Of course, beginning any conversation with those words from the Declaration raises the obvious question: "Who's 'we'?" Can those of us who are women, people of color, descendants of slaves and/or slaveholders, all claim participation in that "we"? Should we want to? Allen, who describes herself as biracial and a feminist, addresses the contradictions inherent in claiming this document for our own in her valuable book Our Declaration. She concludes that we not only can, we must. There is too much at stake for us to cede equality to a white, male minority.
Life, Liberty...
What would it mean to take seriously the idea that people create governments so they can enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? What would the United States look like if that were its purpose?
Let's start with life. It's reasonable to think that the Declaration's authors were following the ideas of another dead white man, John Locke, who believed that people create governments so that they don't have to spend all their time and energy preventing other people from hurting them, or taking revenge when they've been hurt. Instead, people delegate this authority to governments.
But what has the U.S. government done with those delegated powers?
Over the last 15 years of what we still call the "war on terror," Americans have been told repeatedly that we have to choose between life and liberty, between "security" and freedom. We can't have both. Do we want to be safe from terrorists? Then we must allow mass collection of our telephone and Internet-use data. And we must create a registry of Muslims living in this country. Do we want to be safe on our streets? Then we must allow federal and state governments to keep 2.2 million people locked up and another 4.5 million on probation or parole. Ours is the largest prison population in the world, in raw numbers and in proportion to our population. Safety on the street, we're told, also demands an increase in the amount of daily video surveillance Americans experience. And that's just to start down a long list of the ways our liberties have been curtailed in these years.
At the same time, successive Congresses and administrations have cut the programs that once helped sustain life in this country. Now, with the threatened repeal of Obamacare (and so the potential loss of medical insurance for at least 20 million Americans), the Republicans may literally cut off the lives of people who depend on that program for treatments that help them survive.
The preamble of the Constitution also establishes the importance of life, liberty, and happiness, with slightly different language. In it, "We the people" establish that Constitution for the following purposes:
"to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity""
Is it possible that our common "defence" is not, in fact, aided by maintaining the world's most powerful military, garrisoning the planet, and endlessly projecting power across the globe? After all, the United States is protected by an ocean off each coast and friendly countries on our northern and southern borders (although we may not always deal with them as friends should be treated). Certainly, I want my government to defend me from invading armies; on the other hand, I'm not convinced my safety is increased when the United States does the invading.
It's useful, too, as we think about the purpose of government, to consider the idea of the "general Welfare." This phrase implies something important: my welfare, my good life, is bound up with yours. The people established the Constitution to promote the welfare of all of us, and not of a tiny, mega-rich minority, which is now running our government. We could do worse than reclaim the importance of the general welfare, with its suggestion that it is the primary business of any decent government to promote our wellbeing.
...And the Pursuit of Happiness
Surely the definition of the good life, of happiness itself, is such a personal thing that it can't be the subject of legislation or the object of government. Perhaps that's true, but I'd like to introduce one more thinker here, also white, and, sadly, deceased: the political philosopher Iris Marion Young. In her Justice and the Politics of Difference, she offered a definition of a good human life. We can say, she argued, that a society is more or less a just one depending on the degree to which it satisfies basic physical needs, and equally importantly (as Aristotle also believed), "supports the institutional conditions necessary" for people to participate in self-development. To her, that means "learning and using satisfying and expansive skills," as well as the expression of "our experience, feelings, and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen." But self-development and expression, she says, are not sufficient for a good life. We also need self-determination -- that is, participation in the decisions that affect our lives and how we live them.
We have much to defend, but we also should have a vision to advance. As we fight against a secretary of education who abhors public schools, we should also be fighting for the right of all of us to develop and use those "expansive and satisfying skills" -- from reading and writing to creating and doing -- that make life worth living. In a society with less and less demand for non-robotic workers, education will be more important than ever, not just so people can earn their livings, but also so that their lives are valuable and valued.
As we fight against an administration of generals and billionaires, we should also be fighting for a country where we are free to express ourselves in language, dress, song, and ritual, without fear of finding ourselves on a registry or all our communications in the files of a spy agency. As we fight against a president elected by a minority of voters, we fight for a country in which we can take part in the decisions that affect all aspects of our lives.
For many years I've opposed most of what my country stands for in the world. As a result, I often tended to see its founding documents as so many beautiful but meaningless promises spoken in our time to convince us and the world that the coups, invasions, and occupations we engaged in do represent life and liberty.
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