Around the County

Celebrating American greatness

By Pat Stuart
Posted 7/19/22

The Fourth of July holiday, now come and gone, reminds us to reflect on the great American experiment in democracy. And, what a ride it has been. Think of it! Less than 300 years ago, political …

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Around the County

Celebrating American greatness

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The Fourth of July holiday, now come and gone, reminds us to reflect on the great American experiment in democracy. And, what a ride it has been. Think of it! Less than 300 years ago, political leaders across the world thought the very idea of the American Constitution with its representative government and guarantees of freedom for its citizens doomed to fail. Few leaders, politicians, philosophers even believed the average human capable of choosing who would govern them and how. 

Yet, we not only survived, we flourished beyond any of our founding fathers’ imaginings. More and incredibly, when you think about it, and thanks in large measure to our system, we have types and levels of freedoms and prosperity undreamed of in the 18th century. Who knew then that women or people of color would live in equality with white men or that all people in America could reasonably expect society to provide basic safety nets between them and death? Probably no one.

We raised the bar for the human experience. So much so that cultures and peoples far different from ours have done their best to emulate us. Some form of democracy now reaches to all corners of the world. 

As for the absolute monarchies or Napoleonesque dictatorships that dominated the world on the first Fourth of July? They are gone, are almost as extinct as dodos.

That was American exceptionalism at work. We succeeded so wildly in persuading people everywhere of the advantages of the American form of a republican democracy that we stopped being exceptional.  Our experiment ceased being a large-scale test case but became the governmental system of choice for those free to choose.

It’s not that we set out to do so. In fact, I’m convinced that by nature most of us then and now would prefer to stay out of the affairs of other countries. It’s doubtful to me that we would ever have set out to show the world how great the American democracy is if it hadn’t been for the Cold War.

We found ourselves, in the aftermath of two world wars that hinged on American participation, in a life and death struggle with Soviet communism, one played out in multiple countries over decades. 

Fighting communism, for us, meant pitting our philosophy of individual freedom and representative government against Leninist ideas of communism and world domination. We brought our war-torn allies back from destitution and pointed to our prosperity as proof that democracy was the superior system. Democracy was the carrot we used in Cold War propaganda. Dictatorship in any form, we said, was a stick bringing repression and poverty to the masses. 

We set democracy on the march on behalf of freedom.  

It was a winning strategy. We were a winning model. Democracy spread across the continents. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but maybe not so fast.

One way or the other, democracy as a preferred form of govenment succeeded so wildly that we “won” ourselves right out of the Cold War and our position as the world’s foremost leader.  

Thus, we’ve been free to turn inwards, again. Which is a good thing. Democracy is not a static system. It needs care and feeding and refining. 

It needs protection, too, because the rest of the world is not going away. A resurgent Russia. A China with big muscles. A war in the Ukraine. Pandemics. These are just the big challenges which loom as clouds on our democracy’s horizon and which we ignore at our peril.

This time, though, we don’t have to persuade anyone (except, perhaps, ourselves) about the superiority of democracy as a system of governing. 

It’s something to celebrate on the Fourth of July — our greatest and the once-thought unlikely American success: the triumph and spread of democracy!

Around the County

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