Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
Americans are justly proud of the liberal democracy they’ve erected. To be sure, the build hasn’t always been effortless. We’ve faltered spectacularly, especially with our pervasive mistreatment of minoritized groups. We’ve oppressed women, gays, lesbians, immigrants, Jews, Muslims – practically anyone who isn’t Christian, heterosexual, socioeconomically secure and male. And then there’s race. The legacy of slavery and the vestiges of Native American removal policies will forever tarnish this country’s eminence. There can never be an excuse for the truth that a large swath of Americans has forsaken, and continues to forsake, our marginalized sisters and brothers.
And yet with all that said, with all the cautions and caveats about our notorious past, the country has mostly delivered on its lofty promises. There is no shame in shouting the chorus of liberty, democracy, popular sovereignty and equality from the American rafters.
That is why we should all be puzzled by the growing discord over foreign aid.
Traditionally, foreign aid has three intersecting purposes: 1) It has a diplomatic purpose, namely to influence decision making abroad; 2) it has a humanitarian purpose, aimed at addressing issues of desperate need and severe poverty; and 3) it has a marketing purpose — to spread the gospel of democracy and freedom to the far reaches of the globe. All three are meant to stabilize a volatile and unpredictable world. All three are intended to further America’s national interests.
U.S. support for foreign nations boasts a long and uneven history; indeed, it dates back to the early days of the republic. Though often self-serving and almost always accompanied by a heavy hand, America’s initial investments abroad were intended to promulgate the principles of the American Revolution beyond our borders. From Congress’ 1812 decision to appropriate $50,000 for relief to earthquake-torn Venezuela to the Monroe Doctrine a decade later, political officials saw the expansion of European colonialism as a threat to the American ideal of democratic self-rule. Not in our backyard, John Quincy Adams, the architect of the Monroe Doctrine, announced. Most European nations were ruled by monarchies and we have been burned by one, he argued. Never again.
Government involvement in the affairs of foreign capitals represents just one chapter of the tale. Privately funded humanitarian efforts blossomed in the early 19th century as well. When the Greeks sought independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, American citizens mobilized with their wallets. Less than a generation later, we rallied to the aid of the Irish during the massive 1845 potato famine. Government took the primary lead again in the 20th century with the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, the “decade of development” under JFK and LBJ, and the “Food for Peace” program, an initiative that began during the Eisenhower administration and has continually provided famine relief around the world for 70 years.
Foreign aid is in our blood. It is part of America’s identity. And, yes, it always comes at a price. Leaders in Washington dangle the dollar in front of foreign leaders in order to influence, persuade and force specific outcomes. But that aid has saved countless lives and buttressed dozens of fragile democracies. Today, it is making a real difference in places like the Horn of Africa, Uganda and Afghanistan to name just a few.
Of course, humanitarian aid is one thing; military aid is something altogether different. Opposition voices are mainly focused on America’s support for Ukraine and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Israel. These voices are smart, they are informed and they are passionate. I respectfully disagree with most of them.
If we believe, as I think we should, that Vladimir Putin is singularly focused on imposing his version of authoritarianism on Ukraine — with sham elections, corruption, cronyism, discrimination, repression, intolerance for dissent, information manipulation and so on — don’t we have a moral responsibility to intervene? Have we forgotten that it was right to claim our independence from a despot 248 years ago and that the people of Ukraine are just trying to do the same? Have we forgotten that we would have lost the Revolutionary War, and remained a British colony, without the help of France, and that the people of Ukraine are asking us to be their French? Have we overlooked the fact that the Dutch and Spainiards chipped in with money and military assistance as well?
Israel is more complicated. Peace in the region is far beyond the horizon right now, and, for that, Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist coalition bears some significant responsibility. And yet Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, brutality — with 1,200 innocent people slaughtered and countless displays of savage cruelty — was an appalling, inhuman terrorist act that warranted a ferocious Israeli response. That is why American aid is so crucial. The only liberal democracy in the region, Israel has a right to defend its sovereign territory, to fight back when terrorized. It cannot do so effectively without American military assistance. We should not turn our back on a friend on a lonely island surrounded by a sea of illiberalism. But just the same, America’s obligation in the region cannot end there. We also have an ethical responsibility to ramp up humanitarian assistance — seriously ramp up humanitarian assistance — to all Palestinians. And we have an equally forceful imperative to do everything possible to realize a peaceful and lasting solution to this maddening conflict. Everything.
In a recent study, Americans greatly overestimated the amount of foreign aid we distribute. They pegged foreign spending at a whopping “25% of the federal budget” when the actual amount is closer to “1%.” That misperception is part of the story; it provides one explanation for the increasing frustration felt by many. Assistance to foreign regimes is not a major component of America’s governmental outlay, but it is a major part of our mission. Sponsoring democracy efforts overseas is good for America and it’s good for the world. Done ethically, aid to others can be the difference between tyranny and freedom, and between death and life.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.