Political Order and Political Decay Read Online Free

Political Order and Political Decay
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state but rather in “We the People.” These documents did not seek to re-create Britain’s hierarchical, class-defined society in North America. While there were many political and social barriers to de facto equality in the United States over the next two centuries, the burden was on anyone claiming special rights or privileges for a particular class to justify how they were compatible with the nation’s founding creed. This was one reason why the franchise was expanded to all white males a little more than a generation after ratification of the Constitution, long before any country in Europe was to do so.
    The contradictions between founding principles and social reality came to a head in the decades before the Civil War, as southern defenders of their “peculiar institution,” slavery, started to make novel arguments for why exclusion and subjugation of blacks was morally and politically justified. Some used religious arguments, some talked about a “natural” hierarchy among the races, and others defended it on the grounds of democracy itself. Stephen Douglas in his debates with Abraham Lincoln said he cared not whether a people voted slavery up or down, but that their democratic will should prevail.
    Lincoln, however, made a decisive counterargument that necessarily harked back to the founding. He said that a country based on the principle of political equality and natural rights could not survive if it tolerated so blatantly contradictory an institution as slavery. As we know, it shamefully took another century after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery before African Americans finally won the political and juridical rights they were promised by the Fourteenth Amendment. But the country eventually came to understand that the equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence could not be made compatible with laws making some people second-class citizens. 5
    Many other social movements emerged in later years that expanded the circle of people bearing natural and hence political rights—workers, women, indigenous peoples, and other formerly marginalized groups. But the basic political order established by the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution—an executive accountable to a representative legislature and to the whole society more broadly—would prove remarkably durable. No one subsequently argued that the government should not be accountable to “the People”; later debates and conflicts revolved entirely around the question of who counted as a full human being whose dignity was marked by the ability to participate in the democratic political system.
    THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
    The other great revolution of the late eighteenth century took place in France. Gallons of ink have been spilled describing and interpreting this cataclysmic event, and the descendants of those on opposite sides still have not resolved some of the bitter controversies it aroused.
    It may seem surprising, then, that quite a number of observers from Edmund Burke to Alexis de Tocqueville to the historian François Furet have questioned whether the revolution was as consequential as many believed. 6 The revolution was originally animated by the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” which, like the American Declaration of Independence, set forth a view of the universality of human rights grounded in the laws of nature. But the First Republic was short-lived. Like the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions that were to follow, it established its own revolutionary dynamic of radicalization in which today’s left-wingers became tomorrow’s counterrevolutionaries, a cycle that led to the Committee of Public Safety and Reign of Terror in which the revolution devoured its own children. This unstable process was brought to an end by external war, the Thermidorian reaction, and finally the coup of 18 Brumaire that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power in 1799.
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