This was initially intended for an edit to post #36, but its size and that there were already responses to it have lead me to turn it into its own post.
Excerpt from Jefferson's first inaugural address:
"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles,
our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens,
resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
Here Jefferson is fully employing the ideas and concepts that are critical to the "civil religion" that forms the entire political-moral-philosophical superstructure that has shaped American thought and self-conception for at least two centuries now. The bolded portions run directly against the goal of
Excerpt from Obama's second inaugural addrss:
"Each time we gather to inaugurate a President we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
'
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. (Applause.)
The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.
And for more than two hundred years, we have."
The same reflexive identification of America as a promised nation, the invocation of democratic republicanism, equal rights, and self-direction. Both also tie the exercise of those rights to a "free market" economic system. While Obama's address, particularly in the sections after my citation, shows the modifications to that "civil religion" that derive from the Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement, it is remarkable how little the creed changed in the 212 years between the address. These same themes are revisited time and again in American rhetoric. It forms the backbone of how Americans think of themselves and the world. While the canon of the American gospel has added new works since the time of Jefferson (cf. Thoreau's
Civil Disobedience, Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, King's
Letters from a Birmingham Jail), those later additions are less replacements than refinements of the religious-philosophical-political system that arose during the late 18th century.
The biggest problem with letting a state have a monarchy, no matter how powerless, isn't the legal difficulty. We've amended the Constitution twenty-seven times in the past 230 years, and could do so again. The real problem is that it runs counter to the "sacred texts" that define what being an American is; it's heresy against the fundamental religion of the US. It's far easier to stop that "religion" from coming into being than it is to eradicate once it exists. Washington's Farewell Address already shows signs of the sacralization of the Declaration, a mere twenty-two years after the Declaration was issued. The mythologizing of Washington had essentially begun the moment the ARW ended, and the rest of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution began the sacralization process during the Monroe administration.
Here's Robert Bellah's seminal article on the subject:
http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm.
