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"Power Concedes Nothing without a Demand..."
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Frederick Douglass, 1857
I have been thinking--and talking with some of you--about what we ought to be focusing on as the rest of the blogosphere takes off after the presidential race over the next few months. Of course, we still have the same concerns we had back in 2004, when we began this blog and the journey to do whatever we could to restore democracy: voting concerns, media reform, and occasionally, healthcare, torture, free speech, etc.
But while I know the issue of the extraordinary powers of the executive under Bush has been discussed all over the blogosphere, (48,500 hits on Google, for one), I am still not clear on what we can or should be doing about it.
I have had a suspicion that the Democrats in Congress (some of them, anyway) want those powers for themselves and will not address them if and when one of them makes it into office. I would like to think that a few of them feel differently about that, and are willing to cede back to the people those certain inalienable rights. And I am not talking 'bout guns either.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: what does that mean, operationally?
If we think about the Declaration of Independence as a vision statement, or even a mission statement, it becomes clear we have drifted. Read through and see what you think:
The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.
He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing taxes on us without our consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. 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.
New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
Source: The Pennsylvania Packet, July 8, 1776
*****
Here are my questions:
1. What are the operational meanings of those "inalienable rights"?
2. What does "inalienable" mean?
3. From which of those rights have we drifted furthest away?
4. What do we need to do to get them back? (We, the PEOPLE...)
5. Which candidates will pledge to make sure the rights of a democratic people are returned to those people?
6. How can we assure that that will happen?
7. Is this a worthy topic for discussing over the next eight-ten months?
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This Frederick Douglass quote has always made complete sense to me, and I know I've seen it in hundreds of different contexts.
It has always raised questions in my mind about why people accept the world the way it is, rather than working to change things. Struggling to wrest power away from the powerful is hard and often dangerous work. In most social revolutions, people have died before the change went through. In a rich culture like ours, it appears to be very difficult for people to consider risking what they have (isn't this the best of all possible worlds here in the exceptional United States?) to take on any of the grotesque inequities that stare us in the face every day, like the homeless people living on the grates across the street in DC from the State Department. Or the less visible 45 million people without health care. Etc.
We look to leaders to inspire us, to show us courage in action. That's why the failure of Rep. John Conyers to start impeachment proceedings is so dismaying. I thought he was an old lion, but he hasn't even been willing to roar, much less take a big bite out of Bush's ever-juicier list of assaults on our no-longer "inalienable rights."
This refers also to the thread below on torture -
Arianna Huffington writes about how John McCain, former POW who was TORTURED - is selling his soul in order to try to become President. He has been an opponent of torture but not he is GOING SOFT ON TORTURE.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/john-mccain-sells-his-sou_b_86700.html
There is this persistent dissonance throughout American history - a dissonance heard through the clash between the statement of universal human rights set out in the Declaration, and the actions of imperfect Americans throughout the centuries, as reflected through various attempts to use statute and even the constitution itself to deny those rights.
Historians often pose this question: When did the American Revolution end? For some, like Joseph Ellis and Peter Mancall, it ended in 1801, with Jefferson's election as President, and the first peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another. Other historians argue, and this is my bias, that the American Revolution is not yet over - and will not truly be over until the ideals encapsulated in the Declaration are more fully realized. Certainly the woman who gathered in Seneca Falls held this view, and used many of the words of the Declaration to stake their claim. Abraham Lincoln best argued this case, in the 236 words of the Gettysburg Address.
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Karen,
There's not a choice in it being worthy of discussion or if anyone is willing to work on it.
After the primaries, people will get seriously involved in the election. Even now, people are seriously involved in the primaries because they feel the candidates need to stand up and speak clearly about what they will do with the executive power and how they will read 'inalienable rights.'
We must keep pushing for clarity. I call hillary's office as often as I remember. And I email the obama campaign the same way.
Of course each person or party defines 'inalienable rights' differently and our constitution is by nature a tightrope between 'freedom' (individual rights) and the common good.
But as we continue discussing things at the DCP, we find various ways to keep pushing an agenda out there:
1 to 1,
LTE's
YouTube
MySpace
Facebook
Political Blogs
Candidate blogs
We need to keep our eyes and ears open for new ways to communicate. We need to keep pushing books out there. We need to create more songs and encourage our radio stations to talk about these matters and play those songs.
We also have more progressive radio so we need to buy from those advertisers to make them more profitable so that they stay in the air.
Those are my suggestions.