The Vital Center: Politics of Freedom by Arthur M. Schlesinger

Author:Arthur M. Schlesinger [Schlesinger, Arthur M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-09-08T03:00:00+00:00

VIII

The Revival of American Radicalism

THE EQUALITARIANISM of the Declaration of Independence was a spontaneous expression of the American experience. Life on the frontier was making the national character intolerant of classes in the social sense; and the rise of the city would gradually release the forces which would carry on the struggle against class domination in the economic and political spheres. Born in revolution, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” America from its beginning has charted its history and its politics by the morning star of equality.

The faith that all men were created equal brought with it two political premises: that all men were endowed with certain unalienable rights; and that, if government became destructive of those rights, it was “the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” Embodied in the more sober language of the Constitution, these premises assured, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual, and, on the other, the right of the people to control the political and economic life of the nation. These guarantees have become the basic premises of American democracy.

Critics of democracy have claimed to detect an inherent incompatibility in this marriage of majority rule and minority rights. Nor can it be said that our democratic philosophers have been at their most lucid on the point. Thomas Jefferson’s formulation is typical. “Absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority,” he said, was the “vital principle of republics” — but he then went on in the same address to add in apparent contradiction that the will of the majority, though “in all cases” to prevail, yet “to be rightful must be reasonable.” A few lines later he even placed a whole category of rights out of reach of the majority for fear that the majority might destroy them. “The minority possess their equal rights . . . and to violate [them] would be oppression.”1

The problem of reconciling majority rule with minority rights is, in terms of strict logic, insoluble. But the incompatibility exists much more in these terms than it does in the practice of society. For any logical decision in favor of majorities or of minorities would be fatal to free government. Jefferson’s language, however distressing to logicians, expresses the deep and healthy instincts of a free people who require a margin for decision — a margin in which people, leadership and events can arrive at concrete solutions in concrete cases. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution wove individual freedom into our democratic fabric; Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Jackson added the conception of the positive state. The result has been our success in preserving a system where, except for the Civil War, neither majorities nor minorities have been thwarted to the point of resorting to revolution.

Our democratic tradition has been at its best an activist tradition. It has found its fulfillment, not in complaint or in escapism, but in responsibility and decision. In times of crisis, as I mentioned earlier, those who believe deeply in freedom and democracy have generally provided truly national leadership.

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