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A CRACK IN THE LIBERTY BELL
BARRY MAGUIRE
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
Would it not be simpler
If the government
Dissolved the people
And elected another?
-BERTOLD BRECHT (1953)
Democracy begins at home. First in the heart; from
there it radiates through the house into the neighborhood
and community. It is found in smaller places rather than
in centralized illusions of popular culture that reflect mind
manipulation and mendacity as well as gross distortions
of constitutional processes and interpretations.
Democracy is after all a compromise between the
yearning for freedom and the urge to frustrate it. It is an elaborate
though inherently fragile system of concessions between diverse
and disparate ambitions and ideologies represented by a variety
of economic and political classes, despite an enshrined myth that
a democracy is a classless society. The only possible survival for
democracy is to establish and sustain balance between conflict
ing factions so that none gain such power as to be capable of
suppressing or ravaging the rest. In that sense, no debate or
problem can be fully or finally resolved without its resolution
becoming repressive: if any one faction tips the balance of power
for very long the fabric of democracy is destroyed. Diversity is
democracy, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, the country is rapidly retrogressing from a
diversely construed democracy centered on the rule of common
folk to an aristo/plutocracy of immensely wealthy persons and
corporations. The USA is at a crossroads as severe as the Civil
War: a crisis that will determine its future as a nation and society
— either as a corporate oligarchy administered by questionably
elected figureheads; or an open society as envisioned in its most
fundamental beliefs and laws, as well as a leading member of a
world confederacy of presumably eventual democracies.
American history boiled to the bone might be ecapsu-
lated as war and money rather than about liberty and equality
— if it is argued that the wars have all been fought for money,
the pursuit of wealth reconfigures as the essential matrix of the
USA's ‘Manifest Destiny’.
This perspective of history is obviously an injustice to
those who have struggled and often been jailed, bled or died for
the larger beliefs relevant in the Bill of Rights, the ten command
ments of American democracy. Yet the very fact of the intensity
of the strife for equity and justice within our own Constitution
gives legitimacy to the claim that for the powerful elite, wealth
and who gets it is the mainspring of the nation's history.
If indeed this narrow view of history has any credence,
it must be realized that a select few have from the beginning
profited from the collective effort of multitudes of ordinary citizens
who generally prefer equity to imbalance. In this context the
term freedom is misapplied — both politically and economically;
“free enterprise" is a misnomer, for the fact that throughout the
country’s 229 year history the wealthiest Americans have for
the most part accumulated and maintained their wealth at public
expense, essentially through sales and subsidies, which can also
be defined as the blood and taxes of the majority who generally
make possible but seldom share in the abundance.
The real issue of democracy is the disparity of wealth,
which complicates and corrupts every other issue. The religious
rightwing is prepared to begin a second civil war to impose their
rigid theocratic hypocrisies upon government and citizenry, but
their despotic conservatism is fueled by the secularly-minded
wealthy elite whose shadowy support enfranchises virulent
attacks against liberalistic leftist ideas and persons.
It is the wealthy, whose affluence is to a large degree
established on public money paid by the less-affluent they
incessantly impoverish, who are the real revolutionaries of
contemporary America because they are the source of the
dissolution of the essentially liberal society that indulges their
insatiable and arrogant avarices.
The real purpose of the American experience is that
human beings are capable of coexisting as equals, that so-called
free competition is not one of unfair or dominating advantage.
A democracy decays when enormous numbers of citizens are
unemployed with poverty and homelessness their only prospects.
The remedies for repairing and reversing the intolerable social
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catastrophe that has resulted from the past decades of govern
ment laissez faire of business and corporate meganopoly of the
country are many and varied, and depend upon reapplying the
nation’s fundamental principles with fresh interpretations.
The colonial rebels who declared independence from
their mother country had their own ambitious agendas, but they
revived the ancient dream of living freely without shackles, of
determining one’s own life. The most famous sentiments of the
Declaration of Independence virtually shout these long thwarted
desires “that all men (though not women, and not all men either,
as it turned out) are created equal...(and) that governments are
instituted.. .deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.'' In other words, a democracy; a government of equals.
Even the infamous Robespierre could a few years later define
democracy as “a state in which the people, as sovereign, guided
by laws of its own making, does for itself all that it can, and by its
delegates what it cannot.” And Bill Moyers wrote two centuries
later that “Constitutional democracy is no romantic notion. It is
our defense against ourselves, the one foe that can defeat us.”
Yet in contrast to the premise that a constitution mani
festly provides a reasonable guarantee of political equality, a
group of workers in Sheffield, England eloquently expressed a
bitterness in 1741 that sounds as if they were speaking about
life in the USA today: “What’s the constitution to us if we are
nothing to it?”
The practice of democracy has been less than its
publicity; not completely a sham but all too often a façade of
liberty and equality. It has been treated as a vent for the little
people to whimper and perhaps exercise a slim possibility to
redress inequities between privilege and repression — redresses
extremely difficult to accomplish, with no little bloodshed. The real
power has always been with economic elites who rule as lords in
a state dominated by wealth, and politicians who are supposed to
be representatives of the people but are just political real estate,
for rent or lease by the aristo/plutocrats who, like old Romans
exploit for their own benefit the New World Order that rises on the
ruins of Soviet communism.
The oldest struggle after survival is for freedom, of being
part of a community, not enslaved by it — the eternal pitiless
struggle between haves and have nots, the despairing rage of
those condemned to live bitterly wretched lives in the shadows
and as menials to the economic and politically powerful few who
are in their turn angrily terrified by this rage.
History is retrogressed by millennia of injustice, with
periodic excesses of gross brutality. Sometimes the oppressed
overthrow the lords and bosses, but elites always rise in even
classless societies. If the American Revolution is accepted as
more than a revolt of colonial bourgeoisie and that it gave birth
to an egalitarian society in which the common citizenry had a
chance to be their own rulers, it should also be realized that
every reform has been bitterly and often bloodily resisted and
only adopted with great reluctance. Reforms that have been
ratified are usually countered with vicious backlash and
unrelenting reversion.
Vernon Parrington believed that American history has
been “largely a struggle between the spirit of the Declaration of
Independence and the spirit of the Constitution, the one primarily
concerned with the rights of man (sic), the other more practically
concerned with the rights of property." He could not understand
why intelligent Americans confused the two and thought of them
as complimentary. “Their unlikeness is unmistakable," he wrote
in Main Currents o f American Thought (1927)-, “the one a class
ical statement of French humanitarian democracy, the other an
organic law designed to protect the (affluent) minority under
republican rule." Historians long debunked his ideological division
of the nation's two most important documents, yet as early as
the 1820s Alexis deTocqueville observed, as R. R. Palmer wrote,
“that ’equality’ was one of the most fundamental ideas of the
United States; but he also thought the American Revolution
of little importance in producing this spirit of equality."
We are a democracy because it is necessary. It is not
because of beneficent human nature that we have inherited a
few basic rights and liberties sought by the mass of humanity
for millennia. These limits on power are to curb the avaricious
ambitions of many among us to prevent them from getting their
hands on our political rights. Our freedoms are in essence our
obligations as well — to preserve them for our descendants.
We are a democracy yet we know little about demo
cracy. Sovereignty, independence and equal rights do not come
easily and never stay very long without constant feeding and
nurturing. It took a long time for people to be convinced of the
possibility of freedom, even though our predecessors inherited
a powerful but thwarted tradition of rights and liberties. Our own
Revolution was in fact the result of bitter disappointment the
mother country did not recognize the loyalty to ancient principles
its colonies in North America felt they had exhibited in resisting
what they considered illegal and proscriptive edicts intolerable
to honest and loyal subjects.
Political rights or liberties hardwon by one generation
are usually eroded by successors who are careless with them,
not realizing how rare, necessary and fragile they are. The further
removed we are from the intense imperatives of our ancestors
for freedom and equality the more we take for granted what they
fought to establish, and the greater the danger we will allow them
to be taken away.
The larger insistent voices proclaim the USA as the
freest, most wonderful country on Earth and unfurl the flags
ofwordly preeminance and Godly jingoism. Smaller voices
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