Let’s throw this out there before going any further. The 2024 election is the craziest election since 1968. And as of this writing there are still 78 days until election day.
In 1968, we saw an incumbent president announce that he wouldn’t seek re-election, his vice president succeeded him as the standard bearer of his party, the nominee of the other major party was perceived to possess the morality of a used car salesman, and the undercurrent of violence was manifested in two political assassinations that altered the trajectory of the election. Oh, and there was a third-party nut job that threatened to skew the election in favor of one of the candidates.
The Republican candidate, ultimately elected to the presidency in 1968, would eventually resign before the end of his second term in order to avoid being convicted by a Senate impeachment trial for high crimes and misdemeanors. Fearing that he could be criminally prosecuted for acts while president, he accepted a “full, complete pardon” granted by his successor.
And aside from roiling domestic issues, the issue that most impacted the 1968 election was the war in Vietnam.
In 2024, we have an incumbent president who announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election, his vice president will succeeded him as the standard bearer of his party, the nominee of the other major party is perceived to possess the morality of a feral honey badger, and the undercurrent of violence has manifested in an attempted political assassination that to some measure impacted the trajectory of the election.
Oh, and there is a third-party nut job who threatens to skew the election in favor of one of the candidates.
The Republican candidate has been convicted of 34 felony counts, found liable for various civil matters, and is subject the criminal charges in two (possibly three) jurisdictions. He is clearly running for the White House in order to avoid the Big House.
The 2024 election is dealing with many of the same roiling domestic issues as in 1968, with a side issue of the fate of our democracy, all against the backdrop of two wars with which we’re indirectly involved. Not to mention the specter of violence lingering from 2021’s attempted overthrow of a free and fair election.
In some ways, from 1968 to 2024, we’ve gone from bad to worse. Perhaps the one shining light between the two elections is that this year, for the first time in our history, a black woman is the nominee of our oldest political party.
Violence pervaded the 1968 election. Dr. King and RFK were assassinated. There was the civil disturbance at the Chicago convention. And we saw the rise of disenfranchised people responding to the unaddressed issues in this country, and to what was perhaps the most unpopular war in American history.
In his speech entitled the “Other America” delivered in March 1968, Martin Luther King said:
“And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about injustice and humanity.”
If there is one passage that sums up the political divide of 1968, it is this passage delivered in a speech roughly two weeks before King was killed by an assassin’s bullet.
The politics of the mid to late 1960s pitted those who sought to recognize the rights of those most marginalized in our society against those who who sought to preserve the status quo. It was a political and cultural conflict between those who challenged cultural and social norms and those who defended those norms.
And finally, it was a contest between those who practiced the politics of resistance, protest and activism against those who defended traditional norms and rejected a more activist politics.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a time for choosing which side you were on. Many of us tried to work within the system to affect what we saw was necessary change and when the system became unresponsive work outside of the established system. Others actively defended the existing system, sometimes employing the powers at their disposal to silent dissent.
To put it more succinctly, the political conflicts of that time centered on what it meant to be an American.
To varying degrees, the presidential contest of 2024 centers on many of the same issues – racial and economic justice; wealth inequality; the recognition and protection of equal rights; a new transformation of the means and methods of political discourse and completion; and over what the international role the United States should be.
But in this election year, the underlying conflict does not center on what it means to be an American but whether there will still be a United States, at least one we’d recognize at 12:01p.m. on January 20, 2025.
If the United States is transformed into something unrecognizable, from an imperfect democracy to an unimaginable authoritarian society, it will be because we as a people, individually and collectively, have lost our way.
Every Fourth of July, we celebrate our independence, and there’s a lot to celebrate. We are the world’s oldest democracy. Each year we celebrate by watching parades, going to cookouts, catching a ballgame, watching or setting off fireworks. We wave the flag and a few of us either read or catch a public recitation of the Declaration of Independence.
Some of us may even be able to recite the history that resulted in the the Declaration’s creation, and some may even be able to recite portions of the document. But when all is said and done, do we really understand the meaning of the Declaration or of the philosophy on which it’s based?
Probably not. But don’t feel bad, for over the past thirty or so years public education in general has done a poor job of teaching the meaning of the Declaration and civics in general. There are myriad reasons why this is so.
But if there’s a time in our 248-year history since the Declaration’s publication that we should think about and embrace its core meaning and values, it is this year. At no other time in our history have we been confronted with an internal organized effort to replace our liberal democracy with a decidedly more authoritarian political system.
And make no mistake, this is not an anti-Trump or anti-MAGA screed. When the history of these times is written, Trump will have been described as what Lenin called a useful idiot, advancing an ideology about which he neither knows about nor cares.
Rather it is those who prop him up, seeing him as a vehicle for them to attain power and create the authoritarian state. If you question the merit of this statement do me – and yourself – a favor; read the Project 2025 report published by the Heritage Foundation. It is 922 pages of mind-numbing detail, describing what the next “conservative” administration should do.
In short, this is like Mein Kampf 2025 translated from the original German to English. And this is the tip of a much larger iceberg hiding from view below the surface.
To combat this lethal threat to our democratic society, we need to visit or revisit the basis of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence. We need to embrace these ideals and defend them against all who would destroy them.
What follows is a brief discussion of underlying basis of the Declaration. First, perhaps the best known passage of the document:
“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…”
[Note: before we start, what follows is what the authors and ratifiers understood the terms contained in the Declaration to be. We know this from their thoughts as contained in their journals, letters, and public statements both before, during and after the signing of the Declaration.]
First, self evident truths. The above passage is based on natural law theory straight out of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Locke believed that through observation and experience, people, through the use of reason, could discern the laws of nature. It is through that process that self evident truths can be discerned.
Second, all men are created equal. In many respects this might be the most misunderstood truth in the entire Declaration. The use of “men” is not gender specific, rather it refers to the species of Homo Sapiens. That being the case, it includes men and women. Moreover, it is not limited to one race but includes all races.
The authors and signatories understood that all humans are not equal regarding individual attributes. Some are more intelligent, some more dexterous, some have mechanical aptitudes while others might be musical prodigies. Individual attributes were recognized and respected.
By way of example, I could have played center field for the Red Sox except that I was too short, too slow, and was a sucker for high inside fastballs. So, I had to utilize my less athletic attributes.
But make no mistake equality drives what comes next.
Third, “their Creator.” Ok, this is the “god” reference, except that it isn’t the god that immediately comes to our modern minds. This is not the god of the Bible or the Koran or the Torah. In fact, Locke, and later Jefferson, deliberately refrained from any hint of a denominational god. Locke, Jefferson, and most other politicians and even clergy were content to refer to “nature’s creator.”
Keep in mind that by the 1770s there were numerous denominations of Christianity. There were there were those who were deists (e.g. Jefferson). Others were atheists. Others were Jews.
Any attribution of “god” to any one denomination would create an imbalance in the self-evident truth that all men were created equal. The assignation of a Christian God is a modern construct, too often employed by some to advance and impose a narrow religiously based political agenda on others.
The founders of the mid 1700s to at least the 1830s would not recognize the creation of nature attributed to a specific denominational god.
Fourth, “certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” While this appears as a three-pronged list of rights, they are actually linked together in a unified whole. Life is easy. It is beyond dispute that each of us has a right to preserve, protect and advance our own lives. If anything is self evident, it is this truth.
Linked to the above is our liberty to preserve, protect and advance our lives as we see fit. It is the liberty to have autonomy over our lives. We have the liberty to read what we want, speak as we think we must, set the direction of our lives, and to have the autonomy to decide how we are to make our most deeply held personal decisions in the areas of health care, educational/vocational directions, where we reside, to whom we marry if we marry at all, and other decisions that we too often take for granted – until someone or the government tries to say we can’t.
According to Locke, we have the absolute liberty to peruse our lives in any way we want, so long as the exercise of our liberty interests doesn’t interfere with the free exercise of someone else’s liberty interests.
Jefferson wrote “pursuit of happiness” while Locke wrote “property.” They are synonymous. This pursuit of happiness is truly the acquisition of property, whether it be be real, tangible or intangible. It could be land to farm, or a trade perfected, or an education/apprenticeship completed to provide services to the community for a fee. The unfettered liberty to pursue these goals will enable us to live and enjoy more productive, comfortable and secure lives.
Fifth, “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” This is central to natural rights theory. Governments do not bestow rights, they protect rights. Time and again in the writings of the founders it is made clear that individual rights are not granted by a sovereign, they already were provided by nature’s Creator.
Therefore, if a sovereign or a government cannot bestow rights, they certainly cannot limit or revoke our rights.
Thus, the government is instituted and granted its powers from the consent of the governed. The central role of a government is to ensure the protection of the extant rights of the citizens. Government is a creature of the governed, not an independent entity able to impose its will on the people.
The above points form the basis of our democracy. The people, acting from both their ability to reason and an understanding of their self interest, decide, either directly or through elected officials, what powers a government has in order to act in the people’s interests. This popular consent need not be unanimous as long as decisions can be revisited as conditions change over time.
We’ve forgotten that in this system the people hold the power. But unfortunately, we’ve relinquished that power incrementally over the years. Now we’re at the point where there are people who are all too willing to take the rest of the people’s power.
Democracy is a messy system. In a pluralistic complex society, seemingly simple issues become complex. Each of us, directly or indirectly, can have our say on any issue before us. Often passions are stirred, voices are raised, feelings are hurt. In a democratic system, what must be a collaborative process too often is seen as a zero-sum game.
There are those who would have us believe that there’s a way to make governing less messy. Instead of everyone having the power to participate and decide, and yes, to veto the choices others would make, why not elect a group of likeminded people making those nettlesome, messy decisions on behalf of all of us?
And if we agree to that, these folks will likely suggest streamlining the decision-making process by placing most of the governmental power and authority in one branch of government. For example, the unitary theory of the executive, as suggested by Project 2025, would place the awesome powers possessed by one branch of government into the hands of a single person – in this case the president.
If that were to happen, it would not take long before popular dissent is no longer heard or tolerated.
And if one of the newly concentrated powers is to support the “family,” who could argue with that? Under Project 2025, the government could decide what families would look like, who could marry and who couldn’t, what rights individuals in the LDBTQ+ community would or would not have, and whether to deny an individual’s liberty interest to seek appropriate care for a medical condition.
The individual’s personhood would happily be honored and protected as long as they’re the right kind of person.
This concentration of power would end our pluralistic society, would punish those who protest against the new regime, and would determine what we can read and what our kids can learn. Indeed, this new “power” would diminish if not extinguish our right to think.
Don’t think this could happen? Go to Florida or Oklahoma to see what kind of history is being taught to kids in their public institutions. Go to Louisiana and see the Ten Commandments being foisted upon students in the public schools irrespective of the students’ beliefs or non-beliefs.
So much has been made of the consequences of the enactment of Project 2025 that we lose sight of what is actually happening right now.
The year 2024 is a time for choosing. It is not hyperbole to say that this is to most consequential election in our lifetimes. At stake is the continuation of a political governmental process, often frustrating and messy, that attempts in its bumbling way to act in the public interest. Will we continue a process where the rights of all are respected? Or will we succumb to the allure of the strongmen purportedly doing what’s “best” for us?
I’m optimistic that no matter what political disagreements we have with one another, or whatever political party we affiliate with, if we remember that what’s at stake is our freedom to have these disagreements, then the vast majority of us will vote to vindicate the rights of each of us as individuals.
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