AMERICAN DEMOCRACY remains robust as it marked its remarkable 250-year commitment to the ideal of self-government earlier this month. This endurance is not merely a matter of administrative convenience, but a testament to a nation that has projected itself as placing human dignity at the epicenter of the democratic experiment. It has sustained a constitutional structure that has securely housed democracy for two and a half centuries.
Celebrating this milestone is not a license for erasure of historical wrongs committed in the nation’s name. Rather, it serves as an acknowledgment that the citizenry is free enough today to confront those failures, learn from them, and chart a more hopeful course. It offers a moment to reflect on the crucial strides American democracy has made. Indeed, the nation's finest moments have defined the expansion of the foundational principles captured in the Declaration of Independence. The document emphatically claims these truths as "self-evident," asserting that all people are endowed with certain "unalienable rights"—chief among them, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Despite the deep imperfections of the men who drafted and ratified this text, successive generations of Americans have kept the democratic flame alive. While the light has fluttered numerous times, the public has not let it extinguish. The founders possessed a universal vision but limited it to a privileged few, excluding women and people of color. Yet, even in securing these rights restrictively, they engineered a structure of self-government that was destined for universal application. The constitutional separation of powers has allowed American democracy to rebound time and again, providing movements the legal and political pathways to effect change.
While the Civil War exposed the limitations of always achieving such progress nonviolently, it was a democratically elected president, Abraham Lincoln, who preserved the Union and abolished slavery. In the centuries since, the United States has continually expanded its circle of inclusion through nonviolent movements, from women’s suffrage and African-American civil rights to disability and gender advocacy. Even today that work continues with vigor. Democracy has never been seen as a solved problem but seen as the method to solve problems.
