Facing South: The moves of the North Carolina sedition caucus are not only dishonest, servile, and wrong; they are unfaithful. They break fidelity with the American promise.
In 1935, the German American political theorist Carl Friedrich wrote that “to be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact.” Friedrich wasn’t out to disparage the French. He meant, rather, to stress that in the United States national membership is not based on race, religion, language, tribe, geography, pedigree, or ancestry. It is, instead, lodged in an idea, a commitment. In what Abraham Lincoln saw as our nation’s “primary cause,” the principle of “liberty to all.”
Lyndon Johnson described the centrality of our creedal promise with surprising eloquence in his greatest speech, introducing the Voting Rights Act: “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose sound in every American heart — ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘government by the consent of the governed.'”
In our most important national document, Lincoln named that promise as the central purpose of the Civil War — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” President Obama put it less formally in a recent conversation with rock star Bruce Springsteen: “America is a place where you don’t have to look a certain way, it’s fealty to a creed that matters.” To be an American demands a pledged and devoted notion, not a claim of ancestry or purported privilege.
That means, of course, it is possible to behave in ways that are un-American, ways that violate the American promise, rejecting the very mission of our nation. It is possible to be guilty of casting aside our constitutive agreement, to betray both our declared meaning and the sustaining sacrifice of millions, stretching over centuries, to make real, as Martin Luther King put it, “the promises of democracy.” Our Republican leaders in Washington have shown that such betrayal can come even from those in high public office, those who wrap themselves habitually in the American flag, and those who wrongly advertise their status as super patriots.
Think of what the North Carolina sedition caucus has demonstrated.
As Senate leader Mitch McConnell put it on Jan. 6, “the voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken, if we overrule them it will damage our republic forever … our democracy would enter a death spiral.”
Rep. Liz Cheney added a few weeks later:
“The Republican Party is at a turning point and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution. The 2020 election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
North Carolina Republican House members Bishop, Budd, Cawthorn, Foxx, Hudson, Murphy, and Rouzer answered these challenges decisively — voting to reject the positions proffered by both McConnell and Cheney. These lawmakers, and the broad political organizations that support, sustain, and enable them, chose explicitly to favor their own quests for power over democracy and constitutional obligation — the ultimate governing transgression in the United States. They moved to reject the necessary background conditions for democratic political work in a republic. They proved themselves faithless to the central commitment of our nation. The first statute ever passed by the United States Congress prescribed an oath of office for the new government’s officials. George Washington signed the bill on June 1, 1789. Its simple text read: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States.” The majority of North Carolina’s Republican congressmen have given Washington’s handiwork the back of the hand.”