The American Regime and Its Moral Ground

The American Regime and Its Moral Ground
The statue of the 16th President of the United States Abraham Lincoln is seen inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Feb. 12, 2009. Karen Bleier/AFP via Getty Images
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Commentary
In the night he was elected president in November 2008, Barack Obama addressed a vast throng in Grant Park in my hometown of Chicago and remarked that we had built this country “calloused hand by calloused hand, for 221 years.” Obama professed an admiration for Abraham Lincoln, but it was clear that he hadn’t understood—or accepted—Lincoln’s teaching. In contrast to Obama’s 221 years, Lincoln said at Gettysburg that “Four score and seven years” earlier our “fathers brought forth ... a new nation.” Counting back, Obama found the beginning of the country in 1787, with the drafting of our current Constitution. But counting back, Lincoln took the beginning of the nation to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence. It was not merely the claim of independence; it was the articulation of that “proposition” as Lincoln called it, “the father of all moral principle” among us: that “all men are created equal,” that the only just government over human beings must draw its powers from “the consent of the governed.” Lincoln reminded us that the Union, the American republic, was older than the Constitution. The Constitution was made, as it said, for “a more perfect Union.”
Hadley Arkes
Hadley Arkes
Author
Hadley P. Arkes, Ph.D., is the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions emeritus at Amherst College where he taught for 50 years. He is also the founder/director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Law and the American Founding in Washington, D.C. Among his numerous books are "First Things" (1986), "Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths" (2010), and "Beyond the Constitution" (2021).
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