical consensus about what we are free for, nor possess the requisite knowledge or wisdom of how we ought to use government to order our lives, especially at the Federal level. We no longer teach rhetoric. Debate is, at best, an extracurricular activity. Therefore, we do not know how to argue well. Surveys, such as one done in 2019 by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, show that a distinct minority of Americans have a basic knowledge of our national history. We cannot draw lessons from our shared experiences as a country. Basic economic theory is not a required course in high school or university, which means we cannot begin to understand the economic dimensions affecting our national life. Last year, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a survey showing a growing lack of knowledge of civics, which makes the mechanisms of self-government opaque and open to manipulation by fewer and fewer people. This, I hasten to add, is not a problem of raw intellectual ability on the part of U.S. voters, generally, but a problem of a lack of intellectual formation. That, too, has become a locus of intense debate in this country, underscoring the problem of a lack of a philosophical consensus. We do not agree on what content should be taught, especially in the humanities.
One of the ironies of U.S. populism is that too often it has little to do with the actual needs of the populace. Instead of an authentic populism which seeks to empower all to better participate in our national life (one example: the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862), this lack of intellectual formation makes us vulnerable to the sophistry of self-styled anti-elites in our political and media communities. They encourage voters to view themselves as being short-changed or victimized by some other group. Often that “other group” is our fellow Americans. Our political and media culture (deregulated to the point that its business model narrowcasts what people want to hear, instead of giving us a shared set of facts) encourages us to think tribally. Others are made out to be the enemy instead of our partners in self-government with which we must work to resolve the ancient Aristotelian mandate of politics to negotiate and renegotiate how to order our lives consensually. If there is anything approaching a philosophy behind this sophistry, it is a base nominalism where truth claims are defined by those who have the loudest megaphone or can best rally their faction to intimidate their putative opponents into compliance.
For a nation that many want to claim is Christian, the irony is further amplified by how our national shouting matches (we cannot call it discourse, we often cannot arrive at the first step of a debate, namely what are we disagreeing about) carry some of the features of Christian heresies. The most obvious is our Manichean attitudes toward our political opponents, who are portrayed more and more as the forces of darkness, the defeat of which is an imperative cast in apocalyptic terms. This is coupled with a Pelagian attitude to one’s own side, often cast in terms of having “common sense” the other side lacks. However, as the American philosopher and founder of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, argued, if our capacity for common sense judgements was consistent, every person’s judgement would be able to withstand scrutiny. In reality, authentic common sense, for Peirce, can only be arrived at through doubt, critique, and making our ideas more clear. This overconfidence in the authenticity of one’s knowledge and understanding of the issue at hand is such that too many Americans believe that the only way for an opponent to arrive at the truth is to agree with one’s own side, instead of mutually engaging in a process of research and inquiry. This attitude is a type of Gnosticism. Another example of this Gnosticism is how popular media personalities claim superior knowledge to experts who have spent their professional lives studying and seeking real understanding of the issues the former group chooses to squawk over. These heretical features of our politics put our polity into a vicious circle of seeking quick, immediate, simple answers to problems that never lend themselves to such solutions. No wonder we elevate our political leaders to possess messianic qualities to try and save us, instead of participating in government at every level, and do the difficult work of research, contemplation, and engaging in authentic argument. That last feature, according to Murray, is the true generator of civilization.
This leaves us Catholic ethicists and allied scholars with three initial, urgent tasks. First, our society either lacks the confidence that truth can be known, or lacks humility by thinking that truth is readily available through common sense, not subject to any sort of research, analysis, or critique. Our philosophical crisis is, at heart, an epistemological one. We must bring our scholarly tradition to bear, first to sort out amongst ourselves how we can know things with the right balance of confidence and humility and teach our fellow citizens the same. Second, U.S. history demonstrates that barring a crisis that unites the country, aside from the most voluntary of associations, we do a poor job of exercising solidarity. Heather Cox Richardson is correct to observe that too many in the nation view a true citizen as someone who is left alone by the government to provide for oneself and one’s family. She observes that “rugged individualism” is founded in the myth of the “American” West, but it has deeper roots in the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. U.S. history is more communitarian than many think. For example, beginning with Wyoming, that same West gave women the vote before the rest of the country, highly prized formal education (as evidenced by the aforementioned land grant colleges, among other educational institutions), had gun control, and relied on the Federal and local governments to facilitate settlement with Army protection, land grants for settlers, support for railroads, and other infrastructure such as irrigation. (This was often done at the expense of the original Native American or Hispanic settlers of the region.) Catholic thought is full of the theory and historical examples which show that individual achievement and the bonds of social solidarity are not mutually exclusive, nor always in an adversarial tension, but can be in creative tension and mutually reinforcing. Lastly, we must argue again why individual rights and the sovereign rights of nations are never absolute. Both are always limited by the human rights and dignity of other individuals and their communities. The modern reassertion of individual rights and national sovereignty masks an ulterior motive, to shield a person or a nation from accountability when either does violence to the dignity of the other. It is imperative to have a renewed understanding of national and international communions not based on will, but on the renewed ability to live together and talk together.
Reinhold Niebuhr, in the foreword to his Children of Light and Children of Darkness, observed that our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but our inclination to injustice, one which we are tempted to especially now, makes democracy necessary. If constitutional self-government is a way to articulate and practice how we order ourselves as a society, our current politics reflects our collective failure in that task. The Constitutional crisis some think is being propagated by our sitting president is but one serious symptom among many of our real constitutional crisis: namely ourselves.
Works Cited
U.S. Elections Project, The University of Florida. https://election.lab.ufl.edu/national-turnout-rates-graph/
The Cook Political Report, https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings
B. Lewer, Reimagining American History Education. Princeton, NJ: The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2019. https://citizensandscholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/WW-American-History-Report.pdf
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, https://www.goacta.org/civic-literacy/
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, June 25, 2024. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-25-2024
n.a. Morrill Act (1862). U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/morrill-act
Reinhold Niebuhr, Children of Light and Children of Darkness, (New York: Scribner, 1944), p. xiii.