The Unify America Annual Ideals Day Address

I’ve begun to consider the fourth of July “American Ideals Day.”  

I mean no disrespect to the generation of colonists who published 249 years ago, the document declaring our independence from the British crown. Knowing full well it would lead to invasion by the British military, at the time, the greatest fighting force on the planet, the signing of the Declaration was an act of extraordinary courage. As Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying at the time, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

But…other peoples had “in the Course of human events” dissolved “the political bands which have connected them with another,” as the Declaration puts it. This was not the first time a group of people declared their independence. What makes the American Declaration of Independence among the most consequential events in history, was the ethical assertion upon which the founders constructed their argument for independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. 

With these words, a new force was exerted on the moral arc of the universe. For the first time, a new nation was born by virtue of an idea: humans are created equal, and therefore any government among them, must be formed and controlled by them.

But…in 1776, the founders mostly excluded all but white male property owners from their moral arithmetic. As they declared the equality of men and their unalienable right to Liberty, many of the Founders were depriving that very right to the dark-skinned peoples that they owned. The painfully disappointing paradox of American history is that the Declaration’s author at 33 years old, Thomas Jefferson, owned over 600 enslaved people in his lifetime. And he knew better. In his “original rough draught” of the Declaration, Jefferson blamed the King of England for the slave trade, the “cruel war against human nature itself…violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people…captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither…[it is an] assemblage of horrors.” According to Jefferson, his condemnation of slavery was deleted from the draft of the Declaration in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia with scant protest from the Northern states.

That women ought to be added into the moral arithmetic of equality seems to have not even been a question pondered. It was nearly another hundred years after the Declaration, in 1870, that African American men won the constitutional right to vote. But for women to gain the same right, it was another fifty years more, in 1920. And then another 44 years, in 1964, for Americans to be guaranteed equal treatment under the law regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or age. And still four more, in 1968, before basic civil rights were extended to Native Americans. And another 58 years, in 2022, for queer Americans to be guaranteed, by an act of Congress, the right to marry.

The heavy costs of these accomplishments – the sweat, treasure, and blood – were sacrificed by generations of Americans because they rejected the founders’ behavior, and took them at their word. Indeed, they took them at their word ethically enlarged by including everyone:  All humans are created equal.

This concept was first conceived in the middle ages, and then gestated during the Enlightenment. 

In America, it was finally delivered on to the world’s stage on July 4, 1776.

But…it was still only an idea, a concept, a precept: a newborn that might not survive its infancy. 

Yet, once born, for Americans, that idea became an ideal - a sacred goal that must be achieved for America and for all humanity.

First our independence needed to be won or the newborn American ideal would not, in fact, survive its infancy. That happened thanks to the Continental Army of merchants, mechanics, and farmers – black men among them – who regularly had no weapon with which to fight had they not brought one from home. “Miracle” is not too strong a word to describe the improbable victory of General George Washington against the largest, most well equipped, professionally trained military the earth had ever seen. But miracles can happen when a people are driven by a moral ideal.

Our Declaration of Independence and the Winning of Independence through the Revolutionary War is now more than two centuries behind us. 

What we continue to pursue are the American Ideals born on that July 4th.  

Remembering the history and lessons from our break from the British Crown still matters. But the anniversary of the Declaration should - I believe - be centered on the courageous efforts, in the ages since, of Americans forcing our nation to live up to our Ideals. This is a day to celebrate the courage of our founders, and also Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Harvey Milk, and millions of other Americans - most lost to history -  who have pushed and pushed America toward our Ideals. 

While we have Memorial Day to pay our gratitude to the Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, Ideals Day ought also to recognize the veterans of the Civil War who fought to end slavery.  Ideals Day ought to honor how Franklin Roosevelt and the greatest generation upheld our ideals in defeating Fascism - an idea that presumes certain groups of people are intrinsically superior to others based on race, religion, ethnicity or nationality - the very antithesis of the American Ideal.

And…American Ideals Day is also a day to look forward. Responsibility for continuing the work of pulling America toward its Ideals is now in our hands. We need to lock the gains of previous generations against backsliding. What’s more, we are living in a time of new never-before-seen threats to our Ideal. 

I speak not of the incessant threats to what we might consider the First of the American Ideals, that we are all created equal. Threats to the right to vote, manipulation of electoral campaigns through misinformation, and the lack of transparency on their funding…none of this is new.

What we have not seen since the Civil War is a threat to the Second of the American Ideals, which follows logically from the first: 

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Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Our government, more and more, seems unmoored from its source of power.

In recent months, the pace and scope of executive action by the new administration have brought this unmooring into sharper focus. While somewhat less than half of Americans support the policy goals behind these moves, a growing number—including some who broadly align with the administration’s priorities—are voicing concerns about the methods being used. These include a lack of deliberation and planning, questions about legal and constitutional boundaries, and rhetoric that seems to undermine the legitimacy of other branches of government. These dynamics have refocused public scrutiny on the health of our system of checks and balances. But the willingness of the electorate to break with that system and invest far more power in the hands of a single strong leader did not suddenly show up in the last election. It's been more than a generation in the making.

The People, by an overwhelming majority, want our government to solve problems. A poll conducted by Vanderbilt University in June of 2023 found that 79% of Americans wanted their elected officials to work with members of the opposing party—even if that meant compromising on some partisan values.

Yet, for decades, we have been unable to do that. We've been unable to work together to systematically address our most pressing challenges, from education, to climate, to violence, to immigration, to abortion, to energy, to healthcare, and on and on. And now, we have Artificial Intelligence to contend with.

Oh, and by the way, the threat of nuclear annihilation hasn’t disappeared.

In seeking to confront long-standing challenges, the current administration has often relied on unilateral action and sharp rebukes of its critics. This approach reflects real urgency and the frustrations of gridlock—but it also risks deepening polarization and further weakening public trust in institutions. Even when change is necessary, how we pursue it matters. When solutions are imposed without broad consensus, they are more easily reversed and more likely to provoke backlash. Push the pendulum too hard in one direction without building consensus, and it doesn’t just stop—it swings back with equal force.

We've been swinging the pendulum for a long time in the United States.

We cannot stop that pendulum without working together.

This chronic inability to work together to solve our problems has left Americans despondent about the future of our republic. Based on the acrimony and gridlock of our national legislature, the lock on power that majority parties in state legislators have created by gerrymandering, the partisan ideology that has infected our judiciary, and the shameful immaturity on display in our presidential debates, it is understandable that democracy itself is in question. Or to be clear: that Government of the People is in question.

It is easy to blame politicians. But we, the People, are the ones who install them in positions of power. Distrust between Americans who vote for different political parties continues to climb. The division and antipathy among politicians reflects the divisions and antipathy among the People…or at least the small group of the loudest, most angry Americans, who have far too many of us convinced of the iniquity of the “other side.”

We have the most powerful military in the world, but there is no threat from a foreign adversary that compares to the threat within our own borders.

In January of 1837, twenty-seven year old Abraham Lincoln, whose license to practice law was not yet five months old, gave an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. He was prescient about the growing internal divisions in America in his era, and also in ours:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

This is the challenge of our time. Shall we find our way back together? Or will government of the People, for the People, by the People perish in America?  If it does, I tremble to imagine what that will mean for the rest of humanity.