What does the Fourth of July mean to me?
What does the Fourth of July mean to me?
The hope for an anti-imperialist constitutional republic
On July 5, 1852, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In its most famous, widely cited passage, Douglass declared:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
It was a glorious and noble articulation, written with anger from the vantage point of the enslaved and the excluded. Formulations of this kind must be preserved in our collective memory, pertaining to the cultural legacy of humanity.
But such sentiments and articulations cannot be the basis for a political philosophy in the twenty-first century in the United States. Why? Because national leaders seeking social change must proclaim the essential goodness of the nation, and they must exhort the people to move the concrete manifestations of its goodness to a more advanced stage, thereby overcoming its historic and contemporary social sins. Successful revolutionary political practices in the world for the last 100 years have demonstrated that key transformations in the process of constructing a better world occur at the level of the nation-state, implemented by revolutions that have succeeded in the taking of state power, and they do not attain political power by proclaiming the nation to be the essence of evildoing. To the contrary, the revolution must announce the ultimate redemption of the nation.
A number of years ago, Michael Novak, who identified with his immigrant Slovak grandparents, declared that the “white ethnics” of his time were great defenders of capitalism, because American capitalism had been good to them in material terms, even if American society had been oppressive of their ethnic cultures. I myself pertain to the white ethnics of whom Novak speaks, and I support him on this point. I can recall my father, the son of Irish immigrants to America, declaring, as he rode down the fairway in a golf cart with a gin and tonic in hand, “I wonder what the peasants are doing today?”
But yet.
For the generation of Americans that came of age in the late sixties, the war in Vietnam burst the bubble of American greatness. It was not merely that the Vietnam War was morally wrong and politically unintelligent. More essentially, as scholarly, journalistic, and civil society investigations of the time were to immediately show, the war was based on imperialist ambitions in Indochina, thus delegitimating the official declarations that the war was undertaken in defense of democracy. Discovery of this fact led the youth of America to investigate the related question, to what extent was American foreign policy in general based in imperialist rather than democratic premises? In that historic moment of painful discovery, those who had a partial answer to that question were given the floor.
The collective action of American youth during the period 1966-1972 surely made Frederick Douglass proud. They responded with all the fury appropriate for a generation that was learning that the nation with which it identified with pride had lied to them about who and what it is.
I participated in these events not as a leader but as a somewhat marginal participant observer. And I was disturbed at the outset by the movement’s political immaturity. It declared “Revolution!!!”, apparently not noticing that it was in fact small in number, and it lacked a plan for the taking of political power. It chanted “Off the pigs,” irrationally suggesting that the killing of police officers was going to somehow create a better world. Its members smoked marijuana and danced naked, without appreciating the negative impact of media dissemination of such conduct. There was I at the margins, uplifted that new truths were being proclaimed, but disappointed that no one was interested in my criticism of the movement’s superficial theory and politically unintelligent practices.
During the course of time, with the ending of the war to its credit; and with parallel gains in the struggle for the political and civil rights of blacks, Latinos, and women; the stage was set for the student anti-war movement to establish itself as a permanent, more politically mature presence on the American political landscape. But instead, it disappeared during the 1970s. And as a result, the nation was unprepared to respond to the reactionary, myopic, and superficial proclamations of Reaganism.
I myself undertook a lifelong solitary journey, investigating the implications of the anti-imperialist impulse of the late 1960s. That investigation brought me to an appreciation of the importance of the nation-state and of patriotic affection for the nation in the revolutions that have impacted the world during the last 100 years. In Cuba, I saw that the flag-wavers include the most progressive and revolutionary thinkers. I said to myself, “These folks have given patriotism a whole different meaning.” And in reading books about Vietnam, I learned that Ho Chi Minh had used the name “Nguyen the Patriot” as a leader in the Vietnamese exile community in Paris and as a participant in the French socialist party in the early 1920s. In general terms, I learned that the great revolutionaries of the last 100 years have been patriots who celebrated the advances forged by those who came before them and were lifted up as heroes in the political culture, rather than painting all with the brush of evildoing. To be sure, they possessed a critical spirit toward the celebrated revolutionaries and leaders of their nations, addressing their limitations, but never condemning them for their errors. They sought to move the nation toward a more advanced project built on a foundation that its heroes had constructed.
I believe that if the student anti-war movement of the period 1966 to 1972 had advanced to political maturity on a foundation of solidarity and cultural exchange with revolutions in other lands, it would have arrived to appreciate the importance of framing a revolutionary proposal in the USA as an affirmation and an evolution of the fundamental principles of the American Revolution. It would have arrived to recognize that the American Revolution of 1763 to 1789 was an advanced democratic revolution for its time, playing a leading role in the worldwide transition to bourgeois democratic principles, as is widely recognized throughout the world today. And in addition, the American Revolution created a constitutional foundation that establishes the rules and principles that ought to guide the nation, thus enabling political stability in those times in which the leaders of the people are able to forge a consensual majority for a determined national project.
The importance of the founding principles of the American Republic are much more appreciated today by American conservatives than by the American Left. As formulated by conservatives today, these principles include: federalism, with many principles and rules reserved to the states; congressional authority, in which the laws enacted by Congress—as the body that is supposed to represent the people, although it does not do so in practice, as everyone knows—ought not be redirected by executive order or rewritten through judicial interpretation, which means that changes in law should only be accomplished through the backing of a solid majority of the members of Congress; constitutional processes, involving the use of the different mechanisms of constitutional amendment to change the fundamental law defined by the Constitution. Conservatives argue, correctly, that important changes in the history of the nation have been forged by constitutional amendments and congressional legislation, including the abolition of slavery and the protection of the right to vote and the civil rights of all persons regardless of race, color, or gender. However, other changes, not so wise, have been imposed by administrative fiat and/or by judicial interpretation, because there did not exist the necessary majority political will to advance these reforms through the legitimate means established by the Constitution.
Conservatives are right in insisting upon the use of constitutionally defined procedures to affect reforms, because said procedures require a consensus among the people, and they therefore ensure that new laws will have legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Nothing can undermine democracy more than imposing laws without the consensual support of the people. If a proposed reform has merit, its defenders ought to be able to persuade the majority and to marshal the necessary political will. If they cannot, they ought to reformulate the proposal through persistent dialogue with the people, so that what emerges will have the consensual support of the people.
On the other hand, conservatives have learned nothing from the insights of the student anti-war movement of the period 1966 to 1972. Conservatives are completely uninformed with respect to the role of U.S. and Western imperialism in shaping the development of the structures of the modern world-economy, structures that promote the deepening of global inequalities. They do not see that the major powers of the world pretend that they are defending democracy, when in fact they are promoting and defending their imperialist interests in a neocolonial world-system. And even worse, they do not see that imperialist strategies no longer can work in our times, when the world-economy has reached and overextended the geographical and ecological limits of the earth, and when the movements of the neo-colonized have reached maturity. The revolutionaries of the Global South and East, with stamps of both socialist construction and capitalist reformism, have repeatedly declared for a new world order, in both theory and practice. But American conservatives of all colors are in complete ignorance of this fundamental fact of world politics, denouncing the leaders of China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, without having observed what these nations have been constructing.
In reflecting on the Fourth of July, we ought to creatively imagine how we can overcome ideological blind spots of both the Left and the Right and forge an ideological reconceptualization that could provide the foundation for a renewed national purpose that is faithful to the nation’s historic promise of democracy and also engages responsibly in the world.
We need a fourth American revolution. The first established the Republic and the Constitution. The second abolished slavery and established formal rights for the freed slaves. The third, occurring in the period 1955 to 1972, accomplished the implementation of political and civil rights in practice, not only for blacks and persons of color, but also for women. The fourth would fulfill the American promise of democracy.
Those of us who do intellectual work ought to seek to prepare the ideological terrain for the emergence of exceptional leaders, who like numerous exceptional leaders in the colonized regions of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will be capable of teaching the people of the United States the necessary road, bringing the human quest for social justice to culmination, in fulfillment of the announcements of the prophets of old.
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