Reclaiming Our Democratic Values
Before launching into specific ideas for improving U.S. democracy, we need to figure out where we are going, which requires reexamining and reclaiming our democratic values.
What does it mean to be an American? What are we trying to accomplish for the country and the majority of its residents? What are our rights and responsibilities?
Here are the values that top my list for what it means to be an American.
Freedom/Liberty – Everyone is free to live their life as they choose, so long as they aren’t deliberately causing harm to others (individualism). The Declaration of Independence says we have a right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Bill of Rights gives Americans freedom of speech and the press, religion (separation of church and state) and assembly, along with the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Over time, we have also gained the right to marry who we choose, whether that’s someone of a different race, religion, or someone of the same gender.
Equality – While the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” we have expanded that over the course of U.S. history and many struggles for civil and voting rights so that *all people* have equal rights. For people to best fulfill life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all should also have equal access to the basic necessities of life.
Civil Rights – Constitutional Amendment XIV, section 1 and Civil Rights Act of 1964 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 )
Voting rights – Amendments XV (race, color, servitude), XIX (sex/gender – women get right to vote), XXIV (no poll taxes) and XXVI (18 years & older can vote)
Justice – No one is above the rule of law. There should not be two systems of justice – one for the wealthy and powerful and a different one for everyone else. There is a severe access to justice gap in the U.S., where the majority of people who have a legal issue aren’t able to afford an attorney. (See https://law.stanford.edu/2024/06/13/justice-for-all-why-we-have-an-access-to-justice-gap-in-america-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/ for a discussion on the access to justice gap.) We also need to have Trump v. United States overturned because it puts President Donald Trump above the law. We don’t have kings at the head of the United States. The Declaration of Independence put King George on notice about that fact.
Multicultural Nation – The United States is a nation of Native people, those born here, those forcibly brought, those naturalized, and immigrants. It is often described as a melting pot, which suggests peoples of different cultures have melted together in some unified whole. But maybe we’re more like naboob (Ojibwe word for soup or stew), hotdish, jambalaya, or goulash, where we can still recognize the individual ingredients, but the melding of all creates something greater than each ingredient alone. Our differences can be our strengths if we let them and don’t allow others to divide us.
Power of the People – Governments “[derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” (Declaration of Independence) In a democracy, there need to be many avenues for the people to express how they want to be governed. These avenues should not be squelched, whether at the voting booth, through gerrymandering, or by keeping the people uninformed about their civic duties or how the government operates.
Basic Needs Met – To thrive in a democracy, people need access to adequate food, housing, health care (including abortion), education, childcare, and time off. Social programs, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., and various laws have helped with some of these needs, but they have not gone far enough and much of the social safety net is being actively stripped away by the Trump regime and Republicans. To meet people’s basic needs, we need to manage the wealth gap. We can’t have a small subset of the population hoarding all the wealth and resources of the country to the detriment of the majority. (That Elon Musk has become a trillionaire, at least on paper, is obscene.) The super wealthy tend to assume they accumulated all their wealth by themselves, but they have been supported in their endeavors by their relatives, workers and government systems while actively avoiding paying living wages or taxes.
Mutual Aid – Throughout U.S. history, there has been a constant struggle between the wealthy hoarding the country’s resources and power and those attempting to build a country that works for everyone. After a disaster, Americans pull together, pooling resources for recovery. We have also built government services and a robust nonprofit sector* for the betterment of all. (Roads, bridges, utilities, police, fire fighters, schools, U.S. Postal Service, emergency support during catastrophes, National Parks, public health, NOAA weather, NASA, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc.)
Privacy – Amendment IV of the Constitution protects us from unreasonable searches or seizures, however, those who wrote the Constitution did not foresee the internet and the wide-scale collection and use of data by private companies and the government. (They did, however, foresee what’s been happening with ICE, where agents purposefully enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant. That’s why they created the fourth amendment.)
In the past, most of us were only known in a relatively small geographic region. (Remember local phone books?) The U.S. is rapidly becoming a surveillance state (especially under Trump, ICE, and the work of Elon Musk’s DOGE). Corporations engage in surveillance of people for profit. AI promises to supercharge the violation of our privacy. Privacy is key to our democracy. We need to create and implement robust privacy rights and laws.
Healthy Environment – In the history of the U.S., this is a relatively new value, arising in the 1960s in response to environmental disasters and pollution. When rivers spontaneously combust due to chemical pollution, it tends to wake people up. (https://web.archive.org/web/20241129030356/https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa) President Richard Nixon and Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the environment. This and other government agencies that oversee climate, weather, and energy policy are even more critical as we face the climate crisis. An unlivable climate and poisoned ecosystem don’t allow for people or democracy to be healthy.
What We Don’t Value
In trying to figure out our direction as a country, it can also help to examine what we don’t value. Given Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) siege on Minnesota, the attack on Venezuela, and Trump’s unconstitutional war on Iran (with he and Pete Hegseth ordering the commission of war crimes), we do not want the federal government attacking and killing people due to the President’s narcissism, insecurity, paranoia, and cruelty or for any other drummed up political reason. We do not want an authoritarian or fascist at the helm, calling all the shots. That is the opposite of democracy.
Vilifying immigrants or people based on their race, religion, gender or sexuality is something that needs to stop. I also don’t want constant mass shootings throughout the country. Nor do I want the wealthy to hoard all the cash and resources, or to go without paying taxes in support of this country. Nor do I want corporations to keep merging until all we are left with are monopolies.
Choosing capitalism to the point that people are considered nothing more than expendable cogs in capitalism’s profit wheel is also undemocratic. We don’t need to operate under one particular economic system. Capitalists have benefited probably more than average people from the social programs we have instituted (roads, fire and police, public safety, public education, SNAP, WIC (money spent at grocery stores), military (government contracts), intellectual property laws (protecting capitalists’ IP for extended times so they can continue making money from it). Because they find ways to reduce their taxes through write-offs and other mechanisms, they don’t pay their fair share for social programs, but they certainly benefit by having the government and the rest of taxpayers foot the bill.
For every value we list, we need to get clear on what they mean in practice. Even if we can’t quite reach the ideal of each value, how do we continue working toward the ideal?
Democracy is complicated and messy. People will disagree on values (though probably not as much as we expect) or on how they are expressed through policies and actions (probably more disagreement here). And we’re likely to always have power-hungry people who excessively seek wealth and attention and will do anything to get both, including eroding our democracy. While we have struggled and never reached the ideal for most of our values, they provide us a North Star toward which to aim. That we haven’t achieved the ideal doesn’t mean we should give up. Instead, we keep working to make this “a more perfect union.” (Constitution)
Look to Foundational Documents
For direction on reclaiming and improving the expression of our democratic values, we need to look to foundational documents, laws, speeches, and events in our history.
To cover some of the country’s history, NPR has put together a list of 10 books to help you understand America at this moment: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/nx-s1-5646641/best-books-us-history-america. Other such lists are available through an online search.
Foundational documents don’t just include the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, but key documents created prior to and throughout the history of the U.S., like the Magna Carta, which was the inspiration for the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation and case law, or even international documents, like the International Declaration of Human Rights (https://hrlibrary.umn.edu/research/Egypt/THE%20INTERNATIONAL%20BILL%20OF.pdf), which was written by a United Nations committee with Eleanor Roosevelt at the helm after World War II. We can’t forget speeches like “I Have a Dream” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Or the Social Security Act of 1935, Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. We also need to reexamine treaties, both those with Native Americans and international treaties.**
We have to move away from the “originalist” baloney of The Federalist Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society) and conservative members of SCOTUS who believe we have to interpret the Constitution the way the framers of it did, without taking into account any of the history and growth of the U.S. to become more equal and free since that time. If the framers had dealt with all the social and technological change the country has been through, as well as watching the rise of Trump and where the Constitution went wrong, they would have amended it. And, guess what? The Constitution has amendments! It can be changed as the times change. It’s supposed to be a living document, not etched immutably in titanium, though we do need to make it easier to amend.
With America’s best values firmly in mind, we can come up with ideas to rebuild, strengthen and improve our democracy.
What values would you add to rebuild and improve democracy?
*We need a better term than “nonprofit” sector. As folks at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits are fond of saying, “Nonprofit is a tax status.” It doesn’t adequately capture all that these organizations do.
**It is especially important to look at the North Atlantic Treaty now that Trump has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the Venezuelan president and his wife and declared an unnecessary and wholly, embarrassingly unsuccessful war on Iran. As historian Heather Cox Richardson said in her video about the Venezuelan attack, Trump is attempting to overturn the international rules-based order that the U.S. helped arrange after World War I and II, much to the delight of Russian president Vladimir Putin. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu9QSeAI22I)
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