The Long Clasp (Post 2)

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The Idea

Ask a thousand US citizens, or a thousand thousand, to catalogue some of those ideas, and sure to be included on every list will be Freedom and Liberty; on nearly every list in one form or another, the Right to be left alone to do as you please, to worship as you please, to think and speak as you please, and to feel secure from threats of violence and seizure; on perhaps fewer but still many thoughtful lists, the Right to choose your own government.
            Freedom and Liberty, those touchstones of USAmerican self-worth.  What are they, really?  What do they mean?  Are they just different words for the same idea?  “Freedom”, the condition or state of being free, or of being at liberty, comes from Anglo-Saxon-German.  “Liberty” comes from Latin and means the condition or state of being free.
            Although the words are often swapped, their connotations usefully differ slightly.  “Freedom” suggests the inner realm of thought, psyche, conscience, agency; the condition or state of being unconstrained from the exercise of your natural rights.  “Liberty” leans more towards the corporeal realm of movement, compulsion; the condition or state of being unrestrained, unconfined, at large.  This is why one may be imprisoned and still maintain that he is free.  And if the context be false imprisonment or political imprisonment or POW imprisonment, we readily acknowledge such display of inner strength as heroic, asserting in shackles of main force one’s essential dignity.
            So between them, the concepts of Freedom and Liberty pretty well include the other catalogued ideas as specific examples of a larger concept: Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom from interference with your Natural Rights, and so on.  But behind these concepts lies a deeper idea, more profound in the context of social governance, an idea hinted at by the last named item on the imagined list above; namely, the right to choose your own government.
            That hint itself is hugely Great.  To many minds the right to choose your government defines the very premise of Democracy.  Government office-holders chosen by the citizenry; or by an oligarchic Council; or by the accidental entitlement of aristocratic birth; or by force of arms.  Those are the large-basket categories, and the last three pretty much dominate the historical record.  The few examples of the first were generally small-scale and short-lived.
            But the supremely Great idea of the USA, the fundamental sine qua non of the Constitution without which not a word else of that Great document carries any meaning, and which has been, is now, and ever shall be the wonder of the world, so long as this populace holds to its promise, is the idea contained in the first and last phrases of its Preamble, its mission statement:

            The Great daring of these phrases is the collective assertion and covenant that no other authority than they themselves has claim to grant or withhold the right of a People to choose for themselves how they will be governed.  For a right given can be taken away.  The People of the United States of America did not grant themselves the right, and they covenanted that they cannot rescind the right.  They declared with the authority of Free men their inherent agency to come together to decide for themselves.
            Unspoken but inescapable is the corollary, that as for one of the People so for every one.  If not every one of those People has equal claim to that authority, then it follows that some have greater claim—and if some, then perhaps one, and there lies monarchy, tyranny, dictatorship, and slavery.
            Yes, yes, yes! you are correct to object that those Great words did not include women or Negroes or Indians or white men with little property.  Very true.  But more subtly they did not exclude them.  “We the People.”  However “People” is defined by Us, We mean every one of them.  “We acknowledge the right, not grant the right, of every individual one of us to be equal with our own.  No one of us stands apart from others in this regard, for this is an ‘unalienable right’ endowed at birth.”
            Some who signed the Constitution may have thought no further than the present understanding of their time.  Others, with deeper philosophical insight and greater imaginative capacity, may have foreseen that political equality could not persist while restricted to a subset of the whole.  These propertied white men left open the possibility for future generations to ACKNOWLEDGE the political right of other human beings to their essential dignity in this Great country.  And once We acknowledge that right, We also covenant that We cannot rescind it.
            And so it continues to play out.  Negroes, although it took a four-years’ Civil War to stipulate the acknowledgement and a long, long march of assertive protest to claim the prize, are included among the People.  And so for Indians,^[2] women, and unpropertied citizens of nearly any description.  So much so, some might complain, that any damn fool can cast a vote, and almost any damn fool can get elected to public office.