Eric Gonzalez Juenke is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and is on faculty in the Chicano/Latino Studies Program at the College of Social Science. As a scholar in U.S. electoral politics, local and state elections and minority political representation, he continues to publish research on U.S. politics and engages students in academic-driven games. Here, Juenke reflects on the founding documents of America and what it means two-and-a-half centuries later.
American democracy has always been difficult. The challenges are written into the very documents we celebrate on the 250th independence anniversary.
I have taught American government to first-year college students for the past 20 years. It is a joy to help students connect with our nation’s origin story. As we mark 250 years of the American experiment with democracy, it is important to reflect on how its two founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, give each other meaning.
For political scientists, the Declaration and the Constitution stand in stark contrast to one another. The Declaration was a breakup letter and not only with Great Britain and its king. It was a world-altering moment. It was a break with political history so shocking and audacious that its revolutionary effects soon swept across France in 1789, Haiti in 1791, Mexico in 1810 and South America in the 1810s and 1820s and eventually around the globe as people fought to think and rule for themselves.
In contrast, the Constitution is like a roommate contract between the states: a recognition that if they did not “move in” together and create a stronger national government, the lifetimes of the new American states would be, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Together, the two documents form the foundation of the American people’s dual nature: the Declaration embodies our individual desire for freedom from government, while the Constitution symbolizes the need for government. When we are angry at the government, we quote from the Declaration; when we desire protection from each other or foreign adversaries, we typically draw from the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
The finished documents conceal conflict and compromise
Commemorating these documents together is also a celebration of the American political character. While they hold immense symbolic power, both documents embody the inherent flaws that result from political compromise, formed as they were by committees, with edits and changes made at the behest of delegates from different colonies and states.
The Declaration was edited dozens of times after Thomas Jefferson’s first draft to make the language more readable and acceptable to all 13 colonies. A famous example is when Southern delegates struck Jefferson’s references to the horrors of slavery.
The same process of negotiation and concession beleaguered the framers of the Constitution a little over a decade later. The three-fifths compromise, the nominal silence of slavery in the document and the fight over the Bill of Rights all attest to the difficult task of building a government full of distrusting and combative states. The country, whatever it was and would be, began as nation of states, each with its own power, culture and self-seeking interests.
The problems of cooperation that bedevil us today were seeded in the Declaration and rooted in the Constitution. We have never strayed far from the real obstacles of shared governance. Yet both documents provide a way forward despite the complexity of our challenges today.
Unfinished business left to future citizens
The lingering flaws and concessions in the Declaration and Constitution are an essential part of their legacy. For example, the promise of equality in the Declaration remains a national credo despite its hypocrisy in 1776. It became a vital rhetorical weapon used by civil rights leaders, women, young people, farm workers and other marginalized groups to gain political and civil representation throughout our history.
The Constitution’s complicated federal government — separated powers, checks and balances, shared state powers and the Bill of Rights — all forged in distrust and compromise, has protected all of us at one time or another from the worst impulses of our political opponents.
The struggle is real and unending
I hope that my students leave class with at least one message: We cannot understand our nation’s politics based on the words in just one document. The Declaration and the Constitution cannot exist without each other. They are the yin and yang of American democracy: our impulse to be individually free and our need to join together. They reflect the fractured politics of their times. They are kept alive both philosophically and practically through our votes, protests, donations, phone calls, emails, social media posts, deliberation, debates and legislative compromise.
In these difficult times, it can feel like we have strayed too far from the American experiment so far that some worry it has failed. But from the very beginning, this is what the American experiment has always been. Precarious. Difficult. Incomplete. Commemorating these documents reminds us that we are each called to fulfill the fractured promises of past compromise and move the country forward to a more (im)perfect union.
