Introducing The American Promise
Our leaders need a new appeal to win over a cynical body politic
At The States Forum, we are driven by one simple, powerful goal: to finally, fully realize what we call the American Promise — the core commitment our nation made to its citizens — that all people are created equal with the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and that government secures these rights with the consent of the governed. From this radical promise, written in the Declaration of Independence, derive our most fundamental, essential political principles: representative democracy, effective government, fair markets, and personal freedom.
By embracing the core principles of the American Promise, we have the opportunity, in the words of the political philosopher Danielle Allen, to renovate our democracy, to once again make it responsive to the concerns of its citizens, and to restore the democratic faith that too many of them have lost.
The route to this renovation, we believe, lies in the states. As the politics of Washington DC sinks further into dysfunction, it is the states that present us with the opportunity to build a new American politics capable of achieving a national consensus.
Daniel Squadron explains what can win over a supermajority of Americans
What America Has Told Us and Continues to Tell Us
Our confidence in our worldview — in the American Promise, and the principles that derive from it — rests on two simple truths.
To begin, we know the power of these ideas because American history has made it clear. As The States Forum co-founder Daniel Squadron pointed out on the opening night of our launch event in July in Philadelphia, in moments of crisis, and when trying to advance the cause of justice, America’s leaders have turned to the core values and principles of the Declaration again and again:
“Abraham Lincoln called it forth on the bloody battlefield at Gettysburg. The suffragists proclaimed it even while being excluded from the festivities at the centennial in this city. It rang from Martin Luther King Jr's lips across the mall in Washington, and it was echoed by Barack Obama introducing himself to the nation on a New England summer’s night.”
And just as importantly, these are the principles that Americans continue to believe in and hold dear even as they grow skeptical of and cynical about our political leaders and the system they serve.
During the very same week we were gathering in Philadelphia to launch The States Forum, J.D. Vance received an award at the Claremont Institute — the intellectual home of the MAGA movement. And in his speech, in defense of the Administration’s policy priorities, he took the opportunity to explicitly attack the notion that what unites us are the principles of the Declaration. Instead, he gestured to every blood-and-soil nationalist’s preferred explanation for social cohesion: ancestry.
By contrast, when given the chance to evaluate America in relation to the very binary Vance was posing — between understanding America as a nation bound by the values of the Declaration versus a nation bound by ethnic and historical ties — Americans overwhelmingly choose the former.
Colin Woodard, the Project Director at The Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, joined us in Philadelphia. He has been studying this very question, trying to understand how Americans see themselves in relation to their fellow citizens for years. And he explained quite clearly what he and his colleagues have found in regard to what Woodard calls “the big question. What holds us together? What's ever held us together?”
It has always, he argued, been a contest. On the one side are those who believe that “we're bonded together by a set of ideals, the ones from the famous passage in the Declaration of Independence [...] The inherent equality of humans, their rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and representative self-government. To be American is to be committed to this set of propositions about the nature of the universe.” On the other side are those he calls the ethno-nationalists, who hold a much narrower vision of what makes an American, of who belongs.
At the Nationhood Lab, they have put this question to the American people themselves:
“[In] our preliminary baseline poll, we asked registered voters which statements about the nature of the United States they most agreed with. We offered statement pairs about our national purpose, American identity, and the meaning of our past. In each case, one of the statements was keyed off the values in the Declaration. The other one is rooted in more intrinsic characteristics like ancestry, heritage, and character.”
In other words, the first was the American Promise. The second was Vance’s blood and soil. As Colin revealed:
“To our surprise, the civic ones prove far more attractive regardless of gender, age, race, education, or region. 63% of Americans preferred the statement that we're united ‘by our shared commitment to a set of American founding ideals: that we all have inherent and equal rights to live, to not be tyrannized and to pursue happiness as we each understand it,’ over an alternate statement embraced by only 33% of respondents that said we're united instead ‘by shared history, traditions and values and by our fortitude and character [as] Americans, [a] people who value hard work, individual responsibility, and national loyalty.’”
“We later tested if Americans agree with the argument, the covenant argument, that we are duty-bound as Americans to protect one another's rights to these things. And they do by an incredible 97 to two margin, one of the widest our pollsters that'd ever seen. “
You can see the results of these two polls for yourself below:
These results reveal clearly what the majority of Americans believe about themselves, and what they want to believe about the nation. They believe in the American Promise. But they are waiting for leaders who can articulate it and reinvigorate their faith.
New Ideas, New Approaches
Turning this vision into political reality will not be easy. It requires work, a lot of work.
First and foremost, it demands new thinking. We need new ideas and a different way of talking about them. The States Forum has already begun.
Our inaugural journal offers an initial collection of the type of state-focused policy ideas we believe need to be part of the conversation. Our kickoff summit in Philadelphia was devoted to discussions and even arguments aimed at taking us in new directions, to break out of the same old tired debates that default to predictable factional politics.
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll share exclusive excerpts from the gathering and post original content proposing bold, new ideas and frameworks with a rigorous focus on defining and achieving the American Promise in states.
We hope you will join us for all of this.
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