Celebrate the Fourth!
Because self-government is worth working for.
With Julia traveling, my plan was to write about the megabill moving through the House today, and then run a short item celebrating the Fourth along with the week’s links on Friday. But as it gets late Wednesday night with no idea where the megabill is headed next, a switch in plans: A longer Fourth post now, and I’ll be back with links at some point later. Only comment on the bill is what I said before: Whatever happens overnight and on Thursday, it’s still the case that the debt limit and tax cut extensions are must-pass, and so it can’t just be defeated and die the way ACA repeal did.
Happy Fourth of July!
My main theme for every 4th is that the United States was founded as a particularly political nation, and so it’s particularly appropriate to celebrate politics on this holiday. Which marks the beginnings of a nation that was thought of – contrary to what the vice-president thinks – as mainly about the idea of politics itself. Or as the man said, it’s a nation “dedicated to the proposition” of self-government.
I have two quotes for you. The first is a thread my Good Politics/Bad Politics colleague David tweeted out Wednesday:1
Little tale of advocacy from my local radio in LA… I was listening to 94.7 in the car this morning (r&b/soul); morning DJ Liz Hernandez does not typically talk politics, she’s much more about relationships and celebrity news. But this morning for whatever reason, she was clearly unhappy about the Big Beautiful Bill, describing it as tax cuts for billionaires and killing PBS and the environment (good messaging, Dems), and got to wondering whether that “call your rep” advice is really useful.
So she decided to try doing it, on air, so that she and listeners can find out what happens. She called the switchboard, went through the automated process to find out what district/rep is hers, got connected to her rep’s very pleasant staffer, Hernandez told the staffer she was calling to ask the rep to vote against the Big Beautiful Bill, and the staffer took her zip code & promised to pass the request on to the rep and Hernandez seemed genuinely impressed and touched at being able to directly voice her opinion and be heard. (She noted that it’s just like calling a radio station to request a song!) She urged others to do it, and said she’ll put the switchboard number on her insta (where she has >200,000 followers btw).
Anyway it’s easy for those way to in it that most people think their govt is very distant and unavailable to them; I always like when people get that feeling of connection/participation. (Even if I know that rep is obv voting against BBB no matter what.)
And the second? From, well:
As President of the United States, I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York. Rest assured, I have all the levers, and have all the cards. I’ll save New York City…
So, look: There are a lot of reasons to establish a republic, rather than an autocracy.2 Democracies tend to be good at lots of things, from economic growth to fighting wars to supporting innovation. They tend to be better at distributing things in ways people think are fair. They tend to try to make all citizens reasonably satisfied with how things are. They are less likely than autocracies to start disappearing people off the streets and sending them to be tortured and abused in detention camps at home or abroad. So much so that, for the latter, we tend to treat the loss of minimal standards of human rights and the rule of law as evidence that a polity is no longer a democracy.
All that and more are true. But the US Founders cared about democracy for another reason: It meant that everyone could partake in “public liberty” and experience “public happiness” – roughly, the idea of participating meaningfully in self-government, and the particular form of meaningfulness derived from that. For them, this was an extremely valuable human experience – valuable for its own sake, and for the feelings it created in those who were lucky enough to so participate.3
Now, I certainly wouldn’t put calling one’s Member of Congress high on the list of meaningful participation. But it’s a first step beyond just-plain voting. and some move from there to, say, organizing phone banks. Just as others move from stuffing envelopes or going door-to-door for a candidate to helping draft a party’s platform. And still others go from attending a protest – as millions did just a couple of weeks ago – to organizing those protests. And at some point, yes, one is “doing” politics, not just registering one’s opinion. With all the bargaining, conflict, cooperation, and just plain involvement that it implies. In a proper republic, that opportunity is truly available to everyone
As the DJ story suggests, it’s no mere facade. Millions of US citizens and other residents really have been able to meaningfully participate in collective public decision-making, whether it’s at a local, state, or national level. To be sure, the option to do nothing more than vote (or not even that) is also available, and millions choose to opt out. And yes, in a huge nation it’s often hard to see how participation, especially at the national level, can be meaningful. And yet? Members of Congress (for example) really are able to make a difference, and they also really do listen to their constituents.
I’m not going to say that threatening to end all of that or at least degrade it significantly is the most important problem with Donald Trump, but I will say we should care about it too. Trump’s NYC claim is very much that of an autocrat; he’s not participating with other citizens as an equal, but (claiming that he will) dictate the result of an election. Of course this is typical of him, going back to his first campaign claim that he alone could fix whatever was wrong with the nation.
The thing is that when you have a fully authoritarian government, the ruler or rulers have a monopoly on doing politics. And before 1776, that was the norm in the world, with brief and usually very imperfect exceptions.
Properly put, the various universities and law firms and media organizations that Trump attempts to strongarm are at risk of no longer being engaged in collective self-government at all. They’re only, perhaps, fending for themselves against the leviathan. If that’s so, even if they win, there’s no public liberty, and no potential public happiness, involved. The more Trump and his allies win, the less the space for public liberty.
We are not at anywhere near full-on autocracy as of now. City councils continue to meet. Water districts and parks authorities continue to hold public meetings and work with ordinary citizens and groups. Congress has atrophied, but it’s not just a rubber stamp. And public input is still potentially meaningful, and mostly allowed unimpeded – albeit not so much as it was last year.
And so let’s celebrate the creation of a public sphere in which a virtually unprecedented number of people were able to meaningfully participate in collective self-government. And to each of the changes since 1776 that forced open politics to more and more people who the original Founders or subsequent anti-democrats excluded from full citizenship. Even when the nation has fallen short, and that’s pretty much always, it’s an aspiration to be proud of, and worth working for.
Have a Happy Fourth, and here’s hoping that the republic looks stronger next year and in the years to come.
I’m using “tweet” and the associated words for all (so-called) microblogging, regardless of platform. Hey, Twitter doesn’t exist, so it seems to me all the stuff from Old Twitter is up for grabs, and the vocabulary works fine.
As always, I use “democracy” and “republic” as synonyms except for a few specialized circumstances, and I suggest you do to.
See for example Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic and Hannah Arendt, On Revolution.