When Jean-Jacque Rousseau sat down to write his influential and controversial “Confessions,”
he unintentionally started two revolutions. On the one hand, the idea of an autobiography was
something new to the literary world, so “[f]or the first time, an author’s intimate emotional life
became the subject of his work” (Puchner 385). At the same time, Rouseau’s book also offered a new
kind of hero to his audience, a hero who was an “isolated but extraordinary individual, unhappy in his
solitude but brave in his resistance to social mores” (385). That last part was especially relevant, as
Rousseau’s themes of revolution and resistance became wildly influential both at home in France as
well as some 3,700 miles away in a blossoming new country.
Rousseau’s strong sense of individuality, in particular,
would ring in the words of the founding fathers of the United States of America
when they penned the Declaration of Independence. Rousseau wrote, “I feel my
heart and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to
believe that I was not made like any that exist” (Rousseau 387). Indeed, the
entire reason the American colonies decided to declare their independence from
England was because the King of England had lost touch with what the colonists
wanted and needed. It inspired them to write that: “whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect
[sic] their Safety and Happiness” (Declaration). Those early American colonists
very much believed, as Rousseau did, that their needs were best served through
self-governance, and thus they threw off the yoke of the far distant English
king.
Rousseau is the product of a good family, including a
hard-working, humble father and a mother whose “beauty, intelligence, and
accomplishments won her many admirers” (Rousseau 388). As such, he grew up as a
thoughtful and caring person who would not think of trampling on the rights of
others for his own purposes. He wrote that the most important gift his family
bequeathed to him “was a tender heart; but to this they owed all their
happiness” (389). Happiness, then, stemmed from being kind and loving, not from
the acquisition of wealth and power, as so many seemed to believe lead to
happiness and contentment.
This
is very much the same kind of person that George Washington was, and similar
values enabled him to win the war of independence from the British (Waldman
64). Washington’s commitment to religious tolerance, as well as keeping church
and state separate led him to chastise his own troops for making fun of
Britain’s Catholicism, writing, “at such a juncture, and in such circumstances,
to be insulting (England’s) religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or
excused” (65). As a result of Washington’s own outspoken stance against
religious intolerance, the Continental Congress sent a letter to (Catholic)
French Canadians, asking them to join the cause of freedom for the colonies,
and their decision to join the fight was an enormous turning point in the war.
Unfortunately, the concept of
religious tolerance and the importance of being tender-hearted have often been
lost over the years. As America has grown from an upstart colony
of Great Britain into
the world’s biggest super power, her leaders have often lost sight of those
all-important principles upon which she was founded. In his bestseller, American
Theocracy, political and economic commentator Kevin Phillips goes so far as
to say that American became a Theocracy under the presidency of George W. Bush
and to call the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 an era of
“disenlightenment” (Phillips 1). Phillips bemoans the death of the Republican
Party, once founded on ideals of small government and conservative spending,
and its transformation into something that sees itself as “a ruling political
party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the
churches” (8). He goes on to note that the modern Republican Party believes
that “government should be guided by religion, and top of it all, White House
implementation of domestic and international agendas that seem to be driven by
religious motivations and biblical worldviews” (9). The problem with that kind
of religious worldview, of course, is that it tends to be extremely judgmental
and looks down on those who disagree. It does not allow for civil discourse and
alienates both Americans and their neighbors in the global community.
The
truth is, the further we get from a worldview similar to that of Rousseau and
George Washington and America’s founding fathers, the further we get from the
vision of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave. That can
be especially dangerous at a time when Americans are spending less and less
time paying attention to their elected officials and to world events as other
distractions reach an all-time high. Reality TV has replaced what used to be
news, and there are now entire networks calling themselves “news channels” that
do little more than promote divisive thinking and spread disinformation instead
of actually reporting the news. More than a few progressive political analysts
from both sides of the ideological aisle foresee this as a growing
problem that could ultimately spell the end of America as the founders intended
it.
In
her book, The End of America, feminist, social critic and political
activist Naomi Wolf warns against complacency and the impact it can have on a
culture’s way of life. She says Americans tend to think of democracy as being
“eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults” (Wolf 25). According
to Wolf, however, the founding fathers would have found it “dangerously naïve,
not to mention lazy, to think of democracy this way” (25). The founders thought
“that it was tyranny that was
eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas
democracy was difficult, personally exacting and vanishingly fragile” (25). The
founders, in Wolf’s view, did not see Americans themselves as special, but
rather saw America as special.
One
of the biggest threats to the peace that Rousseau so valued and the America
that the founding fathers were hoping to build is the radical change in the way
information is disseminated to the American people. For years America had
network news that was presented in an unbiased way, was a public service, in
fact, that was required for stations to use the national air waves. Instead, we
now have news with an agenda, sometimes called “infotainment,” that works to
forward the agenda of its corporate sponsors (119-122). The George W. Bush
administration used such outlets as well as falsified documents to convince
both Congress and the American people that the country should go to war with
Iraq, for example. This tactic of manipulation was eerily similar to tactics
used by Adolf Hitler during the rise of Nazi Germany (126-127).
The
bizarre thing is that all of these tactics have been done in the name of
preserving “freedom,” as George W. Bush constantly put it. Of course, what Bush
was talking about when he evoked the word “freedom” was not always the same for
everyone hearing it. “The progressive and conservative versions are very
different,” writes George Lakoff, a world renowned linguist (Lakoff, Freedom
39). The concept of freedom that is most clearly threatened by the Bush-era
worldview also threatens the way of life espoused by Rousseau and engendered by
America’s founding fathers. It is “the imposition of a dangerous worldview
without public awareness. When free will itself is threatened, that is the
ultimate threat to freedom” (62). The Bush administration would come up with
their own definitions of words that were not necessarily in line with common
understandings and then evoke them as often as possible to get people used to
hearing them and make them feel like they understood them. All the while, the
Bush administration was working behind the scenes to undermine the very freedom
that the founding fathers fought so hard to establish.
When
progressives talk about freedom they refer to a dynamic freedom, the kind of freedom
that has defined America since its founding. These freedoms include “expanding
civil rights, voting rights, property rights, education, science, public
health, workers’ rights, protected parkland,” which includes the infrastructure
that supports those freedoms: “the banking system, court system, transportation
system, communication system, university system, scientific research system,
social services system” (73-74) and other aspects of the common good which is
paid for through taxation and the common wealth. The conservative view of
freedom is based on the nurturing parent model, in which debate is healthy and
the government is commission to care for the needs of its people.
When
members of the neo-conservative movement talk about freedom, they mean
something entirely different. This
worldview is based on the strict father model, in which there is an absolute
right and an absolute wrong and the strict father is morally right and never
questioned. In this view, neoconservatives see the United States “as the moral
authority in the world, and it is its moral duty to maintain its sovereignty
and to use its military end economic power maximize American interests, which
are, in this view, also the interests of other countries” (109). Never mind
that what best serves the interest of this worldview might not be accepted by
other countries, and might not even be in the best interest of the majority of
Americans.
The
neoconservative (anti-Rousseauian) worldview, with its skewed version of
freedom, has begun what political analyst Thom Hartmann calls “an undeclared
war against the middle class” (Hartmann 2). The short-term impact of the neoconservative
approach is already clearly observable. Most worker unions have either been
disbanded or stripped of the powers that made them the defenders of the working
class, minimum wage is no longer a living wage, the inflation-adjusted income
of corporate CEOs went up from $7.8 million in 2002 to $9.6 million from 2002
to 2004, and from 2000 to 2004 the inflation-adjusted median annual household income
went down from $46,058 to $44,389 (3). From 2001 to 2005 America lost 2.8
million manufacturing jobs, the number of employers offering a full pension
dropped from 91 percent to 67 percent and off of employer-provided health care
(4). The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle
class is struggling to avoid falling into the latter category.
Possibly
the biggest issue threatening America’s democracy, and with it the vast
majority of Americans, is the failing definition of democracy itself. Democracy
“is found among virtually
among all the
indigenous peoples of the world,” and “is the way humans have lived for more
than 150,000 years” (Hartmann 5). “There are no rich and no poor among most tribal
people,” and the European insistence on creating a hierarchy among the Native
Americans made it very difficult for those newcomers to understand their hosts
(6). Yet the democracies already in place among the native tribes very much informed
the way in which America’s Founding Fathers framed the Constitution (6). The
Founders believed in the individual’s right to self-government, and thus
created a form of government in which We the People had the ultimate say.
America’s
form of government is no longer a true democracy, and opinions vary on what,
exactly, America’s political system really is now. Hartmann makes a strong case
that America is now a feudal aristocracy (10), where the elite rule.
Unfortunately, without a thriving middle class, a democracy cannot exist for
long, and becomes “caricature of itself. There are leaders and elections and
all the forms, but they’re only for show. The game is now rigged” (10). The rich don’t want a democracy because what’s
best for everyone does not involve the vast majority of the nation’s wealth
resting in the hands of a small elite class at the top. A democracy will, by
its very nature, strive against such a phenomenon, so the ruling class must
constantly work to subdue and destroy democratic processes at every turn. In
particular, they are opposed to free and public education, limits on the monopolistic
ownership of media outlets, and social security and universal health care.
Policies like these produce a strong middle class, which will constantly work
towards a stronger and stronger democracy (11). The ruling elite can’t let that
happen if they want to hang onto their ever-growing wealth.
There
is a solution, thankfully. There is a way that Americans can reclaim the kind
of democracy that those founding fathers established, one that is in line with
Rousseau’s way of thinking. It is even a way that is compatible with both
Democratic and Republican ways of thinking. “Progressive may see this as an
‘American awakening,’ as a liberation or, at the least, as a campaign, while
conservatives may see the same movement as ‘conservative’ in the truest sense –
a return to the stewardship of the Founders’ vision” (Wolf 152). Americans must
take advantage of a community that is becoming more global by the minute, using
the internet, social media and grassroots movements to “truly encounter their
counterparts across the political spectrum and learn to talk to each other once
again directly, as neighbors, interlocutors and fellow patriots” (153). In
other words, it’s time to stop listening to talking points and 30-second sound
bites purporting to cover an entire issue and start talking to each other as
human beings with the same needs, desires and dreams.
An
amazing film written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Michael Douglas as the President
of the United States sums up America’s democracy dilemma as well as anything
possibly could. In a speech that was the climax of the movie, President Andrew
Shepherd (Douglas) says the following:
“America
isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's
gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say "You want free speech? Let's see you
acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage
and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime
opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the
free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has
to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.
Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can
stand up and sing about the ‘land of the free’.”
Democracy is an idea as
much as it is a system of government. It does not exist in a vacuum and it does
not grow organically unless the soil in which is it planted is constantly
cultivated. Greed is a weed that threatens the very survival of democracy,
whether that greed manifests itself in the form of a love of money or power. The
acquisition of wealth and power subverts the very nature of democracy, and in
turn subverts what is best for the welfare of the people within a culture. Only
though the diligent defense of democracy, which starts with an educated and
alert population, can a culture fight hope off the weeds of greed and power
mongering and restore the kind of society that Jean-Jacque Rousseau and America’s
Founding Fathers would endorse and expect to thrive.
Works
Cited
The American
President.
Dir. Rob Reiner. Prod. Rob Reiner. By Aaron Sorkin. Perf. Michael Douglas,
Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, and Michael J. Fox. Columbia Pictures, 1995.
Film.
The Declaration
of Independence.
Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992. Print.
Hartmann, Thom. Screwed:
The Undeclared War against the Middle Class--and What We Can Do about It.
San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006. Print.
Lakoff, George. Don't
Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential
Guide for Progressives. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2004.
Print.
Lakoff, George. Whose
Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.
Phillips, Kevin.
American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and
Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. New York: Viking, 2006. Print.
Puchner, Martin. The Norton
Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton,
2013. Print.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.
“Confessions." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed.
Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 381-401. Print.
Waldman, Steven. Founding
Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New
Approach to Religious Liberty. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2009. Print.
Approach to Religious Liberty. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2009. Print.
Wolf, Naomi. The End
of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. White River Junction, VT:
Chelsea Green Pub., 2007. Print.
