FILLINg a hole
The Supreme Court has spoken, and it’s going to go on speaking for a long time. But what is it really saying? That decision on gay rights isn’t really about gay rights, and the decision on affirmative action isn’t really about race. Deep down, these decisions … all of them, including Dobbs and those endless ones yet to come … are really a statement about a giant hole in this country, a spiritual hole: the lack of commonly accepted, fundamental American values. We don’t have those values written down anywhere, the basic beliefs that say who we are.
America has never had such a statement of values. Ever. For the first two hundred plus years, it didn’t matter. Nobody agreed on national values, so basically there weren’t any. Racism and injustice were ingrained in society. They were accepted. As a result, social progress was tough. It was bought very, very slowly, one agonizing issue at a time.
During the past few decades, all that has been turned upside down. A vast cultural revolution is sweeping this country. Old values and traditions are being swept aside, basic ideas like the very definition of Justice. That change is far from complete, but it’s already pushed us all the way from a tacit acceptance of Jim Crow to an Obama as President, from gays being ostracized to gay marriage becoming normal.
But that whirlwind of change has left a trail of turmoil and uncertainty in it’s wake. Too much has changed too fast. People are confused about what to believe, troubled. Anger and fear are loose. And so we long for a touchstone to navigate the storm, a North Star of values to cling to. We all feel it, a visceral hunger for something true to grab onto, something free of tribalism and politics. It’s not just a Democratic hunger, it’s a near universal emotion. Democrats and Independents and an awful lot of Republicans alike desperately want some basic definitions. Does “American” really mean everybody? What about Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity? What do they mean? Suddenly, that lack of a clear statement of American core values is terribly important.
Only, the touchstone doesn’t exist. Lost in our obsession with policies and traditional politics, we as Democrats have failed to produce core values for the future. And so MAGA, and all the other enemies of progress (like the majority in the Supreme Court), have stepped into the void, with foresight and organization and massive funding. Quite simply, they have produced their own set of values. The results are plain to see.
Our support for the Equal Rights Amendment has stumbled along for decades, equal rights for women. We’re way past that now. We’re past gay rights and black rights, and everything else. We’re past fighting through layer after layer of injustice, we need to go to the heart of the matter. We need an Equal Rights Amendment for Americans, all Americans. We need a final, unequivocal statement of basic rights for all Americans that covers all of the injustices we’re fighting, for every one of us, and it needs to be permanently fixed in law. We need a Constitutional Amendment:
The government of the United States of America and the individual states in their actions in every sphere shall reflect the following: that all Americans are created equal and entitled to Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity in equal measure, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they believe.
Achieving that is a long way off, but it starts with putting those universal core values on paper, writing them down and holding them up. That’s why the Democratic Creed was written. And that’s why a whole host of people helped write it. The book may say “Democrats 101”, but that Creed within was written for all of us, for every American, regardless of political stripe. The incredible fact is that the majority of Americans now do believe in the core values expressed in the Democratic Creed. Yes, for many it’s only an intellectual acceptance, but stop and think: that intellectual acceptance has never existed before in the history of this country. Ever.
Getting to that Constitutional amendment is more than possible, it’s necessary. It isn’t just democracy that’s at stake, it’s our moral future as a people. But making this happen involves a change in our thinking, and that “we” is us as Democrats, for we are the de facto champions of values.
First of all, we need to grasp that this isn’t about “politics” anymore. As Democrats, we love to talk about this being “a fight to save democracy”, but we never act like it. We talk about “democracy” and “values”, then go right back to pouring every ounce of our energy into the tactics of the next election, the next emergency issues, whatever is facing us at the moment, endlessly fixing the same problems over and over.
Of course we have to deal with these things, but we need to grasp that all of this … everything from the Supreme Court decisions to MAGA to the rise of white nationalism … is about something else entirely. It’s about our identity as Americans, and which road our future will take.
We need to act. We need Democrats everywhere to accept these values, officially and publicly, and live it as well. We need grassroots Democrats to understand that the Democratic Creed means changing things in your community, now. It means beginning a campaign of education among neighbors, education through example as much as anything else.
Then we need to incorporate Independents and disaffected Republicans into that drive for values and vision: the Democratic Creed needs to become the American Creed. Finally, we need to involve the rest of this country, the majority of Americans who hunger for these things but who live unaffected by politics except at election time.
All this takes patience. and commitment. We need to look at what’s really going on and commit ourselves to long-term thinking, to planing for the next ten elections instead of just what’s right in front of us. And that “we” is you and me. This change won’t come from the top. It won’t pop out of the Washington bubble. It has to be us, grassroots Democrats everywhere, the county-level communities that are the Democratic Party. The good news is there are millions of us, all across the country, millions of people all feeling the same need for vision and direction. The hunger is there, and the people. All we have to do is find ourselves, raise the standard, and get to work.
J.M. Purvis is the founder of Democrats 101, Inc., and the author of Democrats 101
