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The American experiment

Helle C. Dale

Former Senior Fellow, Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom

The American experiment was unique and improbable in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence and the American colonies defied Britain, the most powerful nation on earth at the time. As we look around the world at how difficult it is for democracy and freedom to take hold and flourish, America seems like a political miracle.

In 1787, when the Founding Fathers had hammered out the U.S. Constitution in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin told an inquiring woman what the gathering had produced, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." Jefferson also knew how great the American experiment's appeal would be to others. "The flames kindled on the 4th of July, 1776, have spread across too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume the engines and all who work them." The self-evident truth that "all men are created equal; endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" remains the powerful philosophical and moral foundation of a successful foreign policy no less than it is the foundation of the American republic itself. Yet, as we are seeing today, the advance of freedom and democracy is not a straight path, but one that also sustains setbacks.

Americans have kept their republic and built it to be strong, but it will only remain so under constant vigilance. The bombing scare in Britain, where an ineffectual bomb was detonated in Glasgow airport and several other plots unfurled in London, helps remind us that freedom's enemies are as determined as ever. After a full decade of progress following the end of the Cold War, democracy is still under attack and retreating in other parts of the world. The Muslim Arab world presents a persistent and difficult challenge; China continues on its own path, which it hopes will prove that freedom and economic prosperity do not have to go hand in hand; Russia is taking the road toward a kind of authoritarianism of the past; in Africa, democracy's progress has been uneven to say the least; and some countries in Latin America are seeing autocratic populism resurging.

President Bush's ambitious declaration of the advance of freedom and democracy to be his banner causes has run into a tempest of radical terrorist opposition in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, calling into doubt a once promising Iraq policy. Ironically, those on the left who in the past declared themselves democracy's champions have responded with cynicism to the goal of bringing freedom to oppressed nations. Advancing the American model of governance is regarded by some both here and in Europe as naive and imperialist. This is a sad state of affairs.

A Pew Research Center poll released last week on global views of America illustrates the problem. Public rejection of American democracy is prevalent in most countries. This may reflect opinions about the way in which the United States has implemented its pro-democracy agenda, and also about America's democratic values themselves. In 43 of 47 countries surveyed, a majority say that the United States promotes democracy mostly where it serves its interests, rather than as a matter of principle. Even more unfortunately, this cynicism also includes 63 percent in the United States itself. Only 45 percent of Americans have faith in American leadership in the world.

How to restore faith in the American political system -- and in its importance as a model for democracy to be exported and shared -- will, for the most part, be the job of the next president of the United States. Meanwhile, history will likely look more favorably on the vision of Mr. Bush than we see today. By comparison, the star of President Reagan has been ascending since he left office, and it is worth recalling that the Berlin Wall fell during the presidency of Mr. Reagan's successor, the current President Bush's father. Mr. Reagan's vision of worldwide freedom earned him scorn at the time, whereas history has vindicated him.

As Mr. Reagan stated at Yorktown in 1981, "Our Declaration of Independence has been copied by emerging nations around the globe, its themes adopted in places many of us have never heard of. Here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights. We the people declared that the government is created by the people for their own convenience." As powerful as that message is, it has to receive constant reinforcement from those who remain convinced of its promise.

Helle Dale is director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

First appeared in The Washington Times

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Why Franklin, Washington and Lincoln considered American democracy an ‘experiment’ – and were unsure if it would survive

Research Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee

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From the time of the founding era to the present day, one of the more common things said about American democracy is that it is an “experiment .”

Most people can readily intuit what the term is meant to convey, but it is still a phrase that is bandied about more often than it is explained or analyzed.

Is American democracy an “experiment” in the bubbling-beakers-in-a-laboratory sense of the word? If so, what is the experiment attempting to prove, and how will we know if and when it has succeeded?

Establishing, then keeping, the republic

To the extent you can generalize about such a diverse group , the founders meant two things, I would argue, by calling self-government an “experiment.”

First, they saw their work as an experimental attempt to apply principles derived from science and the study of history to the management of political relations. As the founder John Jay explained to a New York grand jury in 1777 , Americans, acting under “the guidance of reason and experience,” were among “the first people whom heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live.”

Alongside this optimistic, Enlightenment-inspired understanding of the democratic experiment, however, was another that was decidedly more pessimistic.

Their work, the founders believed, was also an experiment because, as everyone who had read their Aristotle and Cicero and studied ancient history knew, republics – in which political power rests with the people and their representatives – and democracies were historically rare and acutely susceptible to subversion. That subversion came both from within – from decadence, the sapping of public virtue and demagoguery – as well as from monarchies and other enemies abroad.

When asked whether the federal constitution of 1787 established a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin is famously said to have answered: “ A republic, if you can keep it .” His point was that establishing a republic on paper was easy and preserving it the hard part.

Optimism and pessimism

The term “experiment” does not appear in any of the nation’s founding documents, but it has nevertheless enjoyed a privileged place in public political rhetoric.

George Washington, in his first inaugural address , described the “republican model of government” as an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

Gradually, presidents began to talk less of a democratic experiment whose success was still in doubt than about one whose viability had been proven by the passage of time.

Andrew Jackson, for one, in his 1837 farewell address felt justified in proclaiming, “Our Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment, and at the end of nearly half a century we find that it has preserved unimpaired the liberties of the people.”

Such statements of guarded optimism about the American experiment’s accomplishments, however, existed alongside persistent expressions of concern about its health and prospects.

In the period before the Civil War , despite participating in what in hindsight was a healthy, two-party system, politicians were forever proclaiming the end of the republic and casting opponents as threats to democracy. Most of those fears can be written off as hyperbole or attempts to demonize rivals. Some, of course, were sparked by genuine challenges to democratic institutions.

The attempt of Southern states to dissolve the Union represented one such occasion. In a July 4, 1861, address to Congress, Abraham Lincoln quite rightly saw the crisis as a grave trial for the democratic experiment to survive .

“Our popular Government has often been called an experiment,” Lincoln observed. “Two points in it our people have already settled – the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.”

Vigilance required

If you tried to quantify references to the democratic “experiment” throughout American history, you would find, I suspect, more pessimistic than optimistic invocations, more fears that the experiment is at imminent risk of failing than standpat complacency that it has succeeded.

Consider, for example, the popularity of such recent tomes as “ How Democracies Die ,” by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and “ Twilight of Democracy ,” by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. Why this persistence of pessimism? Historians of the United States have long noted the popularity since the time of the Puritans of so-called “Jeremiads” and “declension narratives” – or, to put it more colloquially, nostalgia for the good old days and the belief that society is going to hell in a handbasket.

The human-made nature of our institutions has always been a source of both hope and anxiety. Hope that America could break the shackles of old-world oppression and make the world anew; anxiety that the improvisational nature of democracy leaves it vulnerable to anarchy and subversion.

American democracy has faced genuine, sometimes existential threats. Though its attribution to Thomas Jefferson is apparently apocryphal, the adage that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance is justly celebrated.

The hard truth is that the “experiment” of American democracy will never be finished so long as the promise of equality and liberty for all remains anywhere unfulfilled.

The temptation to give in to despair or paranoia in the face of the experiment’s open-endedness is understandable. But fears about its fragility should be tempered with a recognition that democracy’s essential and demonstrated malleability – its capacity for adaptation, improvement and expanding inclusivity – can be and has historically been a source of strength and resilience as well as vulnerability.

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13.7 Cosmos & Culture

13.7: cosmos and culture, our turn at the american experiment.

1776: Benjamin Franklin (left) drafting the Declaration of Independence. The drafting committee included Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Rischgitz/Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

Democracy is always a leap of faith, an act of reason and a game of numbers.  Most importantly, democracy is always an experiment in the most fundamental, and most scientific definition of the term. Like every well constructed experiment, you can not know what will happen until it does happen.  It's an important point to hold in our minds on this election day, as we wait to see how this particular run of the experiment turns out. And while we wait, we should remember how much the fate of the nation and the fate of science have always been closely conjoined in what many would call "the American Experiment."

Science has been an integral aspect of the American Experiment in democracy since our origins. Other than stories of kites and lightning, we rarely reflect on the fact that Ben Franklin was not just one of our founding fathers but was also one of the founding experimentalists in electromagnetism.  And while Jefferson did not have Franklin's gifts as an original scientific thinker, his wide-ranging interests gave him an understanding of science's importance to a free people.  In a letter from 1799, Jefferson found it unimaginable that United States would ever turn against science:

But that the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and this country.

Throughout our history we have learned how to use science and technology in ways both better and worse.  We first bound the continent into a single nation with rail lines of steel and telegraph lines of copper wire.  When the age of oil began, it was our airplanes, our merchant steamers and our warships that allowed us to step so powerfully onto the world stage.  Along with the heroism of our soldiers, the reach of our science (from radar to atomic weapons) brought us out from World War II with commanding strength. Leadership in fields as diverse as space exploration and biomedicine continued to give the American Experiment a sense of boundless vigor and optimism even through the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s.

But today we face a different kind of world and a different kind of application for science in our turn at the American Experiment.

Our nation and its relationship to science are no longer what Franklin, Jefferson, Roosevelt or Eisenhower would recognize. There are a long list of new concerns facing us as a scientific culture. These are not just the overwhelming issues of climate change and resource depletion.  In an era where science is just as likely to be carried forward for profit as it is for knowledge, new challenges have emerged.

Sheila Jasanoff of the Kennedy School of Government looks at this moment in our history and sees a different kind of challenge for science and democracy:

Here in the early years of the 21st century, we need a more sophisticated reading of history and a clearer understanding of what it means to link scientific and technological developments to democratic ends... Today we are more likely to suffer from a largely unregulated relationship between science and private interests that drives discovery without attention to the collective good. We remain captive to expensive defense projects, justified by appeals to fear, that stand outside the processes of democratic control. And we risk the possibility that, fueled by financial greed and media hype, ethically and environmentally problematic inventions will be launched into the world before thoughtful people have had a chance to reflect on why we need them.

If the American Experiment with democracy and science is to flourish in the 21st century as it did in the 19th and 20th, then we will have to move in two directions at once.  Leaning on our tradition, we will have to look back and remember how much our value of science's open-ended call to reason, discourse and boundless imagination enriched us as a nation both materially and spiritually.  Recalling the essence of that tradition, we will also have to find the courage to move beyond tradition into new and unexplored directions.

In this task we can be helped by engaging the power of what Jasanoff refers to as science's most modest values: the "skeptical, questioning virtues of an experimental turn of mind: the acceptance that truth is provisional, that questioning of experts should be encouraged, that steps forward may need corrective steps back, and that understanding history is the surest foundation for progress."

Will we be successful?  Will we manage to preserve our vibrant democracy even as the world moves through its bottleneck of changing climate, diminishing resources and new technologies of uncertain consequence?

There is no way to tell without doing the experiment.

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The first amendment, we the people, lincoln, democracy, and the american experiment.

April 11, 2024

In this episode of We the People, Jeffrey Rosen has a special one-on-one conversation with the historian Allen Guelzo on his new book Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment . They discuss Lincoln’s powerful vision of democracy, revisit his approach to tackling slavery and preserving the Union, and explain how Lincoln remains relevant as a political thinker today.

Please subscribe to We the People and Live at the National Constitution Center on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or your favorite podcast app. 

Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.

Participants

Allen Guelzo is director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books on the Civil War and early 19th century American history and is among America’s foremost scholars on Lincoln. His most recent book is Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024).

Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic . 

Additional Resources

• Allen Guelzo, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024)
• " Lincoln’s Speeches and the Refounding of America ," NCC America's Town Hall program (Nov. 2021)
• William H. Herndon, Herndon on Lincoln: Letters (2016)
• Abraham Lincoln, “ Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield ," (1838)

Excerpt from Interview: Allen Guelzo discusses Lincoln's flaws and complexities. Despite missteps, Lincoln's struggle and growth offer lessons and insights for today's challenges, reminding us that even great leaders are human with imperfections.

Allen Guelzo: Jeffrey, I can't disguise the fact that yes, I admire Lincoln and, I would like to invite others to admire Lincoln. And yet I also understand that Lincoln himself is simply a man. He did not walk on the Potomac. He was not perfect. And he brings into this struggle for the preservation of democracy and the Civil War. Many of the prejudices of his own day, I would like to discount them and say, well, you have to look at the context of the 1860s. And yet I'm also aware that if I make an appeal to context, if I yield to that temptation, then what I've done is I've effectively erased an irrelevance of Lincoln to ourselves today. Because if he is only a product of his context, then he has nothing to say to us, and I don't think that's true. I think what we have to understand in looking at Lincoln is he makes mistakes.

He has misperceptions. Sometimes he's yielding to the misperceptions, especially on race of his own day. Sometimes he's yielding to necessity. He is a politician. He's begging for votes and he's begging for votes from people who sometimes entertain in embarrassing degrees, the most vile of prejudices on the subject of race. And he's also someone who is feeling his way through a crisis. We look back on the civil War, we look back on emancipation and we say, oh, well, yes, of course that was inevitable. It was gonna happen that way. He should have known better. Perhaps. On the other hand, the United States had never had a civil war before. The United States had never seriously considered as a nation the question of emancipation. Sometimes it was because the situation had never forced itself on us. Sometimes it was because we didn't wanna think about it until it did force itself on us.

There is no civil war for dummies that he could buy at the bookstore. There's no emancipation for dummies. There's no template. So a lot of the time, what you're seeing in Lincoln as half-heartedness, lack of interest, indifference, sometimes it's because he's not sure where he's at. He's not sure where the country's at. He's not sure where the way forward is, and there's no one to tell him. We have the benefit of hindsight. Now, of course, if we take that very same attitude and apply it to ourselves, I'm sure that 50 years from now someone will be looking back at us and saying, "Well, they should have known to do X, Y, and Z." And it will seem very easy and obvious 50 years from now, we don't experience it that way. We experience anxiety. Well, we experienced uncertainty. Now, Lincoln experienced uncertainty that what was race, what was going to be the future of those who had been enslaved, who were not going to be now going to be free?

What do you do with the population that a large majority of the rest of the population holds in contempt? How do you reconcile these things and how do you do it in the middle of fighting a war? All these get sometimes an answer from Lincoln that we scratch our heads about and say, "What was he thinking? It should have been obvious," except that it wasn't obvious. It was not obvious to people then obvious to some, but not to many.

So he struggles with this. And in our ancient faith, I have to say, frankly, he doesn't always struggle and come up with the right conclusion. He doesn't struggle his way through these questions with perfect adeptness. You mentioned colonization. He's willing to dabble with the idea of colonization, and what colonization meant, just to translate it was, alright, yes, we're going to emancipate the slaves, but we're then going to take all the slaves and we're gonna deport them. Where to? Well, maybe Central America, maybe somewhere in the Caribbean, maybe West Africa. There were a variety of competing theories. But you take one step back from that and you're gonna say to former slaves who have now been emancipated, many of whom, whose ancestors had been in the United States longer than most of the white people who were living in the United States. But you were gonna say, "No, we're gonna ship you somewhere else."

And Lincoln appears for a while at least to play along with this. And there's one particularly damaging moment in August of 1862 when he speaks to a delegation of black leaders in the White House where he urges them, "I want you to consider colonization." Why does he do that? Well, partly, as I say, it's because he's feeling his way through the thicket of these problems, feeling his way, because he doesn't know where the ultimate path or the ultimate answer lies. Okay? That's one thing.

Second thing is, why is he talking about colonization? What good would that do? Well, certainly it wouldn't do any good for the freed slaves. What it might do though, is to persuade reluctant white people to go along with emancipation. You see, if you're gonna get to emancipation, you've got to convince a lot of white people in Lincoln's day that that's not going to pose some kind of economic or political threat to them. How do you make the pill of emancipation go down easier?

You can make it go down a lot easier by telling white people in Lincoln's day, once we emancipate black people, you won't have to worry about it. There's a way out, there's a back door. At which point, reluctant white people say, "Oh, all right, we'll go along with emancipation then."

And there were a number of people, both black and white, who thought that they discerned exactly that strategy in Lincoln's talk about colonization. In the event, does he really carry out colonization? He sanctions one small scale experiment to an island off the coast of Haiti. It lasts for six months. He sends a boat, brings everybody back, and as his secretary, John Hayes said, slews off this humbug of colonization. Why was he doing it? I strongly suspect he was doing it to be seen talking about it, to damp down opposition to the bigger project, which is emancipation.

After that point. Lincoln never looks back to it. After that, that's when he starts talking about voting rights for the freed slaves. And at that point, he's on the high road at last, but he does take his time getting there. That is a fault in Lincoln. So I will not put a halo around his head. I think he's impressive. I think he's admirable in so many ways, but he has his faults, which is to say he's like you and me.

Excerpt from Interview: Allen Guelzo emphasizes Lincoln's view on democracy, highlighting its core principles: consent of the governed, sovereignty residing in the people, accountability through elections, respect for minorities by majorities, and the centrality of law to ensure reasoned governance and prevent anarchy.

Allen Guelzo: Lincoln is a figure that bulks very large in any thinking that we have about democracy, and especially in times that we live in now, times of anxiety, times of concern, fears of crisis. And at moments like this, we turn back to the figure of Abraham Lincoln, because there was a time of crisis in which he lived. And yet our democracy emerged victorious from that, in large measure because of his leadership and his wisdom. So we wonder, can we find answers to our present dilemmas in Lincoln? I think we can find at least some answers, and certainly a large measure of encouragement. And the curious thing is, Jeffrey, that Lincoln never really offers what you would call kind of a dictionary definition of democracy.

In fact, the closest he comes to giving us a definition of the term, is in a note that he writes out in 1858, doubtless in connection with the great campaign of 1858 against Stephen A. Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat. And he says in a very brief compass, As I would not be a slave. So I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. And that, as I say, is not perhaps the best definition one could find, because it's all cast in the negative of what democracy is not. Nevertheless, I think we can still extract some important things from it. And you've actually mentioned several of them already.

One is this fundamental idea of consent. What you deal with in a democracy is the consent of the governed. You work on the basic assumption that political sovereignty, the power to do things and to get things done, resides in the people. The people make the decisions for themselves. The assumption is people are competent to do that. The people, he said, who inhabit the country are the people who should rule it. And with that in view, we understand that consent, being able to say yes, is one of the absolute vital aspects of a democracy. In a monarchy, for instance, or a dictatorship, nobody asks the people what they want.

Either the monarch or the dictator says, this is the way it's going to be, and you're gonna have to live with that. And the people have no choice but either to submit or, in some cases, to rebel. But for Americans, Lincoln understood that democracy, is about this thing called consent, the consent of the governed. And he called that in the great speech he gives in 1854 in Peoria, Illinois. He calls that the sheet anchor of American republicanism, this idea of consent. That's the same speech, by the way, where I extract the title, Our Ancient Faith. And it's in that very same speech he gives in Peoria in October of 1854.

So sovereignty and consent, yes, that's fundamental. To any notion of democracy. We assume in a democracy that ordinary people are capable of governing their own affairs, that people are not born with bits and bridles in their mouths and saddles on their backs, waiting to be ridden by someone who assumes that they have more wisdom or more authority on their own. So yeah, sovereignty, consent. And then along with that, elections. Elections are just absolutely vital to a democracy. Not because we enjoy all the hoo-ha that goes along with elections. And there was lots of hoo-ha in Lincoln's day too. But it's because elections are about accountability. People make the choice of their laws, but they also make the choice of the officials who are going to enact and execute those laws. Well, if they don't do a good job, then elections are a way of holding those particular officials accountable.

It's simply saying that officials, simply because they're elected, do not automatically become monarchs or dictators of their own. No, they're accountable to the people. And so you have to have elections. They have to be free. They have to be fair. They have to be frequent. Otherwise, he said, you can't really have free government because free government is about accountability. To those people who are the sovereigns. And then there's majorities. Majorities are another important part of this for Lincoln. Because in any democracy, you're never gonna get unanimity. You're never gonna get 100% of the people who decide, yeah, we all want pepperoni on our pizza Friday night. I've never seen that happen even in a dorm room.

So you're always gonna have a majority. You're always gonna have a minority. In a democracy, majorities have the privilege of ruling, of having their say and having their way. Now that doesn't mean that majorities then have the authority to take the minority, stand it up against a barn wall and execute it. Now, majorities have the privilege of ruling, but they also have the obligation to respect minorities because, and here's one of the great shockers of democracy. A majority might be wrong. A majority might make a mistake. It might be carried away into error. And the minority might, in the event, turn out to be correct after all. In fact, the minority might be so correct that they actually persuade enough people so that they can become the majority at another point further down the road. So majorities, yes, they rule, but they also respect minorities.

But you see minorities also have a responsibility. Minorities have the privilege of dissent. They have the right to dissent. Maybe I'm using the word privilege and right a little too interchangeably. Let's keep it to right, because that's even more fundamental. Minorities have the right to dissent, but they don't have the right to subvert. They don't have the right to frustrate stand in the way of divert the attention and the direction of the majority. So you understand that in a democracy, there are majorities and minorities, they have obligations, they also have rights. Finally, you mentioned law. For Lincoln law is absolutely indispensable to a democracy because law is what keeps reason central to how a government operates. In a monarchy, what matters most is not reason. You didn't get a king because someone decided it was better for that particular person, Charles the first, or James the first to be king.

That was not the product of a reasonable deliberation. No, it was an accident of birth of heredity. So monarchy, dictators, these are not things that happen by reason. They happen by accident. Sometimes they happen by power, sometimes they happen by force, not by reason. A democracy functions by reason. How do you express reason in a political environment? You express it through law. 'Cause Otherwise, without reason, without law, a democracy can become a mob. This is what, this is what James Madison was afraid of, writing in the Federalist Papers. He was afraid that if democracy became unhinged, then it would do terrible things because it would move from being reasonable and governed by reason to being governed by power or maybe by fear. And he makes a comment in the Federalist Papers that if, and he's talking about the Athenian democracy, the democracy of Athens in its golden age…

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