My Fellow American

Preserving the Republic

Since the Constitutional Convention, we have been in a struggle with respect to American polity and identity. The root word of polity and politics is simply πόλις, or “polis,” the Greek word for “city.” When used as a root for polity and politics, the connotation means how people organize for getting things done for everybody’s benefit, implying that for a city to function, for an organism or organization to function, people of varied giftings and perspectives must come together to contribute their offerings of value to their fellow citizens for their mutual benefit. There are age-old disagreements about how best to do this, since the beginning of recorded time. One of the oldest stories of a disagreement occurs very early in the biblical record of the relationship between two brothers, one who is jealous of his brother, so he murders him.

In our own history of identity, the New World—which we all know by now was not new—became impregnated with two colonies, the Plymouth Colony, where religious refugees from one of the most powerful State Churches of Europe, the Church of England, cut a deal to be the colonists Great Britain needed to populate what would prove to be a very difficult colonial experiment in exchange for religious freedom. One can make equal and opposite arguments about the Puritans, whose connotation has a one-sided and ahistorical perspective, and as one who is descended directly from the Putnams who catalyzed the Salem Witch Trials, I am not a little sympathetic to the knee-jerk reaction people have to the term. However, the original Pilgrims had a bit more of a polity focused on right living in community, where the colony would be focused both on the rights of the individual and the benefit of the whole. I also have ancestors who were on the sister ship of the Mayflower, the Speedwell, which had to turn back due to a manufactured problem by the Captain who did not want to go, that made them return to England. Those who did not consolidate onto the Mayflower were forced to go to Holland for the next ten years, sheltered by Dutch Reformed Christians until they could return in 1630. The Pilgrims wanted to start a new kind of community, based on the biblical principles of their new found and newly established Reformation Christian faith.

Another colony, under Captain John Smith, was ostensibly established in Virginia for the same reasons, but underlying priorities had a struggle between the idea of a new kind of community free of the constraints of the English caste system of nobility and the hunt for gold and glory. The latter pursuit, in spite of the religious overtones of converting the natives to Christianity in Captain Smith’s letters to the crown, dominated in Virginia. We can see these two twin siblings, fighting like Jacob and Esau in the womb, until becoming fully birthed in the establishment of the United States of America in the wake of the American victory over the British Empire, and I have 18 antecedents who fought in the Revolution, in addition to one ancestor who involved himself in the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the organization and administration of the City of Philadelphia as the Treasurer of the City.

What crystalizes in the Articles of Confederation and the ensuing Constitutional Convention becomes an established tension and struggle between the American distrust of the centralization of decision-making and resources, a federal government, and the decentralization of decision-making and resources to State governments and localities. When Republicans and Democrats argue about finding the right sweet spot between these two, we find that they have swapped speeches about it between the 1860s and the 1960s. In the lead up to the Civil War, Democrats believed in States’ rights. Beginning with President Roosevelt in the 1930s, and creeping toward the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, we see the Democrats beginning to love the centralization of power in the federal government, especially since they owned power in the House of Representatives for most of the 20th Century, my own maternal grandfather, the Hon. Donald H. Magnuson serving from 1952 to 1962, as the Congressman at Large from Washington State, shot through the sleeve as recorded in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s memoir and calling his old employer the Seattle Times immediately to give them the scoop.

Now we have the rights of the individual to free speech being challenged by the very party who made it an issue, with Democrats dominating the American Civil Liberties Union for the latter part of the last century, and giving way to calls for the censoring and censuring of individual free speech under the guise of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. And yet, if one were honest, regardless of partisan leanings, we could all note that the tension between centralization and decentralization, instead of propelling the Nation forward like the pedals of a bicycle, with a priority of finding the sweet spot for the pendulum swing, we find an emotional connection to tribal politics trumping solutions for the benefit of individual rights and the country as a whole. John Locke and Edmund Burke, with a side of de Tocqueville, are increasingly relevant reads. Locke points out that for the benefit of the whole, certain civil rights must be ceded to the central government. Burke pointed out that “the effect of liberty on individuals is that they will do as they please…. We ought to first see what it will please them to do.”

For our representative majoritarian democratic Republic to function to protect the rights of the individual on the one hand while protecting the collective rights of others from individual pursuits that would harm their person or property on the other, we are going to have to recognize that the tribalist partisanship is precisely the factionalist danger that de Tocqueville warned us about, where rather than pursuing solutions through the compromise of perspectives, we just want our tribe to emerge the victor in policy disputes and elections. We are at a precipitous precipice at this moment in our history, and it will only be those with a sufficiently strong love of country beneath the debris of our partisan hubris that will see us through to the other side before the arguments between the twins of our original identity subvert the American experiment.

The twins are these, and they are the original colonies: learning to live in harmony with one another through our polity, or learning to personally benefit through gold, glory, and political power. These two competing identities were engaged in a life or death struggle in the American Revolution. These two competing identities were engaged in a life or death struggle when the Jacksonian partisans won in the Senate by one vote the justification for the Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes to reservations beyond the Mississippi. With Jackson standing to personally benefit from in land speculation in West Tennessee, I’ll let the reader to figure out in the Easter Egg hunt for toddlers which twin sibling he represented. He sent Winfield Scott, the future hero of the Mexican War and the officer who offered command of all of the Northern Armies to Robert E. Lee at the start of the Civil War, to go down to present-day Chattanooga to assemble the Cherokees by force of arms and at the point of a bayonet. The Cherokees had received a win in the Supreme Court to keep their land, from Chief Justice John Marshall, known for establishing the right of judicial review of the Executive Branch by the Judicial, who gave them the win in Cherokee v. Georgia, but the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota was all the excuse Jackson needed to use the power of Washington D.C. to drive them out.

I think we can all agree at this point that the Trail of Tears was the moment that one of the twin sibling identities won out in the name of gold, glory, and power for the next century. Only recently have we engaged again in a conversation that could be healthy about which of the identities America needs to be going forward. Like the Brainerd Mission in Chattanooga, with blacks, whites, and Native Americans (most Latin Americans are of mixed Native American heritage by the way), all worshiping in the same congregation from 1817-1836. One can still go to the churchyard cemetery there near what was once the land near the Chickamauga village of the Cherokee, on a tributary of the Tennessee River, and see blacks, whites, and Native Americans, all buried in the hope of a uniquely American experiment: a disestablished faith community living in racial and ethnic harmony for the benefit of all and the glory of God.

That Mission, that was aborted by Jackson, ostensibly in the name of “preserving Native culture,” by the “Great White Father” in Washington D.C., could have emerged as the America we would all prefer to be living in now. We are a nation of Native, slave, and immigrant populations, of mixed genealogical heritage, joined in an epic struggle for identity and national vocation. I would recommend Burkean “conservative reform” to driving headlong one of the two ditches on both sides of the road, with collectivist extremists on the one hand, or anarchical libertarian or fascists on the other. Could the 70% of the country in the middle not take the 15% of each extreme in a rush, retake the country in the name of our ancestors, who fought, and bled, and even died that we might be able to continue the American experiment, where we settle our differences with rational argument and political theory dominating our discussions in our legislatures, State and National? Or will we choose violence out of sheer tribal rage because of the perceived violence the other tribe has done to us in riots?

We have a trajectory fraught with dangers, but We the People have a closing window of opportunity to retake the country’s decision-making apparatus, with clear-eyed and clear headed “sky is blue” thinking waltzing straight back into the belly of the bureaucratic beast, where “sky is green” thinking has become normative. For this to work, it is time for us to define “we” differently than we have been, as Americans, as opposed to the group think originating from intersectional politics and Marxist victimhood theories of oppressor and oppressed. We are Americans. I cannot resist including Ronald Reagan’s “We are Americans” speech with the following YouTube link. While I served as an Army Chaplain from 2013-2023, I would often see a Soldier’s morale on the wane, and I would stop by to give them a morale boost. If they had lost sight of what we were preparing to fight and win the Nation’s wars for, I would send them the link to this portion of a speech, and all discouragement would be banished. All acute frustrations would be subordinated to the National priority of protecting the right of all Americans to their freedoms, whether their families arrived like my father’s antecedents did in the 1630s, or whether their families arrived like my mother’s antecedents did in the 19th and 20th Centuries, or whether they have just arrived in legal immigration and become naturalized citizens. Americans from all races and ethnicities, although I only subscribe to the idea of one race, the human one, as our fundamental identity, should have their rights protected, even the ones with whom we adamantly disagree, and even the ones whose use of their freedoms are destructively self-focused, like the spiritual descendants of John Smith’s colony, on gold, glory, and power. While preserving their right of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, we may also challenge the crazy partisans of our country. As a wise mentor of mine whom I met while I was serving at the Falls Church Anglican in Northern Virginia said of his organization: “we have our crazies, but they don’t run the place.”

We must learn to put our fellow Americans first, not as if America is some nebulous thing, but as a very real and living organism that we must not allow to be killed, the representative, majoritarian, democratic Republic, and the symbols for which it stands as one Nation, under God, and indivisible by the extremist political factions that would tear us apart. We.Are.Americans.

My family has served the nation for the last two hundred and forty eight years in its defense, albeit with one Confederate in the attic, and for the last 107 years and counting since my great grandfather, we have had an unbroken streak of Active Duty in the family. All of my antecedents, including my late mother, have since been buried in Arlington National Cemetery. My father, a Vietnam Veteran and Silver Star recipient will join them, hopefully many years ahead, along with a couple of his first cousins. I served as a Chaplain from 2013-2023 as my way of giving back. While I only qualify for a nook for my ashes at Arlington rather than in ground burial, I too could join them one day.

Before I do, I hope to contribute to the fight against the infighting that is going on, irony noted, to divide Americans, amplify differences, and split them apart as a crises that either Marxists or Fascists will try not to allow to go to waste. My fellow American, there are ditches on both sides of the road of this American trajectory into preserving a more perfect union. We must seize the opportunity. I implore you to participate in your local, state, and federal polity and elections. People with the people in mind must reenter civic participation to sideline the noisy loudmouths advocating for stupid detours into the ditches. American need not drive into one or the other of the ditches, but that will take participation among people who annoy us terribly with their ill-thought-through knee-jerk emotionalist perspectives. With the soothing tones of NPR commentators, we must show up and advocate for a return to normal norms, moored to moral reasoning we all have in common regardless of faith or lack of faith, to preserve the rights of the individual for the common good.

If we do not seize power from the entrenched powerful, who are burrowing into top-heavy bureaucracies in Washington D.C., centralizing power and freezing the pendulum in a place distant from the sweet spot of tension between these two sibling rivalry identities and centralization and decentralization, we will lose so much of what we have struggled so fiercely to gain, with the potentiality of losing it all. Show up. Participate. Vote. Don’t try to shout the crazies down. Show up to outnumber them. And We the People just might have a chance at emerging to the other side of this present darkness in our National polity. It is an if/then prophecy. Do it, and preserve the Republic. Do it not, and we do it at the potential peril of seeing the Nation eat its own from within. Not deciding to participate is a decision. We cannot afford it. We.Are.Americans. Our very National life, which I would like to preserve for generations to come, may very well depend on us living up to the identity and vocation of making no provision for tyranny and injustice, even as we strive for peace for our people.