And so it goes with the victories of the second half of the twentieth century. In Jeff Sessions, for instance, we have a potential attorney general staunchly opposed to the civil and voting rights won by African Americans (and women of all races, in the case of the 1964 Civil Rights Act). In Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, we'll have a climate-change denier and fossil-fuel advocate running the Environmental Protection Agency.
Medicare entitles -- there's that word again -- older people and some with chronic illnesses to federally subsidized healthcare. Its introduction in 1965 ended the once-common newspaper and TV stories about senior citizens eating pet food because they couldn't afford both medicine and groceries. That program, too, will reportedly be under threat.
There's more to defend. Take widespread access to birth control, now covered by health insurance under Obamacare. I'm old enough to remember having to pretend I was married to get a doctor to prescribe The Pill, and being grateful for the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that guaranteed me a legal abortion, when a gynecologist told me I couldn't conceive. (He was wrong.) Then there are the guarantees of civil rights for LGB (if not yet T) people won in the 1990s, culminating in the astonishing 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges granting marriage rights to same-sex couples. All of this could be wiped out with a couple of Trumpian Supreme Court picks.
Nor should we forget that in addition to people's rights, there are actual people to defend in the brave new world of Trumplandia, or at least to help defend themselves: immigrants, Muslims, African Americans -- especially young black men -- as well as people facing poverty and homelessness.
One potentially unexpected benefit of the coming period: so many of us are likely to be under attack in one way or another that we will recognize the need for broad-based coalitions, working at every level of society and throughout its institutions. Such groups already exist, some more developed than others. I'm thinking, for example, of United for Peace and Justice, which came together to oppose Bush-era wars and domestic policies, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, a national coalition of community organizations led by people of color, and National People's Action, another effective coalition of community organizations, to name just three. On the state level, there is the powerful work of the Moral Mondays project, led by the North Carolina NAACP and its president, the Reverend William J. Barber II. In my own backyard, there are the many community groups that make up San Francisco Rising and Oakland Rising.
Such multi-issue organizations can be sources of solidarity for people and groups focused on important single issues, from the Fight for Fifteen (dollars an hour minimum wage) to opposing the bizarrely-named First Amendment Defense Act, which would protect the right of proprietors of public accommodations to refuse service to people whose presence in their establishments violates "a religious belief or moral conviction that: (1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage."
Defense Matters, But We Need More
As important as such defensive actions will be, we're going to need something beyond a good defense: a coherent reason why all these disparate things are worth defending. We need to be able to say why black lives, women's lives, workers' lives, brown and immigrant lives matter in the first place. We need a vision of a society in which not only do all people's lives matter, but where they all have the possibility of being good lives. We need a picture of what a country is for, so that as we fight, we understand not only the horrors we oppose, but what it is we desire.
Fortunately, we don't have to start any description of what a good human life consists of from scratch. People have been discussing the subject for at least as long as they've left written records, and probably far longer. In the third century BCE, for example, Aristotle proposed that the good life -- happiness -- consists of developing and using both our intellectual and moral capacities to the fullest possible extent across an entire lifetime. The good life meant learning and then practicing wisdom, courage, justice, and generosity -- along with some lesser virtues, like being entertaining at a dinner party.
Aristotle wasn't an idiot, however. He also knew that people need the basics of survival -- food, clothing, shelter, health, and friendship -- if they are to be happy. Not surprisingly, he had a distinctly limited idea about which human beings could actually achieve such happiness. It boiled down to men of wealth who had the leisure to develop their abilities. His understanding of the good life left a lot of people, including women, slaves, and children, out of the circle of the fully human.
Although it may sound strange to twenty-first-century American ears, Aristotle also thought that the purpose of government was to help people (at least those he thought were capable of it) to live happy lives, in part by making laws that would guide them into developing the capacities crucial to that state.
Who nowadays thinks that happiness is the government's business? Perhaps more of us should. After all, the Founding Fathers did.
"We Hold These Truths..."
Where should we who seek to defend our country against the advance of what some are now going so far as to call "fascism" enter this conversation about the purpose of government? It might make sense to take a look at a single sentence written by a group of white men, among them slaveholders, who also thought happiness was the government's business. I'm referring, of course, to the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Its much-quoted second sentence reads in full:
"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, -- 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 their Safety and Happiness."
Political philosopher Danielle Allen has pointed out that modern versions of the Declaration's text "update" the original punctuation with a period after "happiness." But that full stop obscures the whole point of the sentence. Not only do people self-evidently possess "unalienable" rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the very reason we form governments in the first place is to "secure" those rights. Furthermore, when a government -- rather than protecting life, liberty, and happiness -- "becomes destructive" of them, we have the right to abolish it and put a better one in its place, always keeping in mind that the purpose of any new government should be to "effect" the people's safety and happiness.
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