The Question Is: What Kind of Nation Shall We Be?

Harry T. Cook

10/26/08

The answer to that question will be given by voters in the 50 states of America a week from Tuesday when they elect a new President and Vice-President, their U.S. and state senators, their representatives in Congress and state legislatures and act upon referenda placed before them for adoption or rejection. Such is the consequence of freedom. Unlike many of our fellow human beings in lands whose populations far outnumber those of our own, the American people are individually and collectively empowered to choose their leaders and to affect the making of public policy. The informed and thoughtful use of that power is what Thomas Jefferson must have had in mind when, in the Declaration of Independence, he wrote: “With a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” If there is anything of an exceptional nature about America, it is that. “Our fathers God, to thee, author of liberty, to thee we sing. Long may our land be bright, with freedom’s holy light; protect us by thy might, great God our king.”

Samuel Francis Smith, who wrote those words, clearly meant that the ideas of God and freedom were co-terminus, and that human freedom was implicit in the order of things. It is, then, no trifling matter to be able – and to be obliged – to cast a secret ballot for candidates of one’s choice and, with a yes or a no, to answer referenda questions. Would that Election Day were a national holiday for which one did not get paid unless evidence were provided to an employer that one had voted.

This election of 2008 has been called by various commentators “the most important of our time.” Yet any election is important for its own time. What makes people say this year’s election is so crucial? I think I know. I think it is the fact that the face of America has been altered so very much over this past generation that it does not seem to many people to be the same country anymore. There being no incumbent running, they see a chance to restore what they take to be the real America. Those of us who came to maturity in the post-World War II years came from families who were spared utter destitution by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which, among other accomplishments, produced the government program known as “Social Security.”

Social Security became as much a part of life in America as baseball and hot dogs. Many were shocked when in the 1980s such programs were held up to official ridicule as being representative of so-called “big government,” which at all costs had to be gotten off the backs of people. Belief in “small government” became a religious tenet. How soon we forget, and how ungrateful is our forgetfulness. Social Security, which was a product of the New Deal, and Medicare of the Great Society, made America look both paternal and pastoral. The nation’s face set toward the world in the 1940s was one of true grit and determination to drive back the forces of fascism. Lately, though, it has seemed to a great many people here and abroad that America bears a grimmer and more uncompromising visage, suggesting we believe that might makes right. For some of the last 50-plus years, the nine faces that have looked down from the Olympus of the United States Supreme Court bench have largely been those of kindly Solomons dispensing justice to the wronged and the oppressed. Now it seems that some of those faces have not such kindly looks at all as they appear, unaccountably, to take pains to withhold justice from those who need it most while not infrequently giving the impression of catering to powerful, moneyed interests. One more thing. After and in light of the Great Depression of the 1930s, America seemed to strike a balance between the free market-place economy of nearly unbridled capitalism and raw socialism. A social contract was forged between government and its citizens that came to be respected in the public sphere by management and labor alike. Both parties kept an eye on one another and negotiated rigorously but in so doing created a great middle class of productive workers, taxpayers and church goers.

A half-century along, and that social contract has been gradually shredded bit by bit so that the flowing stream of justice is reduced to shallow rivulets. The only way to put it simply and honestly is that the rich got richer and the poor poorer, while the middle was stretched out as on a rack. No longer required was the moral imperative that those with much should not have too much; and those with little should not have too little. With all that in mind, the questions before those blessedly fortunate enough to have the franchise are: What kind of nation shall we be? What kind of face do we wish to see in the mirror? What kind of face do we wish to show to the world? What if we chose to be that nation about which Abraham Lincoln, in themes and cadences evocative of his mother’s King James Version of the Bible, spoke in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865? To be a national people “with malice toward none; with charity for all,” who will “strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

What if we chose that?

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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