“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are words that every American has heard. What do they mean? And why are they more relevant now?

“Pursuit of happiness” might be the easiest to understand. We are born with the instinct to please our senses and to satisfy our wants or desires. Perhaps that instinct explains why so many of us identify happiness with standard of living. It is no accident then that politicians assume our happiness relates to the gross national product, the job index, and other relevant economic stats. As a result, they tend to interpret polls through the prism of economic well-being as the most important indicator of the electorate’s satisfaction or “happiness.”

Western culture, however, seems to have evolved with a different sense of happiness. “True happiness,” states Aristotle in his treatise on Politics, “flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue, and not from the possession of external goods.” Aristotle viewed happiness as a consequence of subjective attributes each individual must endeavor to attain. His emphasis is more on the pursuit of happiness, rather than the definition of happiness, which is more difficult to define. Some people are more disposed to be happy than others. I have seen such people in the most destitute of circumstances. Others feel happy when they attain certain personal goals, which, according to the philosopher, should place rational and moral attributes above worldly attainments. Happiness, then, is relative or reflective of personality and character which differ widely in any human population and in many diverse circumstances. Its pursuit, however, can be encouraged or hampered by society or the state. So, some onus for this pursuit of happiness falls to government and to its administrators.

For this reason, we find in the Federalist (Number 68) the belief that the office of the Presidency should be “filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue” for “the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” The Declaration of Independence lists the colonies’ grievances, wherein Thomas Jefferson found King George’s administration woefully inadequate in securing those unalienable rights. He writes “that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men . . . laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely (italics are mine) to affect their safety and happiness.” In place of a dictatorial monarch, our revolutionary forefathers created a democratic republic they believed “most likely” to elect representatives dedicated to preserving those unalienable rights. Americans, as a result, are justified in their expectation that their elected representatives should work to secure all avenues of individual progress in their pursuit of personal happiness, to include every conceivable job, profession, cultural advancement, or educational opportunity that exist in society.

We may be responsible for our personal happiness, but our government has a responsibility to secure our pursuit of happiness—to assure its protection, advancement, and inviolability. For this reason, we elect persons of high moral character who understand the nature of human happiness and are committed to securing its pursuit.

Perhaps, “pursuit of happiness” is not so easy to understand after all. Certainly, the reference to “life” as an unalienable right must be self-evident. Jefferson equates the concept “that all (italics are mine) men are created equal” with the corollary “that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights.” But neither Aristotle’s life nor Jefferson’s reflected this dictum. Both accepted slaves as inferior human beings. America’s Constitution not only excluded African slaves from citizenship, but excluded women from the right to vote, effectively treating them as second-class citizens. After reconstruction and during the Jim Crow era, African Americans were lynched in numbers that defy any sense that their right to live was either unalienable or self-evident. Although women before 1921 were not lynched, they were treated with great indignity during the suffrage movement—ridiculed, shoved around during peaceful protests, arrested for exercising their constitutional right to protest and petition their government, and forced fed in prison during hunger strikes. One might consider these lapses in America’s respect for life merely a part of our evolution. But how do we explain the fact that 25% of all prisoners in the world are currently held in American jails—most of them persons of color? And how is it possible that more Americans die from guns shots every year than have died in decades of recent wars. And why do our children fear school shootings? Is it conceivable that a government founded on the principle that every human has an inviolable right to life is unable to protect the lives of even its children?

America’s problem with its founding ideals is perhaps not so much with hypocrisy as it is with human nature. None of us are born into wisdom, but into a society with preset norms and values. Aristotle and Jefferson accepted the norms of their society: slaves were identified with their inferior position in society, not with their innate potential as human beings. When Abigail Adams told her husband “not to forget the ladies” at the outset of the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787, she was addressing an age-old misogynist glass wall few men could see through. Of course, the Civil War and the Women’s Suffrage Movement won a new awareness. But the ability to recognize the unalienable right to life is still an evolutionary concept. In place of lynching, we have a criminal justice system that disproportionately punishes people of color. * Though women can vote, they are either excluded from positions of power, not equally compensated for the same job and performance as men, not provided the preventive and prenatal care demanded of their gender, or all the above. And the LGBTQ community, until only recently, were long closeted from nearly all societal functions as if it never existed. Its members hid in fear of being ridiculed, ostracized, beaten, or even killed. The right to life may be an unalienable right, but the fulness of its realization is still qualified according to race and/or gender.

Further, the fact that our children face the terror of school shootings is a unique devaluation of the right to life. Without any historical precedent, somehow contemporary America has put the lives of its children at risk. The safety of our children has been devalued in favor of unqualified or unregulated gun ownership and the availability of military style weapons deliberately engineered to kill people. It is inconceivable that any human society would so devalue the lives of their offspring. In the preamble to our Constitution, its purpose is explicitly stated to “insure (sic) domestic tranquility . . . (and) promote the general welfare.” One can easily see how these objectives align with our unalienable rights to life and the pursuit of happiness. But they are discredited by the absence of humane gun laws in America—much to our universal shame.

Another cloud on America’s regard for the right to life is its treatment of immigrants on its borders. I have written more specifically about this topic in an earlier blog (reference “Is Nothing Sacred?”). In the current context, it should be noted that the unalienable right to life cannot be a selective statement, else it is meaningless. In other words, America must recognize this right cannot only belong to Americans. Let’s just take one example from the recent surge in asylum seekers from Central America. Since 2008, Guatemala has suffered from Tropical Storm Arthur, Hurricane Dolly, Tropical Storm Agatha, Tropical Storm Hermine, a volcano, a regional earthquake, and Tropical Storm 12E (sequentially). These disasters have resulted in millions who were left “food insecure,” in need of immediate humanitarian assistance, without income due to the collapse of their agricultural sector, and without support from a government that has lost much of its national budget. As stated in David Wallace-Wells’ book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” Guatemala now has the fifth-highest homicide rate in the world and is, according to UNICEF, the second most dangerous country in the world for children. During the Obama Administration, America responded with foreign aid grants to Guatemala and increased border agents and judges to process asylum seekers. During the current Administration, America has cancelled its aid and adopted a “zero tolerance” policy that separates children from their parents as a deterrence to parents seeking safe refuge from the life-threatening conditions in their home country. Thousands of these children are presently sequestered in internment camps and five of them have died since the Fall of 2018—the first to have died in the custody of our border immigration system. How can we reconcile these deaths and this Administration’s immigration policies with America’s founding principle of an unalienable right to life?

At least every American must accept his/her unalienable right to liberty. It is the very hallmark of any revolution. And America was born of revolution. But do we agree on a definition of “liberty”? Legally and morally, it cannot be the freedom to do whatever we want to do. Free choice is a unique human attribute, but it cannot coexist unrestrained within a society where every human being has equal rights. Those rights cannot be guaranteed unless individual members of society mutually respect each other’s rights. Hence, we have laws and norms of conduct. In other words, liberty is a two-way street, both active and reciprocal, both a right and a responsibility shared by all. As individuals in a democratic society, we are not only free to assure our personal security and to pursue our happiness but also to do the same for all members of our free society. How else can Americans “form a more perfect union?”

Implied in this context is the difference between free choice and free will. There are many influences on free choice, to include our wants and desires as well as our parental and societal determinants and all past choices and/or experiences. Some would even argue we are so determined by our personal history and environment that we are not free at all. But free will, though related to free choice, is qualitatively different. It has a rational basis that is not so easily determined. It is born by superseding principles and seeks a well-defined result. The principles we form in life are developed over a lifetime of trial and error and become intrinsic to our character. The same development can be said of the ends we seek, though most of us define our goals rather hazily until we have lived long enough to clarify our principles. The ends we seek do not justify the means unless governed by principles; for those principles must align with and justify the ends and vice versa. That symmetry between principle and ends is intrinsic to every human being and to society. For the individual it is a lifelong pursuit and one fraught with hazards. Principles can be bandied about like political taglines or demagogic propaganda. They can be adopted like a suit that is acceptable in society, rather than developed by reflection and reason. Truly intrinsic principles are born in the soul by the exercise of human compassion and unrelenting discrimination. As a wise man once told me, “live what you believe, else you live not at all.” But the task of defining personal beliefs requires an unremitting effort to define the principles that will guide one’s life. **

One of the benefits of living in a constitutional democracy is that the common principles governing our society are already well defined. We are simply tasked to understand them, accept them as the foundation for our laws and societal norms, and support them in our personal lives and in the lives of all others who make up our society.

A principled person is said to value ideals over self-aggrandizement or selfish pursuits. The same can be said of a nation founded on principles. If, in addition, a person or a nation defines its goals based on those principles, then we attribute integrity to both. America’s founding documents clearly define both the ideals of our nation and the means to pursue them with integrity. Hence, it is often said, America is an idea that exists only if understood and supported by its citizens.

Therefore, the American Constitution puts a special burden on our government and its administrators. It demands adherence to its founding principles; else it stumbles or—worse—fails. The founders realized that human beings would often choose ends that served individual needs and wants rather than goals defined by the principles expressed in the preamble of the American Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence. For this reason, they built into our government a system of checks and balances, with the ultimate check in the hands of the electorate. A President, for example, is governed by laws and the oversight of an elected Congress. The Congress is subject to the veto of the President. And both the Presidency and the Congress are held accountable to the Constitution and established law by the Judicial Branch. When Congress ignores the general welfare while falling prey to tribalism and to its need for campaign funding from pretend oligarchs, a President may veto legislation and attempt to govern by executive order, or the courts may issue injunctions or cease and desist orders. When a rogue President abuses or extends his power without regard to the law or the role of Congress, then once again the courts may rule against his actions or, in rare cases, the Congress may choose to impeach and remove that President from office. And the Judicial Branch is itself governed by the Constitution and the laws duly established by Congress and authorized by the President. When more than one branch of this tripartite government fails to function according to its established parameters and principles, then the ultimate check falls to the electorate. Its vote not only determines which candidates are elected to public service but also what policies they were elected to enact or support.

My dear readers, we Americans now face an existential threat to our democracy. Our President has been checked by a myriad of courts across the country but persists in ignoring adherence to the Constitution. At this writing, he faces almost countless investigations at the federal, state, and congressional level. He may call this “presidential harassment” by an opposing Party, but the special counsel’s report only quotes his own administrative appointees in its damning expose՛ of inappropriate and criminally obstructive behavior. Meanwhile, Congress is gridlocked by politics governed more by self-interests than Constitutional principles. Those interests are circumscribed by reelection and control of legislative power. Our Senate Majority Leader tables almost all legislation passed by the people’s representatives in the House while he attempts to pack the courts with justices that he believes will serve so-called conservative principles. My argument here is not with Republicanism, but with his absurd definition of conservatism. It is not simply that Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, and both Bushes were Republicans who did not fit his mold. Rather, if the current crop of Republicans were truly conservative, then they would adhere to the Constitution as the only shelter in a catastrophic storm. With their failure to do so, they put this democracy in peril, leaving its fate solely in the hands of us, the American electorate. (Reference, “No, We Cannot.”)

The American system is revolutionary at its heart. As such, the continuum that stretches from liberal to conservatism is on only one plane; and that plane is a liberal construct of a government that is “of, by, for the people.” The ultimate check on a rogue President and a dysfunctional or gridlocked Congress is an informed electorate that exercises its free will with a clear intent to restore democracy in America. The next national election is in the Fall of 2020. But the unravelling of our democratic principles and institutions has progressed at an ever-increasing rate since the last national election. We can partially credit Russian interference in that election—a circumstance that would rile the anger of former President Reagan perhaps more than any other recent President. But most of this unravelling has been at the hands of a populist and nationalistic President who cannot be exonerated from obstruction of justice and who has been named as an unindicted co-conspirator of a felony. His co-conspirator is already serving a 3-year sentence in Federal prison. Key officials in his 2016 campaign have also been convicted of crimes, including his campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, and the man he unadvisedly appointed as his National Security Advisor. Most of his cabinet appointees have proved either incompetent, unethical, or seriously adverse to the mission of their agencies. He has fired every White House official who disagrees with him, leaving only sycophants in his Administration. The American President is in fact the main threat to our founding principles and to the success of our government. His Administration clearly fails the Federalist’s “true test of good government,” as referenced above. And now we have the Special Counsel’s report . . .

Recently, we heard the Special Counsel explain that his mission was not totally prosecutorial. With respect to the President, it could only be investigative. His team investigated foreign interventions in the 2016 elections and any coordination between those foreign entities and the Trump campaign. He concluded that Russia interfered “in sweeping and systematic fashion.” His office issued 37 indictments, mostly of foreign agents, and prosecuted seven Americans associated with the Trump campaign. Though he found a hundred and forty contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians—some of whom were official Russian agents or spies—he did not find “tacit or expressed agreement” with Trump operatives. Instead, he found both Donald Trump and his operatives more than welcoming to Russian interference, even to the extreme of his campaign chief sharing campaign strategy and research with a known Russian agent. But there were no tapes of mutual planning and strategizing—as there were in the Nixon era. Without that vital evidence, the Special Counsel was required to clear the President and his campaign of criminal conspiracy, however damning and inappropriate their interaction with foreign entities. But the evidence he uncovered for obstruction of justice does meet the level of criminal conduct. Since the Department of Justice has developed a long-standing policy (since the early 1970’s) that a sitting President cannot be indicted, he could neither indict nor, paradoxically, clear the President of obstruction of justice—the very same charge for which President Nixon faced impeachment and President Clinton was impeached. In fact, he found evidence for a dozen instances of such obstruction by the President, most of which would merit indictment and prosecution as over a thousand current and former Federal prosecutors have attested. This evidence and the ongoing threat of the current Administration must give us pause.

How can any American live happy and free in an America lost in the shadow of this Presidency—our Constitution and founding principles smothered in the constant drumbeat of malicious propaganda and evidence of abuse of power? Maybe we are too busy to read the Mueller Report. Maybe the actions of this administration are too subtle—like adding a citizenship question to the census or limiting the extent of government scientists’ forecast of climate change—or too frequent to interpret and understand. At other times, his actions are so bombastic and overbearing as to quell any outrage over his lack of compassion for the victims of natural disasters or over his exoneration of avowed racists. But their consequences will be with us for generations, as will climate change. This President vilifies his enemies while pursuing chameleon policies that mask as beneficial while perversely not so. Boasting about America’s ability to “end Iran” or waste North Korea in “fire and fury” does not enhance American security. Nor do tariff wars or racist immigration policies. Defunding education, healthcare, the national endowment of the arts, disaster relief, or student aid programs does not make Americans’ pursuit of happiness more attainable. And what can we make of the President’s constant attempt to bend the government to his will without regard for the restraints of law and ethical norms? I cannot speak for all my readers, but I find myself very much not happy, less free and much less secure.

The lyrics from another dark era come to mind: “the times they are a’changing.” Maybe we are at another inflection point in America’s history where are unalienable rights will be further clarified and extended. We can still hope. But we also must act to preserve those unalienable rights, else lose them.
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Footnotes:
* I recommend Bryan Stevenson’s book “Just Mercy: A Story about Justice and Redemption” about African Americans sentenced to death. His entire legal career has been focused on eliminating bias in the criminal justice system.
** This paragraph is informed by Aristotle’s Ethics. My interpretation is based upon this Latin translation: Voluntarium definitur secundum Aristotelem quod est a principio intrinseco cum cognitione finis. My humble and awkwardly literal translation: “Aristotle defines free will as that which is derived from an intrinsic principle with foreknowledge of its end goal or purpose.” Aristotle encompasses both the governing ideal and intended result in his definition. (Centuries of ethical precepts have expanded and elucidated this foundational statement on the exercise of free will. Even determinists recognize how ideals and final causality effect human morality. But they would still argue that they are formed by nature and environment rather than human rationality and free will.)