“You have, as Frederick Douglass said, lost the ‘ring-bolt to our nation’s destiny.’ His simile was a nautical one: you’ve lost the connection to the mast that keeps you safe in the severe storm.”
The Constitution does not express itself through similes, metaphors, or broad philosophical concepts. It is a legal document, which was written to have a very specific meaning (though, as it dealt with a large subject matter, and language is not perfect, it has led to countless interpretations). It is all well and good to say that the protection of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was the foundation for the type of government the Constitution sought to establish.
When it comes to what the Constitution doesn’t say, you can imagine reasonable people agreeing on what is on the side of liberty. But that’ll never happen in reality. Mutually exclusive worldviews rise up. You have people who say affirmative action is on the side of liberty and people who diagree, people who say outlawing abortion is liberty and people who disagree.
And when these disagreements arise, people are arguing about abstractions and feelings. They’re arguing about those basic principles buried deeply within the American tradition, predating the Declaration. In short, they are arguing about things that have nothing to do with the Constitution, or the law. That the Constitution doesn’t address fundamental philosophical issues is a problem without solution.
Douglas can say we lost sight of something, but the simple truth was, a lot of people didn’t consider negroes deserving of natural rights protection, and we can say they were wrong, but they’d disagree. The law couldn’t do anything about it, for a long while, so long as it didn’t explicitly declare that humans could not be enslaved. That was a problem with how the law was written, and may have been a problem with basic principles, but what I’ve been trying to say is we don’t all agree about said principles, not before the Civil War and not now, in a supposedly modern and progressive era.
The beautiful thing about liberty and natural rights is that none of us ever has to agree with the law, agree with what the government has recognized as constituting true liberty. And we can forever resist everyone else’s opinion, if only inside our own heads. As for the law, it will go on in the practical world, solving practical problems. If I hate what our country has become, hate that it has betrayed its founding principles (or hate that it has betrayed principles it never historically had, but are yet legitimate), I can damn the law, say it is not good. But I’d be more honest, I’d like to think, than Lincoln and Douglas, two politicians for pete’s sake, who were speaking out one side of their mouths.
Wow. All that confusion is strange, in the context of the Founders. They said these truths are “self-evident.”