Posted on 12/16/2007 12:33:05 AM PST by bruinbirdman
This Christmas marks the 350th anniversary of the least-honoured genesis of American freedom, to be celebrated in the New York suburb of Queens. For only the fourth time in its history a fragile piece of paper called the Flushing Remonstrance will go on display.
Written in 1657 by the English citizens of the Long Island village of Flushing, it asserted their right to freedom of conscience against the autocracy of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of their colony of New Netherland. It thus long predated the “self-evident truths” of Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence.
The Flushing Remonstrance protested against Stuyvesant’s arrest, torture and expulsion of a Quaker preacher for defying his ban on all religions but Dutch Reformed protestantism. The 30 signatories were not themselves Quakers but demanded that in the new colony: “If any persons . . . Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker . . . come in love to us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them.” Indeed they demanded that “the law of love, peace and liberty . . . [extend] to Jews, Turks and Egyptians . . . which is the glory of the outward state of Holland and condemns hatred, war and bondage”. The citizens of Flushing ringingly declared: “Let every man stand or fall to his own Master.”
The remonstrance, expressed in beautiful 17th-century English prose, enraged Stuyvesant. He feared too many disagreeable immigrants might be lured to America by what he called “an imaginary liberty in a new and, as some pretend, a free country”. He opposed any houseroom being offered to Quakers and ordered all ships carrying such alien religions be sent back to sea. He arrested and expelled a Flushing citizen, John Bowne, who had allowed his house to be used by Quakers.
Stuyvesant met his match in Bowne, who took his case to the board of the Dutch West India Company in Holland and returned triumphant. The company finally slapped down Stuyvesant and asserted that there would be full liberty of conscience in its American territories. While New Englanders were burning witches, New Yorkers established a domain of liberty to the south.
Not until the 1791 Bill of Rights was the freedom of conscience set out and won in the Flushing Remonstrance included as an amendment to the American constitution.
Like the rest of America, Flushing is now steeling itself to honour its remonstrance in another respect, through the ritual of a presidential election. That ritual begins in January in the caucus rooms of Iowa and the snowstorms of New Hampshire. It then embarks on what has become the most extraordinary year-long festival of democracy anywhere in the world.
The preliminaries to an American election are rooted in history and appear immutable. Americans are people of the book, treating their constitutions, precedents and treatises as of quasi-sacred import. The linguistic beauty and clarity of meaning of their early documents is unsurpassed.
An American election is more than a periodic shifting of oligarchic chairs. It is a mass assertion of the people’s right to choose and dismiss their head of state. It is the closest any big country gets to James Madison’s “pure democracy”, regularly purging the accumulated toxins of the political blood. Europe has nothing to match it.
Such an election is not always nice, for much is at stake. A presidential election is a drawn-out extravaganza of trumpets, flags, hucksters, publicists, journalists, lawyers, businessmen, dancing girls, saints and bigots. It often terrifies the outside world, which is why American elections produce a storm of transatlantic abuse about the degeneration of democracy into a dumbed-down rich man’s, white man’s club.
So-called cyber-democracy has added the charge of plebiscitary mob rule, as if the majesty of presidency has been reduced to the level of an electronic town hall meeting.
In 2008 at least one aspect of such abuse will be simply untrue. The democratic lottery has already put into the spotlight not a gaggle of millionaires but a black, a Mormon, a woman, an Italian and a southern Baptist. The governors of the Dutch West India Company would have swelled with pride. The Flushing Remonstrance is alive and kicking.
The late Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, would lecture Americans on the power of their democracy “to take the world to the brink of disaster” and at the last minute haul it back. The subject might be the Depression, wartime isolationism, McCarthyism, nuclear confrontation and now a concocted “war on terror”. Whatever it was, said Schlesinger, “the great strength of democracy is its capacity for self-correction”. America reaches the right answer only after trying all the wrong ones.
At a time when America is the acknowledged world superpower, such a rollercoaster beneath its leadership can easily be misunderstood. In its paranoid reaction to the events of 2001, America under George W Bush appeared reckless and imperialist, a bully and a “preemptive aggressor”.
It has fought indecisive and incompetent wars against weak countries that America cannot help and can only plunge into poverty and misery. To the wider world, it seems to crave enemies not friends, losing sight of Kennedy’s inaugural admonition that “civility is not a sign of weakness”.
The neoconservative denizens of Washington have been reduced to polluting their intelligence, suspending habeas corpus and debating the uses of torture. They seem unable to engage with other world powers on such matters as trade reform, international law and the future of the United Nations.
This is why America’s friends abroad have felt more despair this past five years than in the previous 50. To turn a phrase once applied to Britain by the American diplomatist Dean Acheson, America has acquired an empire but not found a role.
Yet there is to be an election. As those friends also know, there are as many Americas as there are Americans. Any visitor to that country can sense a yearning for a change, as can any reader of its polls or consumer of its media. This is represented by a sign over Phoenix, Arizona, counting down the days to the end of the Bush presidency. It is represented by the continued buoyancy of the Barack Obama campaign. America seems desperate to give itself at least the option of a black president, of the idealism of a born-again Kennedy.
That Obama’s candidature can be contemplated in a land that has twice voted for Bush and Dick Cheney is the measure of how drastically America’s constitution allows it to cleanse its politics and grasp at something new.
It does so by inculcating respect for its documents. The Flushing Remonstrance, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation do more than set out the basis on which a commonwealth conducts its business. They offer a blueprint for the purgative tradition, summed up in H L Mencken’s famous definition of elections as “chucking the rapscallions out”.
When America appears to teeter on the brink of disaster, “the book” drags it back. In an age of overweening government, only the book has the power to call it to account. That is why Americans revere their historic documents. It is why Europeans, who lack such documents or at best abuse them, wander so casually from the path of liberty. As they wrestle in interminable constitutional disarray, Europeans should note the classic simplicity of the American texts. Their conservatism, their attention to checks, balances and liberties, is not archaic cliché but democratic realpolitik. Those texts would certainly pass the test of referendum.
Last week the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, could not bring himself to attend the ceremony in Lisbon to sign the new European constitution. But sign he eventually did. He thus joined Stuyvesant against Flushing. He backed authority against liberty, as his wish to extend detention without trial backs state power against the practice of freedom.
As long as Europe’s citizens allow their leaders to do such things, they cannot criticise the American way of democracy.
Looks like a prayer for Obama but you have to read the entire thing to get the drift.
yitbos
Some good stuff in there but the Bush bashing and the Obamanizing sort of distract from what would have been a keeper of an article.
laughing Osama really thought so. Oops, I woke up paranoid this morning.
I will not turn the leadership of my country over to the inexperienced and liars that can not admit they are Muslim and half white.
I found the first half interesting but then the ship took on a severe list to port.
What a pompous moron. We should all remember that his sort was the kind that sent a Prime Minister to Germany to face the most dangerous, evil man in human history and what was the outcome? The twerp went home proclaiming there is “peace in our times”!!
The Brits are spineless, poofters living off a well depleted sense of global superiority that died in the 1780s! They are not now and never have been either our friends, nor a worthy partner.
A pox on their weakling houses and all the houses in their neighbors, the fetid Europeans.
On behalf of Brit Freepers, go to hell
As a direct descendant of those folks who sailed up the Hudson and settled in 1620, I second the motion!!
With this one word I knew this essay was headed for the left-side ditch.
In its paranoid reaction to the events of 2001, America under George W Bush appeared reckless and imperialist, a bully and a “preemptive aggressor”.
There is a funny irony to the concept of "paranoid reaction". It is paranoid to think that those who have already attacked you are out to get you?
It has fought indecisive and incompetent wars against weak countries that America cannot help and can only plunge into poverty and misery.
Pre-9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq were characterized by prosperity and happiness? Our warmaking is incompetant as compared with whose? Which countries are we fighting indecisive wars against today?
To the wider world, it seems to crave enemies not friends, losing sight of Kennedy’s inaugural admonition that “civility is not a sign of weakness”.
Only leftists think the "wider world" is of one mind and that they (the leftists) speak for it. And what is this "incivility" of which you speak, comrade?
The neoconservative denizens of Washington have been reduced to...debating the uses of torture.
This is a lie, plain and simple.
They seem unable to engage with other world powers on such matters as trade reform, international law and the future of the United Nations.
Huh? Who besides John Bolton has addressed the structural deficiencies of the U.N.?
This is why America’s friends abroad have felt more despair this past five years than in the previous 50.
It's been eight years, not five. And I seem to recall plenty of despair among these same "friends" when Ronald Reagan was President. Just wait until a Republican is elected again next November. The lamenting of the leftists will be deafening!
The democratic lottery has already put into the spotlight not a gaggle of millionaires but a black, a Mormon, a woman, an Italian and a southern Baptist.
I am not sure about the black, but the Mormon, the woman, the Italian and, I believe, the Southern Baptist ARE all millionaires.
Quote from the article:
“In its paranoid reaction to the events of 2001, America under George W Bush appeared reckless and imperialist, a bully and a “preemptive aggressor”.”
Paranoid reaction? The author is a moron.
We’re a Republic, thanks.
Rudy G. - “Freedom is about authority.”
No thanks
For some reason, British authors are prone to describing the Salem witches as having been burned at the stake...I’ve run across that error in several books on the paranormal/occult written by Britons. But I was taken aback when I read one of those aforementioned paranormal/occult books written by a British author-who described King Charles I as having been hanged!
Burning at the stake was something the British liked to do to heretics. Just ask Joan of Arc.
Exaggerated, overstated, and unecessarily insulting, that post does have an element of truth to it. I think your angered responses proves it.
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