The Significance of Independence: 1776 and Now

The 4th of July is traditionally a celebration of American freedom, and quite rightly so.  The Declaration of Independence proclaims our “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”   In times of war, the first Independence Day has also reminded us of the courage of the first generation of United States citizens, who dared to stand against Britain, the greatest military power on earth in 1776.  Today, as our clunky political system coughs and sputters, Americans should consider the broader significance of “independence” and what it meant to the founding generation.

The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a formal message to the world justifying a colonial rebellion and a birth announcement for the confederation of thirteen new states.  But the idea of “independence” was loaded with far greater meaning beyond a straightforward proclamation of the American separation from Britain.

“Independence” for the founding generation was a political ideal.  Only someone who was “independent” was worthy of full citizenship.  Obviously slaves could not be citizens, because their status was the opposite of independent.  But even wage earners, without real estate, could not be trusted with the power of electing a government.  While today this sounds like an extreme view, the founders believed that as long as someone was dependent on someone else for his livelihood, his dependence made  him subject to the whims and interests of his employer. The ideal citizen was a yeoman farmer, who produced much of what he consumed and owned land, and thus had a tangible stake in the society in which he lived.  Mere employees were untrustworthy when it came to the exercise of the independent judgment necessary for the election of representatives in government.  For the first couple of generations of American citizens, minimum property requirements were prerequisites for the right to vote.

When it came to drafting state and the federal constitutions, issues of “dependence” and “independence” were very much on the minds of the founders.  Of course they did not wish to create a government independent  of  the people, because that would be a tyranny, which is what they had been fighting against.  However they wanted their legislators, like the idealized yeoman farmer, to exercise independent political judgment.  They aimed to achieve a tricky balance.  On the one hand they built a republican form of government that necessarily represented a self-interested electorate, but on the other hand, they tried to configure their political system – through a variety of checks and balances – so that legislators would serve the geographically broad and chronologically long-term interests of the entire nation, or in other words, the common good.

In 2010 the founders’ wished-for balance between dependence and independence in its elected representatives is hopelessly out of whack.  Incentives for legislative independence are nowhere to be found.   Dependence, by contrast, drives our entire political system.  Career politicians, who are dependent on perpetual reelections for their livelihoods, are motivated by short-term election cycles.  To fuel their usual and almost perpetual reelections, they have become dependent on special interests for campaign cash, a process that hopelessly biases independent judgment, corrupts legislation, and usually makes it impossible to pry an incumbent from office.  The desire for reelection after reelection also makes legislators dependent on the narrow constituencies that comprise their home districts, which goes against the founding fathers’ desire that they be independent enough to serve the overarching interests of the whole country.  To stress the importance the generation of 1776 placed on political independence, they often preferred to call members of various congresses and legislatures “delegates” rather than “representatives.”

Americans today, even if they are not intimately familiar with the vision of America’s founding fathers, sense that something has gone wrong with their democracy.  In the 1990s, in an attempt to undermine political careerism, they responded with the term-limits movement.  One purpose behind term limits is to weaken the motivation for reelections, and thereby make legislators more independent of special interests.  Although led by the Right, term limits enjoyed substantial support from the Left side of the political spectrum as well.  The term-limits movement suffered a body blow when the US Supreme Court ruled state-imposed term limits on members of Congress unconstitutional.  (US Term Limits, the groups that led the campaign in the 1990s and defended state-imposed Congressional term limits before the Supreme Court, lives on at http://www.termlimits.org/index.asp .)

Alternatively, today various progressive groups are pushing for public campaign financing, or “clean election” laws, in part to make members of Congress more independent.  Public campaign financing would powerfully undermine political dependency on special interests.  Conservatives, for their part, have too often viewed public campaign finance as just another government program, or worse. Unfortunately this simple-minded critique fails to consider how such clean-election laws could help restore the judicious and somewhat independent spirit the founders sought to infuse into the legislative branch of the American political system.  Public campaign finance should be a Tea Party issue, as well as Coffee Party and MoveOn.org issue.  (For more about the principle group fighting for clean elections, see http://www.youstreet.org/.)

Tom Brokaw famously called the World War II generation “the greatest generation.”   With all due respect to the heroes of the 20th Century, the generation of 1776 comprises the real giants of American history.  They summoned the courage to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on principles alone.  Out of nothing but audacity and intellect they gave birth to a new political order the likes of which the world had never seen.  Now, in the 21^st Century, the political edifice created by the founders groans under the weight of circumstances they could not foresee.  But in a way, they foresaw the unforeseen too, because they equipped us with the democratic mechanisms to change the system so that we can maintain a government worthy of a free people in today’s world.  The challenges we face are tiny compared to those of 1776.  What we need now is just a small measure of their wisdom and courage.   With it, we can recalibrate our political system so that our representatives can be separated from the narrow interests on which they have become overly dependent, and thus declare the independent vision of the founding generation restored.