BRATTLEBORO — Please bear with me as I do my historian thing and take us quickly through the origins of the United States of America's so-called democracy.
Thomas Jefferson's famous words in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were at the time common jargon.
These fine words passed like wildfire, from Parisian salons to Scottish Rite Masonic Temples to Boston's Faneuil Hall. They were code words for a social movement called the Enlightenment, which pointed its sights against absolute monarchy.
Its leaders were merchants and bankers, both in Europe and in the American colonies - with one difference.
In the colonies, leading lights of the Enlightenment were also slave-holding plantation owners - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison being three prominent examples.
Among themselves, the men and a few women of the Enlightenment were already equals. They already enjoyed liberty and happiness, if happiness is defined as wealth.
It is obvious enough that Jefferson couldn't have meant what he wrote in any literal sense. He owned, whipped, bought, and sold the people who provided his food, shelter, and wealth. Equality for African Americans was the last thing on his mind or in his imagination.
Nevertheless, pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 was a clarion call to war against England, the nation with the largest military force on Earth at the time.
What could the 56 signers in Independence Hall have been thinking?
The historical record shows that they understood one thing - namely, that the promise of equality and civil rights embedded in the Declaration held powerful motivational force, that it represented a deep human dream, and that in 1776 it amounted to the single currency available to the Second Continental Congress sufficient to incite colonists to war.
* * *
As it turns out, this minimalist body of unrepresentative elites was right about two things.
The first was that the promise of equality worked: colonists fought and, five years down the road, England surrendered.
The second was that in fact the promise was their only currency, because when veterans of the Revolution returned to their homes in 1781, they discovered that the promissory notes they had been given in payment for their service held no value. In short, the Second Continental Congress had conned them.
Neither wholly naïve nor unsophisticated, war veterans and fellow colonists, now purportedly citizens of a new nation, took matters into their own hands and began acting as if they lived in a democracy.
New state constitutions in Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Rhode Island enabled universal white male suffrage and simple majority voting in their respective legislatures.
By 1786, the Country Party of Rhode Island won a majority over the Minority Party, which represented mercantile interests, and promptly implemented a system of paper money to pay war veterans, together with laws forcing all creditors and merchants to accept the currency as legal tender.
In Boston, John Adams decried the situation as unlivable and denounced men without property having voting rights. Adams then scurried to reinforce property requirements for voting in Massachusetts.
This first, already-heavily-contested fight for voting rights in America quickly turned violent.
Within months of the Country Party's ascendance in Rhode Island, Daniel Shays - a Revolutionary war hero - led an uprising against the property confiscations and debtor prisons imposed by the party of John Adams on the smallholders of western Massachusetts.
Shays' Rebellion, as it came to be called, reawakened members of the Second Continental Congress to their upper-class roots. Their reactionary attention focused on the interplay of voting rights and property, or voting rights and money.
Keep in mind that those rights were already severely circumscribed to white men only, shutting out all women, Blacks, and Native Americans.
In a letter to former President George Washington, Secretary of War Henry Knox estimated that supporters of Shays' Rebellion amounted to “about one fifth part” of New England's population.
And in a letter dated Oct. 23, 1786, he bitterly identified their credo: “That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all.”
* * *
To be fair and accurate, that is the precise framework of the 1620 Mayflower Compact, establishing the original Puritan community in Plymouth, Mass. Signers agreed to work in common and distribute the fruits of their labor democratically.
Today, we call that concept “economic democracy.” But to Henry Knox, such a perspective led directly to “Arbitrary and Capricious tyranny.”
Washington responded with alarmed letters to close allies. To Henry Lee, he wrote on Oct. 31, 1786 that the actions “of numerous bodies in the Eastern States [...] exhibit a melancholy proof [...] that mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government.”
To James Madison, Washington confided on Nov. 5, “We are fast verging to anarchy [and] confusion,” whereupon both men became enthusiastic proponents for restructuring American government.
* * *
The Constitutional Convention proceeded from these reactionary fears.
Within the convention itself, James Madison shined, bringing with him to Philadelphia a blueprint for a new federal constitution that, in the main, delegates ultimately approved.
As Madison conceived it, there were two primary and necessary functions of government. These were, first, the protection of property and, second, the protection of civil rights.
Madison had read his history and was sensitive to social class dynamics. “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest,” he proclaimed in the convention hall. “They always did. They always will.”
While this statement could, and I think should, be read as inciteful self-criticism, Madison held an equally dire view of the propertyless majority, and when he focused on voting rights, that rang clear.
“Extend the rights of suffrage... equally to all, and the rights of property... may be overruled by a majority without property,” Madison said, according to The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787.
That single sentence encapsulates the more or less eternal fear of the rich with regard to democracy and has been, since the Constitutional convention, the bedrock of voter suppression.
I submit that in the end, and in the beginning, voter suppression is about social class conflict waged by the wealthy to protect property and privilege from the un-wealthy majority.
Moreover, it is crucial to recognize that the property and privilege of colonial elites, of slave owners like Madison and Washington, was then, as it is now, indefensible and illegitimate.
It seems to me we need to start there.
* * *
Jefferson fretted.
“Indeed I tremble when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785 - what was St. Peter going to say to a slave owner at the Pearly Gates?
But Jefferson did nothing to change his status, nor did his merchant companions in Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut. And when, in the decades ahead, white men with power began to move against slavery and toward an integration of American Blacks into the body politic, Madison's refrain against universal suffrage echoed throughout the land.
In 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond blustered on the Senate floor:
“Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries [sic] of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than 'an army with banners,' [...] where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not [...] with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”
Sen. Hammond demonstrated a dimwittedness all too common among American politicians. He suggested there were slaves in the north. In 1858, there were none - only free blacks.
More interestingly, he assumed Northern Blacks constituted a majority of the population. They didn't comprise even 1 percent. But in South Carolina three of every five people were slaves, which is to say there were three slaves to every two whites.
Imagine the fear South Carolinian whites might have felt at the prospect of freeing an enslaved majority. Imagine how guilt plays with fear in such a situation. Sen. Hammond did not speak directly to fears of violent reprisal. Instead, he spoke to the fears he calculated in fellow senators, North and South, of a propertyless majority gaining the right to vote.
Sen. Hammond injected race into the central social class conflict of the Constitutional convention - the conflict between wealth and democracy.
Demographically uninformed as he was, Sen. Hammond understood the first principle of government in the United States: that the protection of property overrides civil rights, and that the formula for protecting property centers on restricting the rights and power of the voting majority.
* * *
Currently, non-white citizens constitute a demographic majority in many locations, and will in 20 years constitute the majority nationwide. As sponsors of the Republican Party, Charles Koch and his ilk happily supported Donald Trump's playing havoc with this incontrovertible fact, ginning up a politics of grievance filled with “replacement theory,” “cancel culture,” and “critical race theory” histrionics.
The conflation of race with social class, a political contrivance since Sen. Hammond and the Civil War, has worked well for the upper class, impugning people of color as universally lower class and insinuating upper-class status onto racists.
This neat political trick has turned Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and QAnon followers into happy foot soldiers for counterfeit doctrines manipulated by Fox News, Trumpster politicians, and silent partners in the alphabet soup of right-wing super PACs and think tanks.
It transforms Trump's political base into unwitting protectors of the economic status quo. And it feeds the Big Lie with racist assumptions of Black and immigrant voting fraud, providing fraudulent rationalizations for voter suppression, the success of which, supporters conclude, is the only way to stave off a Black republic - and a socialist one at that.
* * *
America is embroiled, and in its midst every day is the other sure fact of the present: climate crisis and its daily catastrophes.
The United States is showing itself incapable of self-governing in a way that far surpasses George Washington's 1786 misgivings. Poll after poll shows overwhelming majorities in favor of massive infrastructural renewal, universal health care, and climate action.
And what happens? Partisan paralysis in Congress and hopeful words from the White House.
The most telling fact? Through a year and a half of pandemic, millionaires and billionaires have profited vastly while income for the rest has declined.
Over the last 14 months, the roughly 700 billionaires in the U.S. have increased their combined wealth by approximately $1.6 trillion, which is to say approximately 1.6 million more millions of dollars for 700 people.
It is functionally impossible to fathom how much money that it is.
“As wealth and power concentrate,” the veteran activist and scholar Chuck Collins said in his excellent Viewpoint on wealth inequality in this newspaper, “the wealthy deploy their power to further shape the rules, news, and culture of society.” [“Hidden wealth comes at a high cost,” June 9].
“They block popular reforms by capturing the political system and ensuring dysfunctional gridlock,” he wrote.
* * *
That is where we are, and there is very little democracy in it.
Remember that American democracy began as much as a con to spur colonists to war as a promise to the people. When colonists began acting as if they lived in a democracy, George Washington and the other founders took it away, substituting a representative republic with a series of barriers to one.
Just as in 1776, moments of democratic expansion have arisen when the upper class has been threatened and is in need of popular support - the Civil War and the 1930s Depression are two of the largest of those moments.
But in between those moments are constant efforts to constrain democracy, often with voter suppression as a primary weapon - just as we are witnessing wholesale today.
So what will happen?
Maybe Americans will transcend their differences to join in building the next democratic moment - just as with the Lexington Minutemen, the Black brigades of the Civil War, and the auto workers of the Great Depression.
The only certainty I have is that the current brew of gridlock, grievance, inequality and climate crisis cannot long stand.