It may surprise you to find out that I was on the debate team in high school. I know, right? As cool and non-nerdy as I am, it’s hard to believe yet it is a fact. “Debate Team” though is a little misleading because what I really did well was “Congress” which, as you might have gathered, is where you have bills and stuff and act like you are actually in a legislative assembly. It’s possible to succeed in this event through bullshit and force of personality, unlike the more serious events such as “Lincoln – Douglas” debate.
My girlfriend did L/D (such is the hip air of the Forensics world, we have abbreviations for our nerditude.) In a pattern which has repeated itself to this day, I associated myself with a woman who was smarter than me. She would talk all about these Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau while I would occasionally throw in a Karl Marx reference as an attempt to be cool. Apparently, even amongst the most liberal debaters, Karl Marx was not cool. Or more to the point, nobody really took his philosophy seriously as a basis for argument about principles of justices, equity, society, and so forth.
That may be in part because of the stain with which totalitarian regimes marred Marxist analysis of history. It’s more likely that Marx just did not fit in to the American formulation of society and government, a formulation which is widely considered to be the apotheosis of Enlightenment thought. Our best expressions of this formulation are our founding documents: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration is an odd little document not only because it represents something fairly rare in history but also because it has a moral influence without actually being law. The Constitution, on the other hand, is both historically significant and actual law.
And it is law with a purpose, to wit: “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, secure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity ….” Everything that follows is supposed to be directed to this end. James Madison, et al., enlightened people that they were, believed that their posterity would live in times which the authors of the constitution could only imagine. Little did they know that we live in times they could not possibly have imagined. Still our goals remain the same as our vision has broadened.
For instance: many if not all of the founders of our country believed that the franchise should be extended only to property owners (perhaps not coincidentally, almost always white men.) Our understanding of who “the people” (as in “We the people ….”) are is much broader today, and our concern is how to secure the blessings of liberty to the people. It can be fairly argued that one who cannot exercise his liberty effectively does not have it, and there are plenty of people in this country who are not at liberty. I do not count myself among these people even though I can’t go to the Jar-E show at the LAB on Saturday. Pre-teen sleepovers are not true stumbling blocks to the exercise of liberty.
But economic inequities are, particularly when they are preserved and perpetuated by societal institutions. Society and government are not one in the same, but in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-multi nation our government is the one tool we have that can shape our society. Such is the lesson of the Civil War. It is appropriate and reasonable to suggest that the government take an active role in reducing or eliminating the injustices in society that prevent portions of the citizenry from enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That role be as facilitator of transfer payments from wealthier segments of society to the impoverished or it might be of restraint of actions based in hate or conducted with the aim of inspiring fear and inaction in a segment of society. For that matter, a government founded on Enlightenment principles might consider a wide variety actions aimed at supporting those principles in ways that its founders would never have had to consider. Such actions are not, therefore, an abandonment of the principles for a new, Marixist philosophy. They are instead an extension of said principles to their next logical step.