This Christmas marks the 350th anniversary of the least-honoured genesis of
American freedom, to be celebrated in the New York suburb of Queens. For
only the fourth time in its history a fragile piece of paper called the
Flushing Remonstrance will go on display.
Written in 1657 by the English citizens of the Long Island village of
Flushing, it asserted their right to freedom of conscience against the
autocracy of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of their colony of New
Netherland. It thus long predated the “self-evident truths” of Jefferson’s
1776 Declaration of Independence.
The Flushing Remonstrance protested against Stuyvesant’s arrest, torture and
expulsion of a Quaker preacher for defying his ban on all religions but
Dutch Reformed protestantism. The 30 signatories were not themselves Quakers
but demanded that in the new colony: “If any persons . . . Presbyterian,
Independent, Baptist or Quaker . . . come in love to us, we cannot in
conscience lay violent hands upon them.” Indeed they demanded that “the law
of love, peace and liberty . . . [extend] to Jews, Turks and Egyptians . . .
which is the glory of the outward state of Holland and condemns hatred, war
and bondage”. The citizens of Flushing ringingly declared: “Let every man
stand or fall to his own Master.”
The remonstrance, expressed in beautiful 17th-century English prose, enraged
Stuyvesant. He feared too many disagreeable immigrants might be lured to
America by what he called “an imaginary liberty in a new and, as some
pretend, a free country”. He opposed any houseroom being offered to Quakers
and ordered all ships carrying such alien religions be sent back to sea. He
arrested and expelled a Flushing citizen, John Bowne, who had allowed his
house to be used by Quakers.
Stuyvesant met his match in Bowne, who took his case to the board of the Dutch
West India Company in Holland and returned triumphant. The company finally
slapped down Stuyvesant and asserted that there would be full liberty of
conscience in its American territories. While New Englanders were burning
witches, New Yorkers established a domain of liberty to the south.
Not until the 1791 Bill of Rights was the freedom of conscience set out and
won in the Flushing Remonstrance included as an amendment to the American
constitution.
Like the rest of America, Flushing is now steeling itself to honour its
remonstrance in another respect, through the ritual of a presidential
election. That ritual begins in January in the caucus rooms of Iowa and the
snowstorms of New Hampshire. It then embarks on what has become the most
extraordinary year-long festival of democracy anywhere in the world.
The preliminaries to an American election are rooted in history and appear
immutable. Americans are people of the book, treating their constitutions,
precedents and treatises as of quasi-sacred import. The linguistic beauty
and clarity of meaning of their early documents is unsurpassed.
An American election is more than a periodic shifting of oligarchic chairs. It
is a mass assertion of the people’s right to choose and dismiss their head
of state. It is the closest any big country gets to James Madison’s “pure
democracy”, regularly purging the accumulated toxins of the political blood.
Europe has nothing to match it.
Such an election is not always nice, for much is at stake. A presidential
election is a drawn-out extravaganza of trumpets, flags, hucksters,
publicists, journalists, lawyers, businessmen, dancing girls, saints and
bigots. It often terrifies the outside world, which is why American
elections produce a storm of transatlantic abuse about the degeneration of
democracy into a dumbed-down rich man’s, white man’s club.
So-called cyber-democracy has added the charge of plebiscitary mob rule, as if
the majesty of presidency has been reduced to the level of an electronic
town hall meeting.
In 2008 at least one aspect of such abuse will be simply untrue. The
democratic lottery has already put into the spotlight not a gaggle of
millionaires but a black, a Mormon, a woman, an Italian and a southern
Baptist. The governors of the Dutch West India Company would have swelled
with pride. The Flushing Remonstrance is alive and kicking.
The late Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, would lecture Americans on the
power of their democracy “to take the world to the brink of disaster” and at
the last minute haul it back. The subject might be the Depression, wartime
isolationism, McCarthyism, nuclear confrontation and now a concocted “war on
terror”. Whatever it was, said Schlesinger, “the great strength of democracy
is its capacity for self-correction”. America reaches the right answer only
after trying all the wrong ones.
At a time when America is the acknowledged world superpower, such a
rollercoaster beneath its leadership can easily be misunderstood. In its
paranoid reaction to the events of 2001, America under George W Bush
appeared reckless and imperialist, a bully and a “preemptive aggressor”.
It has fought indecisive and incompetent wars against weak countries that
America cannot help and can only plunge into poverty and misery. To the
wider world, it seems to crave enemies not friends, losing sight of
Kennedy’s inaugural admonition that “civility is not a sign of weakness”.
The neoconservative denizens of Washington have been reduced to polluting
their intelligence, suspending habeas corpus and debating the uses of
torture. They seem unable to engage with other world powers on such matters
as trade reform, international law and the future of the United Nations.
This is why America’s friends abroad have felt more despair this past five
years than in the previous 50. To turn a phrase once applied to Britain by
the American diplomatist Dean Acheson, America has acquired an empire but
not found a role.
Yet there is to be an election. As those friends also know, there are as many
Americas as there are Americans. Any visitor to that country can sense a
yearning for a change, as can any reader of its polls or consumer of its
media. This is represented by a sign over Phoenix, Arizona, counting down
the days to the end of the Bush presidency. It is represented by the
continued buoyancy of the Barack Obama campaign. America seems desperate to
give itself at least the option of a black president, of the idealism of a
born-again Kennedy.
That Obama’s candidature can be contemplated in a land that has twice voted
for Bush and Dick Cheney is the measure of how drastically America’s
constitution allows it to cleanse its politics and grasp at something new.
It does so by inculcating respect for its documents. The Flushing
Remonstrance, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the
Emancipation Proclamation do more than set out the basis on which a
commonwealth conducts its business. They offer a blueprint for the purgative
tradition, summed up in H L Mencken’s famous definition of elections as
“chucking the rapscallions out”.
When America appears to teeter on the brink of disaster, “the book” drags it
back. In an age of overweening government, only the book has the power to
call it to account. That is why Americans revere their historic documents.
It is why Europeans, who lack such documents or at best abuse them, wander
so casually from the path of liberty. As they wrestle in interminable
constitutional disarray, Europeans should note the classic simplicity of the
American texts. Their conservatism, their attention to checks, balances and
liberties, is not archaic cliché but democratic realpolitik. Those texts
would certainly pass the test of referendum.
Last week the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, could not bring himself to
attend the ceremony in Lisbon to sign the new European constitution. But
sign he eventually did. He thus joined Stuyvesant against Flushing. He
backed authority against liberty, as his wish to extend detention without
trial backs state power against the practice of freedom.
As long as Europe’s citizens allow their leaders to do such things, they
cannot criticise the American way of democracy.
