Rights of American Citizens Essay Example

The experience of citizens in the United States has varied greatly over the past several hundred years. Though we like to think of our liberties as having the same definition and strength as someone who might have lived 150 years ago, this is not the case. This change has occurred as our rights have been reinterpreted and redefined by dominant political interests and actors over the centuries. Even in our own time, citizens experience vastly different political lives in America based on several factors, including their race, class, location, educational attainment, and others. Still, there are some effects of our modern political body that seem to touch every single person in this country, and there are still limitations on our rights that harrow back to the nation’s founding. In this general way, we are all still dominated by the heart of our political foundations which lie in the views of Locke and other Enlightenment-era thinkers. Then as in now, our institutions: the legislatures, the courts, and the executive branches, which are all controlled by political actors and parties, are the source from which all of the conditions of our experiences flow. In this way, our modern political parties, who share control of the fate of our republic, are dominated now more than ever perhaps by wealthy, monied interests, act as sibling gatekeepers that prevent any meaningful overhaul in furthering the economic and social rights of citizens. With this realization, we must confront the truth that many Americans will not admit to themselves: to achieve the goals of the American experiment, i.e. a republic based on freedom from tyranny and oppression, we must expand beyond the founder’s framework of negative liberties to institute an expansion of affirmative liberties which will ensure American’s rights and enhance our experience as political subjects. This is not expected to happen, as much like our negative liberties, our political institutions seek not to make life better, but to keep it from getting worse.

Using some of the foundational legal theory and case law ranging back to the time preceding our nation’s founding, we can see how our rights have progressed and why they are currently in a state of stasis or even paralysis. In Ellen Meiksins Wood’s ‘Locke’s Theory of Property” in The Origin of Capitalism we find are enlightened as to how it is our nation has come to understand and interpret individual’s rights, at the heart of which is (in this view) property. Locke thinks the key to a stable and prosperous society was the protection of property, not just from other citizens but the sovereign or state itself. This is not only the origin of our views on property, is it also arguably the basis for negative liberties. The government does not promote your rights in the role of protector; rather, it is prevented from infringement on your rights. This is also the basis for the design of a relatively weak Federal state to begin with because a weaker national government is less able to impede on the rights of citizens. Sarah Krakoff’s Inextricably Political: Race, Membership, and Tribal Sovereignty demonstrates the tightrope our judiciary and congress have had to walk while asserting their own authority and curtailing the rights of others, in this case, Native Americans. The government views Native Americans as both members of tribes, and thereby sovereign nations, and as subjects of the Federal government. This is evident in the fact that the federal government (narrowly) defines what it is to be a tribe, and what it is to be a Native American. This definition, which has a high threshold for who is and is not a Native American, is held in contrast to examples like the ‘one drop rule’, which applied broadly to African Americans. By undermining the rights of Native Americans and their tribes and nations, the government affirms once again the primacy of land interests and the wealthy’s right, in Locke’s view, to “improve” the land, or make it prosperous.

In “Structured Governance and Citizenship in the New Deal” from Dividing Citizens by Suzanne Mettler, we learn of the institutional implications for citizens after the implementation of New Deal policies. The New Deal was a set of overhauls in regulations and the social state in the US, occurring after the Great Depression. Prior to the New Deal, the Federal government did not provide oversight of many areas of life and the economy, such as banking or labor/union rights. The view of progressives was the failure of the Federal government led to the conditions that allowed the Great Depression to occur. New Deal policies were instituted to rebuild, stabilize, and expand our economy by providing new rights and protections for citizens. The problem for New Deal policies is where they fall short: often programs were left to administration by the states and not the federal government, which reignited many of the failure points of government administration that had led to the New Deal in the first place. By allowing states to administer programs like social welfare for single mothers, the federal government allowed these new entitlements to be regulated in vastly different ways. On the whole, when examining New Deal policies, it is observed that the policies that benefit white men are typically upheld by the Federal government, whereas the policies that benefit women and minorities are administered by the state governments. Though it was intended to raise the standards of living for all by expanding our liberties into positive or affirmative rights, aka entitlements, the compromises for its implementation made to appease southern Democrats who, at the time opposed racial and gender equality, further entrenched and continued the government’s disparate treatment of citizens. 

Currently, our political lives as citizens are in a holding pattern: the government, or the political actors and parties who comprise it, seem committed not to the idea of making American’s lives better but instead keeping them from getting worse. This idea or its framing is very similar to the framing of negative liberties. Many in the government, including forces that should be sympathetic to the plight of workers, minorities, women, and other marginalized groups, are complacent or complicit in maintaining the status quo, even when given the opportunity to make an impact. This is evident in our modern-day Democratic party, who even with slim majorities that if used properly would expand, refuse to deliver on their promises to overhaul our social welfare state. Our lives as citizens are not actively shaped or reshaped by our institutions, rather, they are persevered like in a cryogenic freeze, and arguably trending towards a state of decay. The protections enshrined throughout the history of our republic protect wealthy property owners above all else. This has not changed and will not change until political leaders are forced to find the courage to change. That will only happen if the people insist on a New New Deal. That should not be anticipated under our current system of campaign finance, where the wealthy can donate vast sums to candidates, and unlimited fund to Super PACs. This system feels insurmountable and unreformable to many and leads to a political apathy that further enables to the system to continue as it is.

In summation, the shaping of our contemporary life by political institutions is one of unending abeyance; the only intention is to adhere as closely as possible to the historical view of citizen life in the United States, the most recent version of which was envisioned during the new deal. To achieve the widely stated goals of the American experiment we the people must use the rights we have intact to end the duopolistic stranglehold on progress in the United States. Only then will life improve for the average citizen. This is not expected, and should not be expected, as political apathy is high due to the failings of the system as it exists today.