Recent Opinions
The looming presidential election is the most important in my lifetime, and given my Bidenesque age, the most important in yours as well. Only one of the two candidates, Harris or Trump, will win the election, so any vote for a third-party candidate is a wasted vote. Nothing less is at stake whether American history moves forward or backward. What that really means shortly.
Press coverage of both party conventions was aired on several networks. Once upon a time conventions generated political drama, because the nominee was actually chosen at the convention. Not so now, when Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were both foregone conclusions. The result was a made-for-television entertainment extravaganza by both political parties.
That means we missed the historical significance of what we were watching at the Democratic Convention. To be sure we are frequently and fully apprised that Harris was the first black woman ever nominated by a major political party. But the full implications of that unprecedented decision never made it into the coverage.
Quite coincidentally, those implications were on vivid display at the Olympic Games in Paris, where a multiracial team of American men and women were winning more medals than any nation in the world. It was an advertisement for American athletic supremacy, because it could draw upon the talent of its inherently multiracial demography. The world watched as many black men and women mouthed the words of our national anthem at the gold medal ceremonies. They were American patriots, proud to represent all of us.
Meanwhile, over in Chicago, the Democratic Convention was making a historically unprecedented decision; namely that the bulk of the American electoral were prepared to acknowledge that America was a multiracial society, indeed always had been, and that most women did not wish to be confined within the parameters of patriarchy. Racial and gender prejudice still existed, but it was now a minority view. A black woman could, at long last, win a national election.
It all goes back to the American founding. As most of you know, the seminal statement of what Abraham Lincoln called the American Promise, and Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, was drafted by Thomas Jefferson in mid-June, 1776. He wrote it with a quill pen on a portable desk hand-crafted for him by a freed slave. It begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I ask you to commit the full paragraph to memory, then answer two questions: what did the words mean for Jefferson? And what do they mean to you?. In November we will discover whether the Democrats were right to invest in the most hopeful version of the American Promise, the belief that “We the people” means everybody. One way or another, we will learn whether, after over two centuries of hesitation, we have finally crossed the line and embraced the full meaning of the American Revolution.
JJE
P.S. Spread the word. I’ll soon be bothering you again with the story of how we got that strange creature called the Electoral College.
September 2024
To Former Students, Followers and Friends
Joseph J. Ellis