James wasn’t glorifying war. He was pointing to the peaceable, constructive politics Shaw and his men fought to preserve: a politics in which “the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties.” Such nations, James said, “have no need of wars to save them.”
Today, we are again in urgent need of that tradition. But to renew it, we first need to recover it, and to tell a more complete story of what American democracy has always meant.
That story is important, but it is incomplete. Alongside the language of fixed rights ran a robust tradition of creative common work.
The founders gave this tradition a sophisticated articulation. John Adams defined the body politic as a “social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.” Jefferson held that realizing democracy required a culture in which every man “would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.”
When the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he found this tradition flourishing. Americans, he observed, banded together in voluntary associations to achieve what Europeans left to aristocrats or the state, driven by what he called “self-interest rightly understood”—the recognition that one’s long-term interests are inseparable from the well-being of one’s neighbors.
Since Tocqueville’s day, the Civil Rights movement is perhaps the richest example of the collaborative tradition and the civic courage it demands and inspires. In popular memory, it is primarily a story of rights. But it was also, and perhaps primarily, a story of citizens building power together across differences of race, class, religion, and ideology to create political possibilities none of them could have achieved alone.
The Freedom Schools of Mississippi taught Black Mississippians to read and to think critically, articulate their values, and imagine new futures for their communities. Ella Baker insisted on “group-centered leadership” rather than charismatic saviors, distributing power so that communities could sustain themselves long after any individual leader moved on.
None of it was comfortable. All of it required exactly the civic courage James had described: the willingness to work with people one distrusted or had been wronged by, in service of a goal that transcended those differences.
Both major parties reinforced this retreat—the right celebrating individual freedom from government, the left emphasizing group rights against majorities—casting democracy as a zero-sum competition rather than a collaborative enterprise. The result was a vicious cycle in which Americans came to treat government as a vending machine: insert preference, receive outcome.
But civic hope is not dead. Organizations like the Industrial Areas Foundation build civic power in working-class communities across partisan and racial divides. Braver Angels teaches Americans to engage across genuine differences without surrendering their convictions. Educators across the country are developing civics curricula that engage students in the actual practice of collaborative democracy rather than mere memorization of rights and procedures.
As we mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we would do well to remember how its signatories closed: with a mutual pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.
That pledge was not merely an assertion of rights. It was an act of courageous, collaborative citizenship—the founding gesture of a tradition we urgently need to reclaim.
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