We the Fallen People

Summary: Framed around an oft-repeated but inaccurate quote, McKinzie points out that the theological and political anthropology of the founders changed within a generation and how that change impacts our politics today.

As McKenzie opens the book, he traces how many politicians over the past decades have wrongly quoted Tocqueville to say a variation of, “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” The quote has publicly and regularly been pointed out as wrong, but it continues to be used.

After establishing the quote as wrong, McKenzie lays out how he believes the founders understood human nature and how they established the constitution concerning their understanding of human nature. McKenzie believes that the founders believed in Original Sin (Wikipedia link), which in his conception, means that they designed the constitution to prevent populism from overtaking the country. In McKenzie's account, human depravity and sin would mean that populism would lead to demagogues and other corruptions of power.

I want to start by saying that. I am not a historian, a theologian, or a political scientist. I read and respond to books here, and quite often, I think I am likely wrong because of my educational limitations and ideological biases. I have read many of these posts that I would disagree with later as I acquired new information or saw through some of my blind spots. We the Fallen People is a book that I both really do recommend because I think it is overall helpful in thinking through the issues of the partisan divide and how the country should be politically oriented. But I also think that there are two related concepts that I think McKenzie has either gotten wrong or wrongly described.

Much of the evidence that McKenzie is citing is about how President Andrew Jackson's version of populism (and his authoritarian tendencies) was contrary to the founder's intentions and then how the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who was skeptical of democracy and populism, rightly understood the strengths and weaknesses of the United States more similarly to the founders than his contemporary Jackson. Underneath this historical analysis is a concern about the ways that the recent President Trump, who regularly drew inspiration from Jackson, is accelerating the problems within the United States because the founder's vision was for a country that rejects strong central leadership and populist leaders because they distrusted centralized power because of sinful humanity.

Jackson has lots of evidence for authoritarian styles of leadership, from his rejection of the Supreme Court's attempts to curb his power to the vilification of minorities (the enslaved and Native Americans) to create a point of fear to draw people to him, to rejection of institutions not under his direct control because of their ability to resist his impulse toward power (The Bank of America).

And Tocqueville's skepticism of populism and individualism meant that in his exploration of democracy, he was particularly interested in how democracy could lead to tyranny.

McKinzie, about a third of the way in, uses Cherokee removal to illustrate that it was not a failure of democracy (as is often framed today) but an example of democracy's problems that Tocqueville identifies:

Modern scholars who condemn the removal of Native Americans typically describe it as a “contradiction of democracy” or a “betrayal of democracy.”73 This would have mystified Tocqueville. Remember, as Tocqueville understood it, the “output” of democracy is whatever the majority in a democratic society advocates, condones, or tolerates—good or bad, wise or unwise, just or unjust. By Tocqueville's reasoning, any act of government that commands the support of the majority is by definition “democratic.” To suggest otherwise would be illogical.

Don't misunderstand my point. To concede that we probably would have supported the removal of Native Americans had we been alive two centuries ago doesn't exonerate those who did so at the time. It implicates us. When we wrestle with this rightly, when we not only concede but confess this reality, our prayer shifts to that of the tax collector, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” And when this becomes our heart's cry, Native American removal becomes more than just a regrettable episode in the distant past. It becomes an urgent warning—to us, today. Although the circumstances would surely be different, we are just as capable of condoning injustice and rationalizing it as righteous, of depriving others of their liberty and calling ourselves good. In a democracy, the minority is never truly safe from the majority.