The Important Question of Our Time
Fellow citizens of the United States of America:
You are called upon to decide the most important question of our time:
Do you choose a future of ever-expanding freedom and justice for all, or a return to a past where power and privilege dictated who deserved rights?
This choice transcends political parties, presidential candidates, and even religious beliefs. Without the freedom to form your own opinions and make your own choices, how can there be true faith and allegiance?
The arc of American history, like that of the moral universe, is long, but it bends toward freedom and justice for all. Over the last 250 years, we have broadened the definition of “We the people” to include all Americans. At our nation’s birth, voting rights were generally restricted to white male property owners. Most other groups, including women, African Americans, Native Americans, non-Protestants, and non-property owners, were excluded. The institutions of slavery and indentured servitude were legal but never moral.
The stakes today are as high as they were then: the preservation of our Union, the protection of the longest-standing constitutional republic, and the defense of a democratic society where every citizen has an equal vote, and no one is above the law are on the line. This is not just about our present but about ensuring these freedoms for future generations. We must “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
The original thirteen American colonies faced an important question: whether to continue under the monarchy of Great Britain, which led to “an absolute Tyranny,” or to seek independence, where a government “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” could secure our “unalienable Rights.” Those who were allowed to choose, chose independence on July 4th, 1776.
Before the United States had a constitution, we had the Articles of Confederation. In these articles, the states were strong, and the Union and the protection of individual rights were weak. Not surprisingly, the states started abusing the rights of individuals and of other states. Within a decade, the United States was falling apart. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers to advocate for a new constitution with a strong central government. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton posed the crucial question in The Federalist №1:
It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.
“The people of this country” — those who were allowed to choose — chose the establishment of “good government from reflection and choice.” The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788 and took effect on March 4, 1789. The Bill of Rights, consisting of the first ten amendments, was officially added on December 15, 1791, providing protections for various individual liberties and limiting the federal government’s powers.
The sovereignty of the people and the supremacy of our constitution were again challenged in 1860 and 1861 by eleven southern states who traitorously and unconstitutionally seceded from the Union to preserve and expand the ungodly institution of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln’s opening lines of his Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, eloquently framed the existential choice America faced:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We know the United States has long endured this deadly and tragic test, and for the most part, we have continued down the path of expanding freedom. Non-property-owning white males gradually gained the right to vote in the early 1800s. Slavery was abolished in 1865, and citizenship was granted to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., including former enslaved people, in 1868. In 1870 — nearly 100 years after America’s founding — African American males were granted the right to vote. Fifty years later, in 1920, women were finally granted the right to vote. Four years after that, Native Americans were legally granted citizenship. In the 1950s, Asian immigrants were finally afforded the same naturalization rights as their non-Asian counterparts. And in 1971, nearly 200 years after America’s founding, the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, giving young adults the same rights as all adults.
Despite these legal protections, many enshrined in the Constitution and signed into law, there has been and continues to be resistance to equal rights. For some, equal freedom for others means a loss of supremacy and power for them. This struggle between freedom for all and power for the few has been at the core of this Great American Experiment since its inception. Hamilton observed this in The Federalist №1:
Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter, may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument and consequence of the offices they hold under the State-establishments — and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandise themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies, than from its union under one government.
Make no mistake, the same “certain class of men in every State” exist today and are actively undermining our constitution and resisting the movement toward more freedom and justice for all. They want to take America back to a time that was only great for people like them — when they held power, money, and status above all other citizens. As times change, they are unwilling to change. One of the greatest aspects of the U.S. Constitution is its capacity to adapt through amendments and more enlightened judicial opinions. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Samuel Kercheval on July 12, 1816:
…laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
The coat that once fit our nation as a young child now constrains us. We face a clear choice: to embrace the light of greater enlightenment or to revert to the shadows of our “barbarous ancestors.” In the coming months, I will passionately advocate for our Constitution and the liberties it enshrines. Through clear and easy-to-follow arguments, backed by factual historical evidence, I will invite you to explore these truths and form your own convictions. My stance is unequivocal: the path to a freer and fairer America is the only way forward.
PUBLIUS