What else could America have been?

Everybody knows that the United States could easily have been a monarchy or a theocracy, but what if something else had influenced the founding fathers? Might they have founded the United States of Confucianism? Or Machiavellianism?

The Founding Fathers drafted our Constitution and our country as an experiment in applied rationalism. Everywhere else, superstitions and class favoritisms were explicitly spelled out in the law. Those who created the government here decided to try doing without all that, relying instead on clearheaded empiricism. That set of ideas came along at the right time to influence the birth of a nation.

Philosophical systems are created and developed by groups of intellectuals corresponding with one another. By contrast, governments are usually formed by a conqueror or they coalesce out of smaller city-states. The United States became independent in an unusually self-aware way. It provided an opportunity to build a good government from scratch - to learn from previous mistakes. The form of "good government" the founding fathers chose was democracy, because it was the idea that was in vogue at the time. But it could easily have been different.

6 comments:

  1. I don't think we could have been a theocracy or a monarchy. Religious freedom and tyrannical rule were what the founding fathers were railing against. It is only today that we are trying to turn the US into something like these. We were really a collection of smaller democracies (states) that really only banded strongly together because they had to keep other countries with larger armies at bay.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's pretty much the way it happened, except that we were actually a monarchy up until independence. Every country in the world was either a monarchy or a theocracy at that time, IIRC. It would hardly have been surprising for George Washington to declare himself king. If it hadn't been for the will of the intellectuals, and the fact that old George and the other military leaders went along with it, things could have been very different.

    ReplyDelete
  3. America was founded by and run by business owners and remains so to this day. White male land owners voted. Not women and not peasants. Funny how todays lobbyists have pretty much keep it that way in this age. The difference is, we've been taught that its a democracy, so we think corporate ownership of senators is new. Another difference is the global instancy of information sharing and centralized media. Hopefully blogs and comments like what we participate in now can change some of this before we self-destruct.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The absence of women's suffrage and voting rights for blacks were certainly problems with the early democracy here. We all work within the constraints of our times.

    The wealthy do have more influence than the poor, and I'm not comfortable with the way corporations are acquiring the rights of natural citizens. That said, this is the most democratic place on earth. Senators are still elected, even if elections are swayed by advertising dollars. It is a continuous fight to elect good people and for those people to always act with integrity.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is NOT the most democratic place on earth. It is the most American place on earth. The Democratic and Republican parties and the blind faith of their followers are what essentially negate much of the leverage that our democracy should have. Look into the system under which the Presidential Debates are managed and try to tell me that we really have a democratic system. We have an oligarchy. Blind-faith Republicans try to make this a theocracy. Our system of primaries and elections do not really allow this to be a democracy. I'd argue that many of the countries in Europe and the British Commonwealth are more democratic in effect than we are here.
    I love America, but the "rah, rah, we're the best democracy" argument is fairly ignorant.
    And yes, I'm happy to live in a country where I can say that, but don't kid yourself and think its the only one.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Kevin, I appreciate your input and value your perspective, but it was not my intention to discuss the present. I'm sorry I let this get so far afield. The intention of this post was to ask an open-ended question about a unique moment in philosophical and political history.

    And in case you hadn't guessed, I hate politics.

    ReplyDelete