America at 250 is in danger of becoming just another country

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With less than a year to go until the United States of America’s 250th birthday, it is worth standing back and looking with awe at those years. The U.S. did not just become the richest, strongest, and freest country on Earth. It did so while remaining a stable constitutional democracy for 2 1/2 centuries, with only one interruption. The only other republic that comes close is Switzerland.

What is the U.S.’s secret? Is it the principles contained in the declaration? The ingenious checks and balances written into the Constitution? The character of the people?

As in a three-legged stool, each is necessary. Constitutions are worthless unless there is a cultural predisposition to freedom under the law. Most Latin American countries became independent a generation or two after the U.S. and adopted variants of its Constitution, consciously copying what they already saw as a successful model. Yet they went on to lurch from autocracy to revolution and back again.

In the years that the U.S. has had just one constitution, they have burned through more than 200. That difference alone explains why no Latin American leader has ever had to propose a wall to keep yanqui migrants out.

The words and phrases of a constitution, on their own, guarantee nothing. Read the old constitutions of, say, East Germany or the USSR and you will find all manner of lofty promises: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship. As the inhabitants of those unhappy dictatorships understood, paper rights are meaningless without enforcement mechanisms.

The American enforcement mechanism is only partly contained in the documents themselves, in the separation of powers and the guarantee of states’ rights. Just as important is the hold that the idea of constitutional liberty has over the general population.

President Calvin Coolidge got to the heart of it 100 years ago as the sesquicentennial anniversary approached:

“Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”

There is a reason that those two great charters hang in the National Archives next to the third document, the actual Great Charter, Magna Carta, all three tended to like holy relics.

The U.S., being a creedal rather than an ethnic nation, is an exercise in collective imagination. The bits of green paper it calls currency have value because we treat them as valuable. Its laws have force because we agree that they do.

If Americans were to treat the Constitution as contingent, useful only insofar as it delivered outcomes that they liked, then the U.S. would become, well, Latin American.

Elevating process over outcome is difficult. Why accept an election result when you regard the winners as a bunch of clowns? Why obey laws that you think are oppressive? The answer, that insisting on getting your way all the time ends in tyranny, does not come easily.

In recent years, American politicians have started to look a lot more Latin American, with their calls to lock up opponents, their recourse to lawfare, their territorial demands on neighbors, and, indeed, their economic protectionism. That tendency represents a reversion to the mean, a sinking back into what passes as normal in other countries.

To put it another way, the principles of the declaration need to be taught all over again to each generation. Pause the lessons and we will quickly sink into the all-or-nothing tribal authoritarianism for which our DNA designs us.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY FROM A BRIT IN AMERICA

Which is why the next 12 months matter so much. The committees involved with the commemoration, especially its educational aspects, have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to teach people that they are American, not for reasons of blood or soil, but because some spidery script on a desiccated parchment turned a theory of freedom into a nation and planted that nation’s flag on the moon. Today’s Americans have a repairing lease on that inheritance, a duty to pass on what came to them. And what Frederick Douglass called “the ringbolt” of their inheritance is the declaration.

The next 12 months are an opportunity to remind Americans that their political institutions were created to serve the founding documents, not the documents to legitimize the institutions. Officeholders swear loyalty to the Constitution, not citizens to their leaders. Politicians are servants, not rulers. Achieve all this in President Donald Trump’s second year, and the anniversary celebrations will have done the state some service.

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