Independence and Government

Hi, it's Tom. You know, today's July 4th, and in America that means it's Independence Day. And we get pretty excited about Independence Day. You know, it's the day that we commemorate the signing of our Declaration of Independence, which is a pretty remarkable document. You know, I think remarkable in that the colonists at that time not only decided to break away from Great Britain, but they decided that it was important to tell the British why they were breaking away. And so there's a whole list of grievances that were used as the fundamental premise for declaring the independence of the colonies. And, you know, between that and, you know, the part in the Preamble about, you know, all men are created equal, you know, there's some great principles in the Declaration of Independence, but that's really all they are. They're principles. You know, there's no there's no substance to the Declaration of Independence in terms of methodology for governing. It would take, you know, another 11 years before the Constitution was written and ratified. And Even in the Constitution, you know, you have the basic articles of the Constitution, but then you have the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. The Constitution's been amended 27 times, and the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, which are the Bill of Rights, are a fascinating group of principles because these are the principles that the framers of the Constitution used to say no matter what the voice of the people might be, democracy be damned, these 10 rights can never be abridged. They can't be voted out. The idea of a democracy, you know, can be pretty dangerous, right? I mean, if you think about democracy, right, majority rules in a direct democracy anyway. We don't have a direct democracy. We have a representative democracy in the United States. But in a direct democracy, you know, the difference between a direct democracy and mob rule is really kind of just perspective. I mean, direct democracy can be, well, you know, there are more of us than there are you, and we decide that you don't get to do certain things anymore. That could be voted on as a direct democracy. We're seeing that new democracies really have to figure out how to balance the voice of the majority and the rights of the minority. Well, that's what those first 10 amendments into the Constitution were designed to protect. No matter what happens, you have these rights. And the Supreme Court just recently said, for example, that you do have the right to bear arms regardless of whether or not you're going to be part of a militia and so on. And writing for the majority in that decision, that you can have whatever opinion about that you like, this being America, First Amendment saying you could speak about those things, write about those things, the government can't keep you from doing so. Regardless of your opinion about that, Justice Scalia, in writing for the majority, said, we don't, we can't take these rights away from anybody. These are rights that the framers of the Constitution said, these are the platforms that we use for our protection of the rights of the majority— of the minority. Now, the only thing I wanted to really talk about in this, after that kind of setup, is to say this: government is hard. Governing is hard. Um, uh, the history of our species on the planet has been a history of progressively figuring out different ways, in my way of thinking about things, more and more refined ways of governing ourselves as a species. And the United States being, you know, 232 years old today is the oldest representative democracy that there is. Even though we're a young country, there are much, much older monarchies than our form of government. But we're, we're the, uh, the oldest representative democracy, maybe the oldest represent— maybe the oldest democracy period. I don't know, Switzerland is a direct democracy, I think, but whatever. But the, the fact is that, that over thousands of years, tens of thousands, 20,000 years of civilization and only 200 years of this form of governing ourselves. And that what that says to me is that government is about experimentation. And we've figured out that our experiment using this Constitution, which can be amended, that our experiment continues to work in the way in which it was designed. Others don't think so. And, you know, I think the key is every nation is free to determine its own government philosophy and to determine how it's going to take on this messy, difficult task of governing the people. Over the past 50 years, you remember, just Just to go back a bit, even though we're a representative democracy, women have only been permitted to vote in the United States since 1920. It took a constitutional amendment to permit women to vote, give women the right to vote. Of course, African Americans got the right to vote 50 years before that in 1870 in another amendment to the Constitution right after the Civil War. So, you know, we are proud of our democracy and we should be proud of our democracy. What's important for us all to remember, I think, is how hard it is to govern and how continually experimental government is. The system of government that we have in the United States with 3 major divisions of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, and the balance of powers that exists between those three bodies, and how that's worked since the framing of the Constitution, I think has been a remarkable experiment. And it continues to, you know, be filled with the kinds of controversy that you would expect in governing any group of people. But today we celebrate that here in America, and it's easy to forget how hard it really is to govern people. Get 10 people together and try to figure out how to get anything done, and you'll get a picture of what it would be like to try to govern now, what, 300 million of us. So, and just as an aside, When we look at countries like China, which is 4 times plus the size of the United States and which has enormous geographical, cultural, educational diversity, and think about trying to govern a country like China— not like China, there's nothing like China— trying to govern China Wow. So independence and government are tricky, and we're doing our best here. Take care and see you guys again soon. Bye-bye.