The Declaration of Independence and Conditions for Democratic Flourishing

0:00Michael McConnell:This is a special episode of Stanford Legal, a recording from one of the many special discussions that take place here at Stanford. Keep following the feed for our regular programming.

0:25Condoleezza Rice:Welcome to The Declaration at 250, a special series from the Stanford Constitutional Law Center presented by Stanford Legal. I'm Michael McConnell, and as we approach the 250th anniversary of America's founding document, we've gathered eight of the nation's leading scholars, historians, and jurists to explore a deceptively simple question. What new can be said about the Declaration of Independence today? In this first episode, we examine the fundamental conditions that allow democracies not merely to survive but to flourish. Our guest is Condoleezza Rice, the 66th United States Secretary of State and current director of the Hoover Institution, whose unique perspective bridges the worlds of diplomacy and scholarship.

1:15Condoleezza Rice:Drawing on decades of experience navigating global affairs and teaching political science, Secretary Rice reflects on how democracies are built and sustained, not through idealism alone, but through hard work, historical awareness, resilient institutions, and above all, dedicated citizens willing to do the difficult work of self-government. Responding to Secretary Rice is Professor David Kennedy, an eminent historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Freedom from Fear, The American People in Depression and War. As we begin our exploration of the Declaration's enduring significance, there's no better place to start than with the essential question, what does it actually take for democracy to work?

2:01Condoleezza Rice:Let's listen.

2:04Michael McConnell:Good morning. Well, I have the following challenge, which is that I'm going to talk about the U.S. Constitution with one of the most eminent American historians ready to comment on what I say. And so with that little caveat, let me thank, first of all, Mike McConnell and his colleagues for this opportunity to talk on Constitution Day about this very special anniversary that we are about to welcome, which is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But I've spent a lot of time recently saying to people that the Declaration of Independence was actually, in many ways, not necessarily the start of democracy.

2:51Michael McConnell:The Declaration of Independence was a declaration to overthrow the old. And if you start with the lovely language about when in the course of human events, And of course you do come to the consent of the governed and so forth. But maybe my favorite line in the Declaration of Independence comes a little bit further down. And I have to say I was Secretary of State and I decided I wanted to go to the National Archives and see some of our foundational documents. Now the reason that you go when you're Secretary of State is later on you might have to stand in line. But they let you go in and I saw the Emancipation Proclamation, which for me as a descendant of slaves was particularly moving, but also then got to actually read the Declaration of Independence.

3:36Michael McConnell:And I thought to myself, when did I last read the Declaration of Independence? Maybe in fourth grade at Burnett-A-C Hill Elementary School, maybe not completely understanding it. So here's my actually favorite line to make the point that the transition from my topic, the Declaration of Independence, to democratic flourishing is not something that can be taken for granted. And so here's the line. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He has brought the woes of death and desolation and tyranny. Okay, not exactly a high-minded notion about democracy, but rather a criticism of the old and intention to overthrow the old.

4:24Michael McConnell:And so I think one of the things that's worth thinking about is how do you get from that petulant kind of list of particulars against King George, which would then lead to war, to what the title of this day is, Constitution Day. How do you get to that moment, and how do you think about it and its continuing lessons. So the main point that I wish to reflect on is that the point of revolution is not necessarily the beginning of democracy. It is the end of tyranny. And those two are necessary conditions, but not necessarily sufficient. The French Revolution is a very good example of this. There was the overthrow of the old, and then there, as you will remember a lot of guillotines and the terror and ultimately the re-establishment of an emperor and so that is a transition from the moment of revolution to the democratic flourishing that actually didn't work out so well for quite a long time.

5:31Michael McConnell:I can tell you a little story about that. I was actually there for the 200th anniversary of that moment in France and that was because we were all invited. I was Secretary of State at the time. We were all invited to be a part of it. And there was one very poignant moment, which is that Margaret Thatcher had said something along the way that the French Revolution was not actually the beginning of democracy. It was the beginning of communism in Europe. And so they sat her in the third row with the leaders of not very, from their point of view, important countries. But she actually might have been right.

6:15Michael McConnell:So what does that transition depend on? That transition from the moment of revolution, the moment of throwing off the old, to the moment of the democratic flourishing and ultimately democratic consolidation. The first is I think you do have to account for circumstances. And I'll come back to this in some of the cases that I want to talk about. But you have to say that if you are fortunate in your circumstances, it's a lot easier. And in fact, the United States was really rather fortunate in its circumstances. Having from the time of the arrival of the settlers, the colonists on this land, they found not a completely open field, but a pretty open field compared to what others would see.

7:08Michael McConnell:In other words, the institutional landscape was theirs to shape in a way because there was not a great deal of competition from other organized forces at the time. And they also had a little luck. A lot was in America's favor. They were relatively homogeneous, white male landowners. They had a fairly long period of managing political affairs even before that declaration. And there was no oppressor with a monopoly of the use of force as most tyrannies have. Now, let me repeat that. We know that the Declaration of Independence leads to a war with Great Britain. But one of the advantages that the Continental Army would have is that Great Britain was a long way away and actually found it more difficult, therefore, to fight this war from a great distance despite its great power.

8:09Michael McConnell:And so no oppressor with a monopoly of force, a monopoly on the use of force. So relatively homogeneous, fairly long period of managing political affairs before the declaration, no oppressor with a monopoly of force that was proximate to them and even so it almost failed twice. It almost failed because the articles of confederation were too weak and there was too little centralized power and then of course it almost failed when in the time before the Civil War the reckoning with the original sin of the American founding slavery would come to create a moment in which it looked like it might not survive at all.

8:57Michael McConnell:And so even with these favorable circumstances, this is an experiment that almost failed twice. Now, it didn't fail, of course. And after the experience with the Articles of Confederation, the founders, of course, created the Constitution, an institutional framework through which people would be able to carry out their interest. People had to accept that there was this sort of abstraction called a constitution through which you would carry out your interest and your desires. As was said in the Declaration of Independence where you would pursue happiness, I've always thought maybe pursue fulfillment is a little bit better way to think about it.

9:44Michael McConnell:And they were able then to create this institutional framework that we now know had several features. I'm going to focus in a moment on one particular feature, which is this distribution of power among three co-equal branches, which in many ways I think is the story of why this Constitution has survived for so long. So they made the transition, and we as Americans have what has been called a spirit of constitutionalism. In other words, a kind of fealty to the Constitution almost as our personal protector. I've always thought that it's extraordinary that many of the cases before the Supreme Court are actually about an individual or a group of individuals saying, you have violated my rights and now I will take you to the judicial branch to resolve that.

10:36Michael McConnell:So think Brown versus the Board of Education, for instance. And so our kind of personal protector. Since I worked a lot internationally, this is sometimes a bit of a mystery to even other democracies. I had a German friend say to me, the problem with you Americans is that you think just because you have rights, you have to exercise them. And I do think, while it's not an exclusively American thing, the way that they are exercised through this Constitution that itself is a couple of centuries old is pretty remarkable. Now one of the problems is that I think that as we go back in our history and we look at moments when that Constitution actually played the role of pushing the American experiment forward, we sometimes don't actually think about the history, the degree to which various elements of this democracy are really the story of how it got pushed forward.

11:35Michael McConnell:And let me use an example that I personally know very well. So I was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. I was born in Alabama at a time when you couldn't go to a movie theater or to a restaurant if you were black, where despite the 1954 Brown versus the Board of Education separate but equal would not stand. The schools in Alabama were still segregated. And so it was a moment at which, in fact, constitutionally protected rights were being denied to a large part of the population. It is also the case that I was eight when the Civil Rights Act passed. I'll come back to that. But for my parents or for my grandparents, this was an even more searing experience.

12:21Michael McConnell:My father and my mother were engaged in 1952 and they went down to register to vote. And my mother, who was very fair-skinned and beautiful, was asked by the poll tester, what is it that you teach? And she said, I teach American history. She taught English. He said, so you probably know who the first president of the United States was. And she said, yes, George Washington. He said, you pass. He looked at my father, six foot three, dark skinned and a football player, and said, how many beans are in this jar? Now, my father was very despondent about this, and he went back, and there was this older man who was one of his, my father was a Presbyterian minister and high school guidance counselor.

13:09Michael McConnell:He went back and he talked to this elder in his church, and his elder said, oh, Reverend, he said, I tell you how to get registered. He said, you go down there and you find this one clerk. He said, she's trying to register Republicans. This was in the days when there were no Republicans in Alabama. He said, if you will declare yourself to be Republican, she'll register you. And my father was registered. And from that day on, he was a member of the Republican Party. So they learned to work around it, but it was a searing experience to try to exercise your rights at this time. I remember too being with my uncle as a little girl and on election day, the day that George Wallace was running for governor, and even in my little six year old self, I knew that this was probably not a good thing for black people.

13:58Michael McConnell:I'd known that this man was a segregationist, but there were long, long, long, long lines of black people going to vote. and I said to my uncle, if all of those people vote, then George Wallace probably can't win. My uncle said, no, no, we're a minority, he will win. And I said to him, then why do they bother? And he said, because they know that one day that vote will matter. And so these are experiences that I had, and of course, the experience with the Civil Rights Movement is very different if you lived it in Birmingham than if you now see it in various documentaries and renderings of it. If you want to understand what happened with the Civil Rights Movement, most people would focus on Selma and the marches in Birmingham and the great speeches of Martin Luther King.

14:49Michael McConnell:All of those were important in the sense of the protest that ultimately we have had enough. However, there were other elements of the progress in Civil Rights that are more institutional in nature. Starting in 1937, Thurgood Marshall and lawyers of the NAACP would get together on Friday mornings to decide what court cases they could bring that might bring down segregation. There was something called the Margo Report, in which they actually would say we can maybe win that one in Oklahoma, maybe we can win that one in Ohio. they won some, they lost some, but they were working, if you will, the system to see what they could get overturned.

15:37Michael McConnell:And then of course, there was the appeal to the 14th Amendment, which had been passed to eliminate slavery, but which had language to which they appealed. And then finally, the legislation itself, which ironically would come under a southerner, Lyndon Johnson. I can tell you too that as a little kid when John F. Kennedy was assassinated there was great despair in the black community as to whether or not civil rights legislation would go forward because as my fourth grade teacher said there's a southerner in the White House what will become of us now. Well what became of us now was the 64 Public Accommodations Act and the 65 Voting Rights Act.

16:24Michael McConnell:Now, I do have to tell you a funny little story about the Public Accommodations Act, which was the one that said you basically have to serve black people too in a restaurant. About two days after it passed, my father said, let's go out to dinner. And so we did. And we walked in, and people kind of stopped eating, and they looked up, and then they went back to eating. And it said something to me about the importance of law. People always talk about changing attitudes and changing culture. But if you change the laws, sometimes the great majority of people will realize, oh yeah, now it's legal, I guess I'll go back to eating.

17:05Michael McConnell:And that has always stayed in my mind when I hear, well, changing the law isn't enough. It may not be enough, but it's a very important prerequisite. it. So consolidated democracy, which I think we can argue we have in the United States, although I know David has another term for it. We talked about this. But let me tell you what I mean by consolidated democracy. So we go through the Declaration of Independence, we go through the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, the Civil War and then we emerge on the other side. And I would call the 64-65 period a second founding because until then there were large numbers of the American population in the South principally who lived under Jim Crow explicitly denied constitutional rights.

18:00Michael McConnell:So we go through the second founding. So what do I mean by consolidated democracy? It is a time when many things have happened de jure. In other words, laws have changed, as I just expressed. But the institutions are beginning to get moral authority, normative acceptance, not just an acceptance because it's legal. That is a fact that once institutions get to that place, they tend to be stickier. they tend to fight back when there are challenges to them and it is also a matter of at that time it's actually unhar - it's hard to undo them. Now it also is the case that what exists at the time will have a very big impact on when that moment comes.

18:55Michael McConnell:We've talked about the American case which I would argue maybe because I'm a specialist in international politics in retrospect looks relatively straightforward if you think about some of the cases that we have seen since. So one way to the admonition here to think anew about the Declaration of Independence is to think about its continuing influence on countries and peoples that are trying to make the journey from the overthrow of tyranny to the flourishing of democracy. And I can tell you in my work as Secretary Abroad that the lessons of the U.S. case are almost always the first reference point for those who are trying to overthrow tyranny.

19:43Michael McConnell:And it is most certainly the first reference point for those who want to keep tyranny in place. Because they understand that if you have certain kinds of institutions, it is actually a lot easier to keep people down. Now, what are some of those? I would say that the most important is really the separation of powers. And it comes in the following form. If there is too strong an executive and the other institutions are weak, the independent judiciary, the legislature, and most misunderstood sometimes civil society and the organization of civil society, those become the institutional basis on which once tyranny is overthrown people can begin to move to democratic flourishing.

20:32Michael McConnell:It's not very well understood for instance that in Gorbachev's Russia, Gorbachev's Soviet Union in 1985 the first signs of what we would come to know as pyristorica, in other words people and glasnost, people speaking their minds would actually be a civil society organization devoted to cleaning up Lake Baikal. So just think about that. It's not always a rights issue. Sometimes it's just that people organize. And it is one reason that authoritarians go after civil society. The independent media, yes, but the independent media, they can control much better. Civil society is much harder. So I think I want to now reflect on just a few cases of understanding how this institutional landscape, that is, what becomes of the separation of powers, what becomes of civil society, how do we think about the overthrow of tyranny and that moment when they have a chance for democratic flourishing.

21:40Michael McConnell:Let me talk about one, first of all, that is near to my heart that just didn't work. That would be the Russian Revolution. Not the Russian Revolution of 1917. We all understand why that didn't work. But the Revolution of 1991. And there is a story. The Soviet Union collapses in December of 1991. And Boris Yeltsin, a few months later, is the president. He's the president of Russia before the Soviet Union collapses, and then he becomes the president of the Russian Federation, which includes some other countries as well, some other former republics as well. The general story that you hear about this is, well, you know, they just didn't have the DNA, they just didn't have the tradition, but I want to suggest to you that this is actually an institutional story.

22:36Michael McConnell:And that institutional story is that you had too strong a president, too strong an executive, who we all loved, Boris Sheldon, we all loved him, but who failed to actually exercise power through institutions. At an early point in his presidency, he got sick and tired of the legislature, the Duma as it was called, doing things that he didn't like and so he just started ruling by decree. What in that circumstance happens to the Duma? It becomes weaker and weaker and weaker because institutions have to be used, people have to see them succeed, and then they began to get this normative power. Interestingly, it would have maybe worked if it had just been Yeltsin or had he transferred the presidency to a man named Boris Nemtsov, who would later die in what was an assassination.

23:32Michael McConnell:But Boris Nemtsov might have treated the strong presidency differently than did the man that he chose, Vladimir Putin. And so one way to think about institutions is if they cannot constrain the worst, then they're not very powerful. It's not about constraining the best that is important for institutions in the separation of powers. It's about constraining the worst. And I think Boris Sheldon's decision to give that to Vladimir Putin is an example. Now, there's another one where it didn't work for the opposite reason. That would be Afghanistan. There, you had too little centralized power in a country that had had 25 years of civil war, that had never really been an integrated country in Kabul, and we tried to make it an integrated country in Kabul using the landscape that was there, who were the warlords, who actually each took responsibility for their part of the country.

24:37Michael McConnell:And you were never able to get a strong enough government, central government in Kabul, to control those circumstances, and therefore terrorism arises within them. Some make their deals with terrorists, and so forth and so on. So this is an example of too weak an executive. So we have an example of too strong an executive and now too weak an executive. Now a couple of cases where I think you could argue that it did work. The transition from that moment at which the old is thrown over is one thing that we all will remember as the Arab Spring. where the old is thrown over and their great hopes about whether or not the moment for democracy has arrived in the Middle East.

25:23Michael McConnell:And probably the country that did best was Tunisia. There is an interesting institutional story in that almost all of these other cases, Egypt, Algeria, etc., were kind of located in the capital, not in the country as a whole. But Tunisia had a nationwide union movement that became one of the sources of institutional stability outside. Unfortunately, it did not last, and Tunisia is now moving more and more toward too strong an executive and toward tyranny. Another one where it did work, Poland. The story about Poland is often a story about the overthrow of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the rise of solidarity.

26:17Michael McConnell:But what is forgotten is that in 1981, when martial law was declared in Poland, solidarity, which had been formed in 1979 under Lech Walesa at that shipyard in Gdansk, had to go underground. They were sustained by a very odd troika. Ronald Reagan's CIA, the AFL-CIO, since they were, after all, a labor union, and the Vatican. Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who had obviously a lot of contacts to village priests everywhere, and solidarity was sustained with things that now seem a bit archaic, but printing presses. so they could continue to get their message out. And when communist power could no longer hold the next moment of revolutionary possibility, solidarity was already organized.

27:15Michael McConnell:It was able to emerge very quickly to negotiate with the communists in what was called the roundtable negotiations in January and February of 1989 and ultimately to take power in the fall of 1989. And then finally, two others, There's one that I think people don't recognize, but I was myself intimately involved in. In 2007, there was an absolutely horrible Kenyan election, a contested election. Part of the problem for Kenya is that their parties are ethnically isolated. So you have parties for each of the ethnic groups in Kenya. As you might imagine, this means that any election is really very fraught.

27:56Michael McConnell:And this one in 2007 was particularly fraught. a thousand people had died in tribal and ethnic violence. And I was asked by Kofi Annan to come and help him negotiate a government of national reconciliation, which we did. Not very easy, but it came about. Fast forward five years later, there was a contested election in Kenya. But this time, they said, we will take this to the electoral courts and let it be resolved there. That is an interesting institutional evolution where people somehow decided we don't want to go that route of violence anymore. We will have this institution called the Electoral Commission, the Electoral Courts, to decide it.

28:44Michael McConnell:Every Kenyan election is a high wire act, but knock on wood, until now there's been nothing that looks like 2007. And so the lesson here is that institutions can start to evolve and get normative power. And then finally, one that we've just seen, which is particularly interesting, and that's the fall of Viktor Orban in Hungary. Everybody talked about the democratic recession and how Hungary was an example of the democratic recession. But very interestingly, it looks as if some of the institutions survived during that 25-plus years. It also looked as if one institutional intervention from the outside mattered perhaps more than others.

29:29Michael McConnell:Hungary was a member of the European Union. The European Union had begun to sanction Viktor Orban about 15 years ago. It was therefore not, the benefits of European Union membership were not available to Hungary, and Hungary sunk to be the 27th economy in the European Union. That is what Mayer used against Viktor Orban in the elections, and Viktor Orban is no more. Fortunately, he agreed to leave power, but it shows that institutions can sometimes be inchoate or even latent, but will come back to the fore. Now, all of the stories that I've told you are stories about the moment of revolutionary opening, and then whether or not they move to that next stage of at least democratic resilience, if not consolidation.

30:27Michael McConnell:But they're institutional stories, and I want to close here. there is too much of a tendency to explain whether or not you get from the moment of revolution to democratic consolidation or resilience by reference to something that political scientists, when they don't know what else to call it, call culture. Culture is a residual category that assumes that there are some people who just don't have the DNA for democracy. and you hear it in almost every case. Or they don't have the traditions or they don't have somehow the cultural traditions of democracy. This used to be said about Africans, by the way, because they were just too tribal.

31:14Michael McConnell:It used to be said about Asians, they were just too Confucian. It used to be said about Latin Americans, they just preferred men on horseback or cadillos. And so we have to ask ourselves, do we underestimate the passion of people to live outside of tyranny, which is in fact universal? And instead of saying, well, they just don't have the DNA, to recognize that even in the history of the United States, this was a very difficult, long transition that is in fact still underway. The Declaration of Independence declared a core value. Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

32:03Michael McConnell:Exactly how to put that into practice is a very long road that continues to this day. So when tyranny is dissolved, the work has just begun to translate the moment of revolution into democratic flourishing. And we owe it to others who are trying to make that journey, not to sell them short. Thank you very much.