American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

Instead, let me offer a palpable example of what we might call color-blind racism in action. Consider the war on drugs, first declared by Ronald Reagan in 1982. The decision to make the prosecution of drug dealers and users a national priority had two unfortunate consequences: first, an exponential expansion of the prison population in the United States from 300,000 in 1980 to over 2 million in 2010, an incarceration rate nearly ten times higher than that of any industrialized nation in the world; second, the impact of the new drug war fell disproportionately on the black population, chiefly black males in America’s inner cities, where imprisonment became the presumed fate for a statistical majority of ghetto youth, the equivalent of going to college for white suburban males.

What Myrdal called the American Dilemma was really the White Man’s Burden, which was to face the fact that “this world is white no longer, and it never will be again.”

Income inequality increased on a steady path starting in the late 1970s, and by 2008 it had reached the same historical high point achieved in 1928. The Great Compression had been replaced by the Great Divergence—a term journalists began to deploy as shorthand to describe the unexpected arrival of a second Gilded Age in twenty-first-century America.

We currently inhabit a second Gilded Age in which the active interplay within that dialogue has almost completely disappeared because belief in a prominent role for government has been placed on the permanent defensive, in part because one side enjoys the advantage of a very large and expensive megaphone that amplifies its message. As a result, mainstream politics is trapped in a one-sided conversation, a muted version of the American Dialogue bereft of the energy and conflict-driven dynamism possible only with full engagement of both sides of our founding principles. Adams predicted this outcome because, in the Adams scheme, aristocracies throughout history always created oligarchies that then mobilized their economic power to unbalance the political equation.

David Humphreys, a former aide-de-camp currently serving as Washington’s private secretary, reiterated Knox’s argument, emphasizing the stain on Washington’s legacy if the convention failed. Humphreys then added the intriguing insight that if by some miracle a national government emerged from the deliberations at Philadelphia, Washington would almost certainly be chosen to head it, thereby ending his retirement forever. By March 1787 Washington appeared convinced. “In confidence I inform you,” he wrote to Knox, “that it is not, at this time, my purpose to attend.”

This information, which proved accurate, transformed the previous political calculus, making the prospects for fundamental change at least imaginable. When Washington shared this news with Knox, the trusted confidant reversed his advice. “But were an energetic and judicious system to be proposed with Your Signature,” Knox now argued, “it would be a circumstance highly honorable to your fame in the present and future ages; and doubly entitle you to the glorious republican epithet—the Father of Your Country.”

United States has committed the predictable mistakes of a novice superpower most rooted in overconfidence bordering on arrogance; second, wars have become routinized because foreign policy has become militarized at the same time as the middle class has been immunized from military service; and third, the creedal conviction that American values are transplantable to all regions of the world is highly suspect and likely to draw the United States into nation-building projects beyond its will or capacity to complete.