The Pursuit of Happiness: Can Historic American Governance Survive the 2024 Election’s Constitutional Crisis?

I don’t know about you, but I am always setting forth to carry out ethical resolutions based on my personal values and, well, not quite making it. Long ago, I adopted Stoic Philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s advice to reason out two or three brief “rules of life” and then (try to) live by them. 

Here’s a rule I used when I was a college professor: “keep aware of society and fight oligarchies and special interests that do not work for the greatest good of the greatest number.” This led to several rather dramatic whistleblowing episodes at the University of Wisconsin, which meant that I was shunned by some colleagues for the rest of my career.

Still, how my moral chakras stood up and aligned themselves with my soul when I spoke for my values was reward enough for me. But I am not always that well in tune with my own moral universe. For example, I belong to a Unitarian Church that has a four-step covenant of values, which I whole-heartedly agree with.

“As part of this beloved community, I promise to

1. Strive to be my best self in all my interactions
2. Assume the best intentions of everyone’s actions
3. Be mindful of our shared humanity in my communications
4. Pause, reflect, and be part of the solution when things go awry”

Here, alas, is my moral inventory:

Best self: I lost my temper in a committee meeting.

Assume best intentions: Have I really thought about what X is going through in her life before I get so mad at her?

Shared Humanity: That board member is opposing my ideas about the environment — he is the enemy! (demonizing)

Pause, etc: I did better at this one. When the National Unitarian Association sent out new wording for the denomination’s principles, I went to Zoom meetings, listened to what folks had to say pro and con, and suggested a consensus compromise.

(For an unfortunate example of my woefully failing to live up to my principles, see my article: Harris and Trump, Where Do We Go From Here?)

Setting up moral covenants and striving to adhere to them has a deep historical background in American culture. 

In “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America,“ Jeffrey Rosen recounts how, in their youth, both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin made lists of virtues they aspired to, checking off their failures and successes as they went, only to have to give the whole thing up because of their many moral lapses.  

Franklin, for example, had an eye for the ladies, undercutting his pursuit of moderation; on the other hand, he learned to control his argumentative tendencies by presenting his opinions in a humble tone of speech and listening carefully to what other people had to say.

John Adams had tremendous ambition and vanity but “worked throughout his long life to achieve the tranquility of mind that he learned from Cicero was the secret of happiness.”

Washington had a terrible temper but succeeded in stifling it in most of his military and political interactions. 

Jefferson struggled with a lifelong avarice that kept him from freeing his valuable slaves — including his Mistress Sally Hemmings and their children — at the end of his life.

Rosen writes that evolutionary era thinkers like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, Phyllis Wheatley, and Mercy Otis Warren were widely read and deeply thoughtful about the ethical writings of classic philosophers like Cicero, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. They adhered to the classical concept of moral striving as a battle between reason and lesser emotions.

They considered the quest for personal self-governance as necessary to political self-governance. Both could be undermined by vices like pride and greed, with the social fabric especially threatened by emotionally driven “factions,” which James Madison defined as groups of people whose reasoning powers were overthrown. 

In contrast, they defined “Happiness” as living virtuously and The Pursuit of Happiness as the hallmark of a well-lived life. Their emphasis was less on meeting this goal but on striving towards it in an aspirational process rather than a final achievement.  

“Understood in these terms,” explains Rosen, “it is always something to be pursued rather than obtained — a quest rather than a destination.”

The eighteenth-century view of the relationship between happiness and moral virtue veers widely from the contemporary understanding of happiness as a kind of extended good mood within the individual. In “Are We Happy Yet?” New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose provides a summary of the kind of positive thinking and personal happiness literature we have been subjected to ever since.   

In the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale proposed positive thinking as a way of making employees more productive. The present belief that everyone ought to be personally content most of the time has proven psychologically toxic in our sad old world of random catastrophe and perennial interhuman nastiness. 

Given the American Founders’ take on the relationship between personal and social happiness, it is interesting that Grose finds interaction with other human beings to be a good antidote for human sadness: 

“For all the supposed happiness-boosting strategies that aren’t supported by evidence, one of the few things that might move the needle is social contact. Dealing with other humans forces us to put up with their frailties and chaos and churlishness and to expose our own. Engaging with other people as our imperfect selves shatters the illusion of control that we have when we’re attempting to optimize our moment-to-moment feelings. It also goes against the self-help cliché that we cannot have good relationships unless we work on ourselves first.”   

I did not grow up in happy times in New York City during World War II and my teenage years there in the 1950s, and we were not an especially “happy family.” When I was 15, my mother and I attended Norman Vincent Peale’s church, eagerly lapping up his ideas about looking at our lives less dismally; we always came home with pamphlets of his sermons. We never thought he was talking about morality, just how to feel better about ourselves. To us, morality involved behaving ethically and finding a way to be of public service. 

The summer that I was 16, I sailed a schooner from Southern Connecticut to Northern Maine (and back) with five friends, the father who owned the boat, and a rather physically uncoordinated supplement to our crew whom we called “the Harvard Freshman.” I learned to “Box the Compass,” which meant sitting at the wheel and obeying orders to steer “East North East, a Quarter East,” etc. Perhaps it is for that reason that I have always liked the metaphor of a Moral Compass, one which is based on an ethical “True North.”

Being attuned to values like a compass is tuned to a magnetic pull has both personal and societal applications.

In the personal realm, True North is where my inner law-giver or conscience tries to aim; a social moral compass consists of my country’s take on right and wrong, formulated in the covenants I agree to live by. 

In the United States, this is the Rule of Law as embodied in the Constitution. 

We have seen that our founders, though they searched their consciences daily, had a hard time living up to their values. Realizing from their personal experiences how flawed human nature can be, they devised a system of “checks and balances” to help their new country control such emotions as greed and factionalism (divisive adherence to political groups adhering to out-of-control emotionality.)  

That is why they insisted upon a “balance of power: between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches: 

“This separation prevents any single branch from overwhelming the others. The President can veto laws passed by Congress, but Congress can override the veto with a two-thirds vote. The President appoints judges, but these appointments must be confirmed by the Senate.”

Our present election season of 2024 is a battle between this constitutional system, which has served us well since the founding of the Republic, and the Republican party’s tooth-and-nail fight for a Trump-led dictatorship. 

Because the middle and working classes and people of color far outnumber rich White people demographically, Republicans are undermining democracy in favor of an authoritarian oligarchy, transforming themselves into an emotion-driven faction pursuing greed (economic advantage for the rich) and racial hegemony. 

For example, a Republican-dominated Senate (unconstitutionally) blocked voting for President Obama’s Supreme Court pick so that, when he became President, Trump could “pack” the court with judges loyal to him.  

These judges formed a block to roll back rights like women’s reproductive choices and Black voting protections,  and then reached an (unconstitutional) decision that Presidents are immune to prosecution for crimes committed in office. Since 2020, they have set electoral officials in place to refuse certification of the coming presidential vote.

Meanwhile, Trump has announced that his followers need only to vote “this one last time,” as he intends to do away with elections. 

This is exactly the failure of personal and social reason in the formation of “factions” that the founders feared. 

As Jeffry Rosen puts it, while the “constitution makers set up a Rule of Law under which “a group of citizens use their powers of reason to achieve political happiness,” we have arrived, in this election season of 2024, at a situation in which the importance of “sober second thoughts (necessary to) achieve private and public happiness” are hard to find. 

Or, as New York Times columnist David Brooks writes, when “America’s founding fathers understood that when private virtue fails, then relationships fail and the constitutional order crumbles.” 

You can see why we Biden Democrats were so terribly disheartened when, earlier this summer, he mumbled through a crucial debate with Trump, and it began to look as if he would not be able to beat him in the election. An admirer of his many legislative accomplishments and dedicated patriotism, I didn’t like the way my fellow Democrats were pressuring Biden to drop out of the race. But then he did.

The British theological writer C.S. Lewis titled a memoir “Surprised by Joy.” That is exactly how we have been after the switch from Biden to Harris as presidential delegates. Political joy? How could this exuberant uplift in our spirits, amidst the gloom and doom of America’s divisive political scene, possibly be happening?   

But it is. Suddenly, there was Biden’s chosen successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, and, a few weeks later, her own Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz, exuding joy to cheering crowds of 15,000 and 20,000, including scads of previously disaffected young people and voters of every color along with (would you believe it?) White Dudes for Kamala!  

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are appearing before enormous crowds roaring their approval with huge, happy grins on their faces. All kinds of wildly funny things are going on. Trump’s V.P. pick, J.D. Vance, announced that America is too full of  “childless cat ladies” who have failed at their proper feminine reproductive duties, and, the next thing you know, we have Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala bling, T-shirts and banners and campaign buttons and hilarious spin-offs like “Childless Fish Dudes for Kamala.” 

The more that Trump and Vance go before their (more sparsely attended) rallies to dourly scold American women for getting too big for our britches, the more vigorously Harris and Walz call them out before thunderously cheering crowds for their opposition to abortion, in vitro fertilization, and even contraception, while focusing on practical ways to bring down grocery prices, lower the cost of drugs and medical insurance, provide child care and meals for children at school. 

What we are witnessing in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in their huge wide grins as they belt out speeches to ecstatic audiences, is the pursuit of Political Happiness, that heady alignment of deeply held personal values with the will of the party to put them into practice for the good of the nation. 

Although the polls (which we have learned to ignore) report a neck-and-neck race, they may not have fully absorbed the groundswell of support for the Democratic ticket: Young people who had planned to sit the election out are signing on in significant numbers, the Black community has launched thousands of volunteers for the campaign effort, independents are swinging Democratic, and there is even a “Republicans for Kamala” group out there ringing doorbells, enthusiastically recruiting voters.  

On the convention’s second day, in the evening, the Roll Call of  Delegates rollicked through their votes, state by state, every speaker full of resolution and every delegation loud in heartfelt exuberance. There was a cut into Kamala and Tim rousing a happy crowd in Wisconsin, with those wonderful wide grins on both their faces. 

Then came Michelle and Barack Obama with their characteristic mixture of hope and moral determination urging everybody to shout “Yes we can” to their call to put on our walking shoes and start ringing doorbells. Yes, it is a close race, but my bet is on those of us going for the exuberant possibility of a diverse and inclusive constitutional democracy over those dedicated to a gloomily divisive autocracy.