A Decent Respect for the Opinions of Mankind

The best Fourth of July celebrations I ever attended took place at a friend’s house in Maryland.

It was his favorite holiday and he invited everyone he knew to stay for a few days with constant food, music, and an unconscionable number of glowsticks.

The centerpiece of the weekend, however, was something I’ve never experienced at another party: a reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Everyone received a laminated copy and stood in a big circle on the deck. We took turns reading lines before saying together the last paragraph, pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to the ideals of the country.

Before attending, I had heard about this tradition. I thought it incredibly lame, corny, cringe, choose your adjective.

Then I participated and it was deeply moving.

There was something powerful about standing in a group - some of whom were not even American - and speaking aloud words written a quarter of a millennium ago.

We tend to remember the Declaration through a handful of soaring phrases about equality, rights and the pursuit of happiness. But much of the document is a list of grievances against the king. They were people complaining about their government.

There was one line in particular has remained with me ever since, at the end of the opening paragraph and before the truths that we hold to be self-evident.

“a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The members of Congress were not merely making a grand historical movement. They were making an argument.

They believed that other people’s opinions mattered. They believed that human beings possessed the ability to hear logic, examine the evidence, and reason for themselves. They believed that an act as consequential as dissolving the political bands between metropole and colonies required an explanation for the entire world.

The Declaration was not written merely for historians to study centuries later. It was intended to persuade people living at that moment of the justice of the cause.

Standing at that house in Maryland, surrounded by friends and reading those grievances aloud, made the people behind the document feel less like characters in a history book. They were not marble statues. They were people confronting the problems of their own time and trying to convince others that a better political arrangement was possible.

We often talk about history through grand structures, sweeping trends and impersonal forces. We talk about empires, economic systems, social movements and technological transformations.

All of those things matter. But history is also made through arguments.

Someone has to describe what is wrong. Someone has to imagine what could be better. Someone has to make the case to other people and respect them enough to believe that they might listen.

This is my first Fourth of July as a candidate for public office, and that makes the holiday feel a little different.

There is plenty about running for office that is difficult and frustrating. But every time I knock on a door and speak with a voter, I have the opportunity to make an argument about what I believe our community and our state could become.

Then the voter makes an argument back to me about what they care about.

Sometimes we agree. Sometimes we do not. But we are speaking to one another as people capable of listening, reasoning and forming our own judgments.

That exchange is at the heart of democracy. More than voting, or fundraising, or Facebook ads, that is democracy.

Democracy requires us not merely to hold opinions, but to explain them. Not merely to seek power, but to give reasons for how that power should be used. Not merely to speak, but to listen when someone else makes their case.

This Fourth of July, I am deeply grateful for the privilege of participating in that process. There are many days when democracy feels under threat. But we have a much easier job to recover it than those who wrote those words in Philadelphia two hundred and fifty years ago.