Comments like this really get under my skin:
As we approach the point where Hillary Clinton has to clobber Barack Obama and begin to win delegates or fade away, the candidates are finally debating what is, to many, the central question of any presidential campaign: in order to secure this most perfect union, who can best provide for the common defense?
Passages such as this one echo two texts. One is the preamble to The Constitution of the United States of America. The other is the common line from both Republicans and many Democrats that their top priority is "keeping America safe." These comments anger me for numerous reasons, the first of which is the inaccurate reading of the preamble itself:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Five priorities are listed in the preamble, not one. I took the "liberty" of highlighting the non-security related priorities: Justice, general Welfare, and Liberty. In fact, "Justice" is listed before the two security-related priorities, even though it was left out of Marc Ambinder's formulation above. Security and / or common defense was not the single, over-riding concern of framers of the Constitution, even though in our contemporary political discourse it is usually the only task anyone seems to remember the Constitution appointing to the government of the United States.
A second thing that bothers me about comments along these lines is how it ignores that we did not declare our independence from the British because they were failing to keep us safe. Instead, we declared independence from the British because they were denying us our rights. In other words, democracy, liberty and justice were the overriding concerns in forming the nation, not security. Declaring our independence in order to secure our liberty actually put us at great risk, considering that a higher percentage of Americans died in the War of Independence than in any other war in our nation's history. The country was formed quite squarely by putting our liberty on a higher priority level than our security. If we took security as the dominant value, then we would never have declared independence at all. And then, eighty years later, we fought the bloodiest war in our nation's history once again over rights and justice, not over security.
Our growing national obsession with security over justice, liberty and democracy is one of, if not the, clearest sign of the eroding stature of America in the geopolitical scene. Until about thirty years ago, America had pretty consistently been the most progressive great power, or super power, in the entire world. Now, due to the rise of conservatism in America, we have unfortunately lost that title to the European Union. It is a painful irony that most of Europe has become more democratic than America itself: in a sense, they have become more American than thou. Our loss of priorities in governance is one of the main reasons for this. In an American contest, "liberty and the pursuit of happiness" should matter just as much as life (remember Patrick Henry?). Justice, the general welfare and liberty should matter just as much as the common defense and domestic tranquility. We have really lost our way on this front, to the point that even saying your first priority as President or in Congress is anything but security is considered blasphemy. That is an incredibly frustrating, teeth-grinding loss of our national purpose, to such an extent that it has become an untouchable symptom in our national decline.
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