Legal Food for Thought

With presidential elections always looming ahead of us, now or anytime is a good time for us to think about the gap between the ideals and reality of American democracy. A gap between American ideals and American reality has always existed. At our founding, almost two hundred fifty years ago, we declared all men created equal but kept millions enslaved and did not allow half the people--women--to vote. Since then, we have boasted of our country as a land of equal opportunity and meritocracy, but even today racism, sexism, inherited wealth, and tax laws favoring the rich create vast economic disparities not based on individual merit or talent. And now we have yet another yawning gap between the ideals and reality of a fundamental American conceit: democracy itself. The democratic ideal is at the heart of the American experiment. Self-government is what our Revolution was all about. Here, we the people supposedly rule. Lincoln described it as government of the people, by the people and for the people. Democracy! It has always been a patriotic rallying cry. A little over a hundred years ago we went to war to "make the world safe for democracy." In 2003 we went to war in Iraq to "export democracy." But is our democracy, not in theory but as actually practiced, so ideal? Is it worth exporting? Is it even real? Is it endangered? What do we even mean by democracy? A good way to answer these disturbing and provocative questions is to go back for guidance to one of the greatest yet least widely known speeches in American history. In 1852, the famous escaped slave Frederick Douglass gave a powerful and eloquent speech about American hypocrisy. Invited to speak at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York, Douglass delivered more than was expected. He titled his talk "What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?" Douglass started off in traditional Fourth of July fashion, praising at length the founders for their courage, foresight, and wisdom. He complimented and admired the "truly great men" who signed the Declaration of Independence as "statemen, patriots and heroes" who "loved their country better than their own private interests." But then he pivoted. His speech took an unanticipated turn, a turn that, even when read today, startles the mind and sears the conscience. After such a glowing backward look at 1776, Douglass shifts to his present: 1852. He considers the terrible plight of the slave in antebellum America and then, like the biblical prophet Jeremiah, thunders at his listeners: "Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery . . . bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy." With all the force and harsh memory of his own life experience, he goes on to describe slavery to his northern audience as the worst example of "your national inconsistencies." Yet he predicts that, "there are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery . . . the doom of slavery is certain." Douglass spoke these prophetic words nine years before the Civil War began and eleven years before the Emancipation Proclamation. For an American to read Douglass's brilliant speech today is a chilling and bracing but important and embarrassing experience. If you have never read it, you really must. You owe it to yourself. You will never forget it. It is on a par with the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream." You will admire Douglass's rhetorical skill and depth of feeling. What is more, you will find yourself thinking about how Douglass’s speech applies to America today. In 1852 the great American hypocrisy was the gulf between professed equality and actual slavery. But, thankfully, slavery itself is long gone, though, sad to say, not all of its vestiges. Racism in American life still exists. Now, however, America’s hollow mockery is the huge chasm between democracy and the disenfranchised voter. Where is today’s Frederick Douglass to decry the bombast, deception, irony, hypocrisy, and inconsistency of the American electoral process?