There has been a lot of discussion over the past couple of weeks — if you can remember anything before the abomination that is the ACHA — over what the core principles of the Democratic party are, and how far party members need to conform to them. This came up around the candidacy of Heath Mello and whether party leaders should have supported him given his anti-abortion voting record in the Nebraska legislature.
I’m a 69-year-old woman who remembers the days when abortions — not to mention birth control — were illegal in most states, and I blog for Planned Parenthood and administer the This Week in the War on Women group here at Daily Kos, so clearly women’s health matters to me.
But this is a matter of endorsed policy, not of core values.
So I have been thinking about what our core values really are. What differentiates us from other political parties in this country, especially from the other major party, the Republicans? And I think I found them in our country’s founding documents. Look at these passages:
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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed [...]
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Think about it. Governments are established among men to secure the rights of the people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And governments derive their power from the people. Not from God, as was the case throughout Europe at the time, but from the consent of the governed. How radical is that? Not a king ruling to be feared by the people, but rather a government dependent upon the people for its validity.
And the Preamble to the Constitution lists four things the government it is establishing is supposed to do for the governed, giving equal weight to providing for the general welfare — equal in importance with providing for the common defense and securing the blessings of liberty.
I’m not infatuated with the founding fathers or the documents they gave us. They were all white men of property, and it was the consent of white men of property that they meant, and for whom they were securing these rights, and that for many of them, part of that property was other human beings. I’ve said before that the history of this country is of the fights other groups have fought for their part in these core rights, and to have their consent sought by those seeking to govern. African-Americans, women, workers, the disabled — all have declared their rights to be included under the protections of and consent for our government.
The founders included the mechanisms to do this.
We are still a long way from the vision, but the arc of history until recently has been towards justice.
But where I think Democrats differ from our other political parties is that we take the role of government seriously in securing our rights and providing for the general welfare. A government that makes laws that protect the rights of minority groups or that see that our poor people are fed, housed, educated, and healthy, is doing its constitutional duty. No more, no less.
This is not oppression, as some would have it. This is government working as it was intended to work.
We disagree with Republicans on many policy issues, but the crux of our disagreements rests on how we see the role of government in our lives.