Anti-Climacus

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I've been spending a lot of time with, I think, the two really formative documents on the American social/political project: the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. I think the former envisions the idealized version of the world--all men created equal, with their political rights secured by their governments--embodied in the concrete moment of the American founding. The thing about the Declaration is that it makes a number of claims, which, if you follow them logically, are truly outrageous: all men created equal being one, and the other being that governments derive their powers from the just consent of the governed. Practically speaking, the founders had no right to assert either. It is an argument that human beings are capable of overcoming their baser natures, and that it is entirely reasonable to demand that they do so, when circumstances allow. This principle gets codified in the Constitution, which plays the cynical natures of men off each other to ensure the stability of the noble goals--political equality and just government.

Lincoln asserts something slightly different. The Civil War, for him, is not ultimately a war about whether or not slaves should be freed, or whether the south should be allowed to secede--though those issues are hardly irrelevant. It is a question of whether or not the particular republican-democratic dream at the core of the United States is possible at all. If it is, and Lincoln seems quite convinced that is is, then we know how it obligates us--to the last full measure of devotion, if necessary. We have to be prepared to wield power in the name of liberty.

So now we find ourselves, as a country, on the verge of going to war with Iraq. And that's the thing about the claims the Declaration makes--they don't declare that government is illegitimate if it ignores the political rights of the people only in America. Saddam Hussein runs an illegitimate government by the standard we ourseves set down at the founding. The question is not whether he has WMDs, and it is not whether he horribly oppresses and brutalizes his own people--though these issues are important as well. It is a question of whether or not the republican-democratic dream is possible at all in a worldwide context. And if you're convinced that it is, then you know how it obligates us.