The Promise of Democratic Equality in the United States

Douglas D. Roscoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138555587
• eBook ISBN: 9781351369893
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Promise of Democratic Equality in the United States explores the ways in which the American political system fails to fully respect political equality.

Douglas D. Roscoe argues these deficiencies are not necessarily failures of justice, but often reflect attempts to balance important but competing principles and values. He analyzes the balance among these competing values in a variety of contexts, including congressional representation, the Electoral College, voting regulations, campaign finance, lobbying, the Senate filibuster rules, and protections for civil rights and liberties. A diverse set of methodological approaches is employed to carefully evaluate whether the limits placed on political equality are reasonable and necessary.

Using a rigorous normative framework, while leaning heavily on high-quality quantitative evidence and social science research, this book provides students of democratic theory and American politics with a compact and manageable review of the degree to which democratic equality is supported in the United States.

1 Created equal

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …

Declaration of Independence

Philadelphia was an exciting place to be in the early months of 1776, particularly for the delegates to the Second Continental Congress. The battles of Lexington and Concord, fought a year earlier, had sparked open warfare with British forces. Through the remaining months of 1775 and into 1776, Congress oversaw the war effort. They were engaged in matters big and small, from designating George Washington as commander-in-chief to raising revenue to paying the doorkeeper.¹ In many ways the Continental Congress was a functioning national government. But everything Congress did happened under a cloud of uncertainty and fluidity. What was the legitimate authority of the Congress? What exactly were the colonists doing? Should they be attempting to reconcile with Great Britain on terms more favorable to the American colonies? Should they break completely with their home country and forge a new nation? The issues were not easy and the stakes were immensely high. For someone with an interest in public affairs, this was compelling work.

But Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson wanted to be somewhere else. Three hundred miles from Philadelphia, in Williamsburg, a group was gathering to write a new constitution for the commonwealth of Virginia. This work – the framing of a new government – was what Jefferson longed to be doing. He had a longstanding interest in English constitutional law and was widely read in both ancient and modern treatises of government. But his charge was to remain in Philadelphia, and so he could only send his draft of a constitution back with his fellow Virginia delegate (and mentor) George Wythe.² Stuck in Philadelphia, Jefferson endured the long days and grueling work schedule the Continental Congress required. Delegates not only met in full sessions to vote on matters, but they spent many hours in various committees to review and vet proposals.

By June of 1776, momentum had carried the delegates toward the conclusion that independence was inevitable. As the war escalated, Congress recognized reconciliation was no longer possible. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee, another delegate from Virginia, offered a motion to formally declare independence. This was a momentous point in the nation’s history. From the British perspective, this was rebellion and treason. Delegates from each of the colonies were being asked to make a collective decision to break with their own country and form a new nation.

Despite the gravity of this proposal, it was met with delay. The motion was set aside until the next morning, because the Congress had “some other business.”³ When they took up the resolution on June 8, there was a long debate, which culminated in a decision not to decide, at least for three weeks.

The delay was due only in part to the obligatory and often tedious demands of running a government. Congress also believed the political situation had not ripened enough for a formal vote of independence to take place. The delegates in Philadelphia felt the people in the colonies still needed to be persuaded, and they lacked confidence that a vote for independence reflected the people’s will. While political support was being shored up, Congress did conclude it prudent to draft a declaration of independence, so that it would be ready to go when they finally did come around to voting on Lee’s resolution.

The task of drafting this declaration was given to a committee of five congressional delegates, who were chosen at least in part to provide geographical diversity.⁴ There was John Adams of Massachusetts, the leading advocate for independence; the elder Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, at that point world-famous; Roger Sherman of Connecticut; New Yorker Robert Livingston; and Jefferson, who was appointed in part because it was politically prudent to have a Virginian on the committee, and he was one of the only prominent Virginian delegates who had not left to lead the war or to work on the Virginia constitution.

Besides being an available Virginian, Jefferson had another characteristic that led to his appointment on the drafting committee. He was an excellent writer. Though widely regarded as a poor and uninspiring speaker, he was well known among the delegates as a master with the pen. His 1774 pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America was reprinted widely across the colonies, and Congress had given Jefferson in 1775 the job of writing a first draft of the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms. For these reasons, the drafting committee quickly delegated the job of producing a first draft to Jefferson.⁵

What was Jefferson’s mood and mindset as he began drafting the Declaration of Independence? He certainly had no idea that it would become such a seminal and foundational piece of writing in the nation’s history – “American Scripture,” as historian Pauline Maier puts it.⁶ Indeed, it would not be until some years after the revolution that it would attain its gravity in American political culture. Was he annoyed that he was not in Virginia, working on its constitution, a document that was certain to have great importance? Did he find the task a distraction from his other congressional duties? Or was he grateful to have an opportunity to set up the frame for this important moment through his own words? He must have understood the Declaration was bound to have some influence, at least over the immediate political situation. Was he flattered that Congress had delegated the task to him?

It’s impossible to know with any certainty, but it seems likely Jefferson was highly agreeable to the task. “By disposition, Jefferson’s most comfortable arena was the study and his most natural podium was the writing desk.”⁷ He was a voracious reader and preferred reflective solitude to vigorous personal politics. So it was probably with some degree of ease and pleasure that Jefferson sat at the custom-built desk he had designed himself, in his apartment on Chestnut Street, and wrote out the first version of the Declaration of Independence, producing a rough draft in just two days, and refining it over the next two-and-a-half weeks with some minor input from Adams and Franklin.⁸

Jefferson’s efficiency at the task reflected his writing skill, but it was also a consequence of the nature of the Declaration itself. The document that he was drafting was not intended to be a novel political theory or a new treatise on political philosophy. Jefferson was not charged with breaking new ground, but rather with capturing and communicating the political beliefs that were common in the American political sphere. He was trying to synthesize and articulate, not construct anew. The ideas he so eloquently expresses in the preamble were already part of the political culture in America. As Maier explains,

By the time of the Revolution those ideas had become, in the generalized form captured by Jefferson, a political orthodoxy whose basic principles colonists could pick up from sermons or newspapers or even schoolbooks without ever reading a systematic work of political theory. The sentiments Jefferson eloquently expressed were, in short, absolutely conventional among Americans of his time.⁹

As Jefferson put it, in a letter to Lee in 1825, his aim was:

Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.¹⁰

Though perhaps not copied from previous writing, Jefferson’s Declaration drew heavily from the ideas and phrasing of previous texts, and this surely eased his writing task. One of these was the draft Jefferson had written for the Virginia constitution, the text of which had been taken back to Williamsburg by Wythe. The preamble of that draft constitution was clearly a starting point for Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration.¹¹ Also in Jefferson’s mind as he wrote was George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Jefferson adapted these pieces of writing in ways that revealed extensive “borrowing,” but this kind of adaptation was commonplace at the time.¹²

Therefore, it is fair to say that the Declaration was derivative, both intellectually and practically, from already existing theories, principles, and specific texts. Although this fact could reasonably be viewed as minimizing the importance of Jefferson himself in the construction of the Declaration, it also adds considerable weight to the document itself. The Declaration has come to have so much meaning as a founding document precisely because it articulated the logic and rationale for independence as it actually existed among the colonists at the time the country was born.

Political equality

The opening line of the second paragraph in the Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most famous phrase in the entire lexicon of American political history. If an American today can recite anything from our founding documents, it is this line, announcing that all men are created equal. It is memorable because the principle it embodies is so essential to American democracy. Equality is fundamental to any democracy.

But what kind of equality was Jefferson talking about? Certainly he didn’t mean to suggest all people had equal talent or ability, or that everyone is or should be equal economically. Jefferson understood, as did many of the founders, that variations in ability and character were inherent in human nature and naturally result in some degree of unequal wealth or material condition. For the founders, the need to have government at all arose in part from this diversity of economic outcomes (in particular, the government needed to protect the property of the rich from being taken by the poor). Nor was Jefferson referring to equal treatment by the government – the type of equality later referenced in the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment, which says no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This kind of “legal equality” is, of course, very important to Americans, and though equal treatment has not always been fully realized, especially regarding African Americans, the principle itself has been the animating force behind civil rights movements seeking to improve how government treats minority groups.¹³

But the Declaration of Independence is written from a perspective that is prior to government, and so the equality it talks about cannot be equal treatment by government. Jefferson is describing what the state of nature looks like – a state that has no government (a point we will explore at length below). As the Declaration explains, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men” – the rights already exist in the state of nature prior to this formation of government. Take away government, and you find humanity in a state of equality, with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What Jefferson means by equality in the state of nature is political equality – that no individual has any more inherent political authority than anyone else.¹⁴ No one has any natural authority to rule over anyone else. All men – all people – are political equals.

From a contemporary perspective, this idea may seem obvious. But for a group of people forming a government in the 18^th century, it was an emerging theory with radical implications. For centuries most people had lived under some form of government in which a right to rule was either inherited and/or deemed granted to an individual by God through divine right. In some periods this right to rule was highly centralized in a monarchy, and in some periods it was more distributed among an aristocracy, but with f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Created equal
• 2. Unequal by design
• 3. One person, one vote; two people, one voter
• 4. One dollar, one vote
• 5. Free or equal
• 6. Regulating the marketplace of ideas
• 7. The heavenly chorus
• 8. Minority rule
• 9. Failure or fairness?
• Index