democratic
paideia
—the cultivation of an active, informed citizenry—in order to preserve and deepen our democratic experiment. Race has always been the crucial litmus test for such maturity in America. To acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project is anti-American only if one holds to a childish belief that America is pure and pristine, or if one opts for self-destructive nihilistic rationalizations. One of our most crucial tasks now as democrats is to expose and extricate the antidemocratic impulses within ourdemocracy. It is when we confront the challenges of our antidemocratic inclinations as a country that our most profound democratic commitments are born, both on the individual and on the societal level. Only the nihilists among us tremble in their boots at such a prospect.
In examining the deep roots of imperialism in American history, it is important to know that most of the grand democratic projects in human history—from Athens to America—have xenophobic and imperial roots. The most famous of all speeches in democratic Athens—Pericles’ great funeral oration rendered in Thucydides’ classic
History of the Peloponnesian War
—celebrated democracy at home while glorifying Athens’s imperial domination of other peoples abroad. “For Athens alone of her contemporaries,” Pericles proclaimed, “is found when tested to be greater than her reputation…we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.” Even the democracy at home he lauded was seriously compromised, rooted as it was in slavery, patriarchal households, and the economic advantage of the cheap labor of resident aliens (like the great Aristotle) who could not vote. Similarly, the democratic experiments of Rome, France, England, and Germany had deep imperial foundations.
The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire—and aided by the French and Dutch empires—even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its populationconsisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own new nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against. The Declaration of Independence, principally written by the thirty-three-year-old revolutionary Thomas Jefferson—who himself embodied this paradox, being both a courageous freedom fighter against British imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his beloved Virginia—offers telling testament to this complex and contradictory character of the American democratic experiment.
The reference in the Declaration to indigenous peoples as “Savages” worthy of American expansionist domination for an “empire of liberty” further reveals this contradiction. In listing the colonies’ charges against British oppression, Jefferson sounds this theme in his last charge: “He [the British oppressor] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” A few years after he wrote the Declaration, Jefferson proclaimed that he trembled for his country when he thought of the suffering of slaves and that God was just—a suffering that he was all too aware enabled his political career, since his slavocratic views were so popular with his constituencies, and a suffering he intimately and directly contributed to in a mighty way in both public policy and personal behavior. Yet in 1783, less than a decade after Jefferson’s Declaration, the chief justice in Massachusetts declared an end to slavery in his state because“a different idea has
paideia
—the cultivation of an active, informed citizenry—in order to preserve and deepen our democratic experiment. Race has always been the crucial litmus test for such maturity in America. To acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project is anti-American only if one holds to a childish belief that America is pure and pristine, or if one opts for self-destructive nihilistic rationalizations. One of our most crucial tasks now as democrats is to expose and extricate the antidemocratic impulses within ourdemocracy. It is when we confront the challenges of our antidemocratic inclinations as a country that our most profound democratic commitments are born, both on the individual and on the societal level. Only the nihilists among us tremble in their boots at such a prospect.
In examining the deep roots of imperialism in American history, it is important to know that most of the grand democratic projects in human history—from Athens to America—have xenophobic and imperial roots. The most famous of all speeches in democratic Athens—Pericles’ great funeral oration rendered in Thucydides’ classic
History of the Peloponnesian War
—celebrated democracy at home while glorifying Athens’s imperial domination of other peoples abroad. “For Athens alone of her contemporaries,” Pericles proclaimed, “is found when tested to be greater than her reputation…we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.” Even the democracy at home he lauded was seriously compromised, rooted as it was in slavery, patriarchal households, and the economic advantage of the cheap labor of resident aliens (like the great Aristotle) who could not vote. Similarly, the democratic experiments of Rome, France, England, and Germany had deep imperial foundations.
The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire—and aided by the French and Dutch empires—even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its populationconsisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own new nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against. The Declaration of Independence, principally written by the thirty-three-year-old revolutionary Thomas Jefferson—who himself embodied this paradox, being both a courageous freedom fighter against British imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his beloved Virginia—offers telling testament to this complex and contradictory character of the American democratic experiment.
The reference in the Declaration to indigenous peoples as “Savages” worthy of American expansionist domination for an “empire of liberty” further reveals this contradiction. In listing the colonies’ charges against British oppression, Jefferson sounds this theme in his last charge: “He [the British oppressor] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” A few years after he wrote the Declaration, Jefferson proclaimed that he trembled for his country when he thought of the suffering of slaves and that God was just—a suffering that he was all too aware enabled his political career, since his slavocratic views were so popular with his constituencies, and a suffering he intimately and directly contributed to in a mighty way in both public policy and personal behavior. Yet in 1783, less than a decade after Jefferson’s Declaration, the chief justice in Massachusetts declared an end to slavery in his state because“a different idea has
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