When
a nation chooses to celebrate the date of its birth is a decision of paramount
significance. Indeed, it is a decision of unparalleled importance for the world’s
"First New Nation," the United States, because it was the first
nation to self-consciously write itself into existence with a written
Constitution. But a stubborn fact stands out here. This new nation was created
in 1787, and the July 4 that Americans celebrate today occurred on a different
summer eleven years before.
The
united States (capitalization, as can be found in the Declaration of
Independence, is advised) declared themselves independent on July 4, 1776, but the
nation was not yet to be. An act of severance did not a nation make. These
united States would only become the United States when the idea of a collective
We the People was negotiated and formally set on parchment in the
sweltering summer of 1787. This means that while every American celebrates the
revolution against government every July 4, pro-goverment liberals do
not quite have an equivalent red-letter day to celebrate and to mark the equally
auspicious revolution in favor of government that transpired in 1787.
Perhaps this is why the United States remains exceptional among all developed
countries in her half-hearted attitude toward positive liberty, the welfare
state, and government regulation, on the one hand, and her seeming addiction to
guns, individual rights, and negative liberty, on the other. In part because
the nation’s greatest national holiday was selected to commemorate severance
and not consolidation, (at least half of) America remains frozen in the
euphoric tide of the 1770s rather than the more pragmatic, nation-building
impulse of the 1780s.
In
The Lovers' Quarrel, I argue that the United
States had Two Foundings, and that July 4 was only Act One of the creation of
the American republic. In the interim years before the nation's elders (the
imprecise but popular nomenclature is "founders”) came together again—this
time not to address the curse of the royal yolk, but to discuss the more
mundane post-revolutionary crises of interstate conflict especially in matters
of trade and debt repayment—the states came to realize that the threat to
liberty comes not always from on high by way of royal governors, but also
sideways courtesy of newfound friends. In the mid-1780s, George Washington,
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and their compatriots came together to design
a more perfect union: a union with the power to lay and collect taxes, to raise
and support armies, and an executive to wage war. This was Act Two, or the
Second American Founding.
Just
like in the motherland, where Restoration would follow after the failed
experiment of the Cromwellian Protectorate, a subtler counter-revolution occurred
in 1787 when the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was
shredded up and quietly discarded into the dustbin of History. In its place was
inserted the Constitution. With the passage of time, we now act like the
turbulent period of early nationhood of the 1780s, which indicated manifestly
to the Federalists the need for a more robust central government, never even
occurred.
Custom
and the convenience of having a bank holiday during the summer when the kids
are out of school has hidden the reality of the Two Foundings. We now refer to
a single founding, and a set of founders, but this does great injustice to the
rich experiential tapestry that helped forge the United States. It denies the
very substantive philosophic reasons for why one half of America is so
convinced that liberty consists in rejecting government, but one half also
thinks that flogging that dead horse with the King long slain seems needlessly
self-defeating. As Turgot, the Abbé de Mably, put
it in a letter to Dr. Richard Price in 1778, “by striving to prevent imaginary
dangers, they have created real ones." To many Europeans, that the
citizens of United States have devoted so much energy—waging even a Civil
War—against its own central government and fortifying themselves against it
indicates a revolutionary nation in arrested development; a self-contradictory
denial that the government of We the People is of, by, and for us.
The
United States is thoroughly and still vividly ensconced in the original dilemma
of civil society today, whether liberty is best achieved with government or
without it. Conservatives and liberals are each so sure that they are the true
inheritors of the “founding” because they can point to, respectively, the
principles of the First and the Second Foundings to corroborate their account
of history. And they will continue to do so for as long as the sacred texts of
each of the Two Foundings, the Declaration and the Constitution, stand side by
side, seemingly at peace with the other, but in effect in mutual tension.
This
July 4, Americans should not despair that the country seems so fundamentally
divided on issues from healthcare to Iraq. For if to love is divine, to quarrel
is American; and the United States have been having at it for over two centuries.
