The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Roger W. Bowen is a former college president. His last book, “Japan’s Dysfunctional Democracy,” looks at institutionalized corruption. He lives in Prospect Harbor.
Birthdays are a time when many of us take stock of our life and think about how we might change in the future. We can perform this exercise for nations as well.
For America on the eve of its 250th birthday a recent opinion poll by Gallup shows that only 19% of Americans say the founders of the nation would be pleased with America’s democracy today and a Reuters poll found only 38% believe that America will still have a democracy in another 250 years.
The picture darkens: a Pew poll says that 69% of all Americans today believe that democratic institutions may no longer be able to solve America’s problems. The public approval rating of Congress is 12%; the executive branch — President Donald Trump — has rapidly declining rates of public approval, now hovering around 35%. The approval ratings for the U.S. Supreme Court are a barely respectable 42%. Add the fact that nearly half of all young people say that the freedom of speech is not all that important, that it is acceptable to censor people holding beliefs different from their own. A darker future awaits, perhaps the reason that the Economist Intelligence Unit rates our democracy as “flawed.”
Why now? Call it “the Trump Effect.” Trump seems to understand that many Americans question our representative democracy because in practice the system takes so much private wealth in taxation from the poor and middle classes. American citizens have long wanted more government services but do not appreciate having to pay for them. If government fails to build infrastructure and schools, if it does not keep the nation safe, if it favors the rich over the poor, white Americans over black Americans, and so on, public support declines. Citizens may not want to hear this, but they own our political system so long as free and open elections result in seating one of their own in Congress to represent them.
How we got to this point is clear: propertied and elite Americans had to issue a call to rebel against their British colonial overlords for the right of self-governance. Known famously as the Declaration of Independence, it was approved by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776.
The Declaration invoked the very same Enlightenment values that the British had adopted for themselves — natural rights, the rule of law, and government by consent. Thomas Jefferson’s prose shaped these same values, or “self-evident truths,” into an American philosophy legitimizing rebellion whenever a tyrannical power threatens the “life, liberty, and happiness” of a people having “inalienable rights.”
Canadian philosopher C.B. Macpherson shows that in late 18th century America “happiness,” always a difficult concept to measure, actually meant “property” in the Founders’ minds. For propertied white males, owning property 250 years ago meant that they could vote for a representative to Congress. African slaves, Native Americans, the poor, indentured servants, and women were excluded.
Implicit in the Declaration, and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, was recognition that rights denied or extended to any one group might well be denied or granted to other groups. Expansion of the franchise to assure government by consent of the governed required expanding rights to excluded groups.
Black male property owners came first in a few states and then with two amendments to the Bill of Rights — the 14th “equal protection under the law” intended to address so-called “Jim Crow” laws of the southern states and the 19th, which guaranteed the franchise to all black men and all black and white women. A few years later, in 1924, the vote was finally granted to Native Americans and in 1975 President Ford signed a bill giving non-English speaking citizens the same voting rights. Rights denied earlier to Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans were overturned by the courts.
Much of this ground was adeptly covered by President Barack Obama at the dedication of the Obama Presidential Center on June 18. This event, at which all former presidents and their spouses (except for Trump who was likely watching the event on TV in the White House) attended, was striking for exemplifying what we can call “the Obama Effect”: the audience was racially diverse, the music came from a mixture (Black, white, Latino) of performers, Barack spoke thoughtfully about democracy, how government works, and so on. Barack and Michelle both spoke passionately about personal choices (woman’s right to choose, a teaching faculty’s right to choose textbooks, etc.) and shared values, not least of which is the moral imperative to call out bullies and the sycophants who “swear” allegiance to the person of the president because they do not accept the constitutional constraints on the executive; the elected leaders who start wars they cannot finish; and liars in government who try to cover up their failures in office, often by trying to deflect public bile toward one’s predecessors.
It was a heart-warming, inclusive and egalitarian event for Americans of all races. President Obama was speaking about equality before the law, while in an earlier interview Trump asserted he has more power than any leader in history. Apart from the obvious contrast, who are you going to believe: a cool president (“No drama Obama”) who emphasizes that leadership means serving Americans or a megalomaniac who believes he is (or should be) king of the world? Lest we forget, it was the wannabe king who in May 2025 answered a reporter’s question about whether the president is required to uphold the Constitution with “I don’t know.”