Are Our Political Divisions Threatening the U.S. Social Contract?

The U.S. Constitution is a product of the Age of Enlightenment, aka the Age of Reason. During that age, which occurred in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, empiricism and rationalism were considered to be the primary paths to knowledge. Political ideals such as the limitation of government through a constitution, the separation of church and state, and freedom of speech and thought were promoted. Our Constitution forms a social contract, based on these ideas, between us and our government. Yet, at the present time, the political and ideological disputes between us have become a threat to our prevailing social contract.  That threat would have continued under either a Trump or a Harris administration.

Mostly because of the diversity of opinions in the modern world about social reality, the idea of a social contract has gone out of style. What exactly do we mean by the phrase “social contract?”

The Social Contract Philosophers and the Age of Reason

The ideas from the Age of Enlightenment about government were epitomized by the Social Contract Philosophers. The development of social contract theory was initiated by Thomas Hobbes with the publishing of his book Leviathan in 1651. 

As with future social contract theorists, he postulated that, without the restraint of government, humans “in a state of nature” would constantly war with each other. In order to protect ourselves from each other, we agree to surrender authority over ourselves to a state. We consent to obey the decrees of a sovereign. In return the sovereign will protect us from each other and from foreign enemies. Otherwise, as Hobbes famously stated, our lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. We surrender unlimited natural freedom to do whatever we want for the more practical freedom of a safer social environment.

For the United States, the most important of the social contract theorists was John Locke, who added other codicils to Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory. The father of classical liberalism, Locke believed humans had rights to both life and property under natural law. Without a society with a government, Locke believed the enforcement of those rights would be extremely difficult. In addition, he argued the social contract between the rulers and the ruled was conditional upon the government protecting both the persons and the property of the ruled. if this contract were violated, the ruled were justified in overthrowing and replacing the sovereign. Needless to say, the writers of the American Declaration of Independence from Great Britain’s King George III made full and explicit use of John Locke’s arguments.

By the time of the eighteenth century and the flowering of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, European societies had accumulated a lot of historical experience with arbitrary and tyrannical government. All the power of government was centralized in an all powerful, autocratic sovereign.

 Also by then, England had gone through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when King James II was deposed and replaced by his daughter, Queen Mary II and her husband William III, prince of Orange and stadtholder of the Netherlands. As a result the Coronation Oath Act of 1688 required a new coronation oath for any succeeding British monarch. It was taken by both the new King William and Queen Mary. In that oath, the monarch swore to “solemnly promise and swear to govern the people of this kingdom of England, and the dominions thereunto belonging, according to the statutes in parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same”.  The power to legislate had successfully been extracted from the executive branch of England (the King or Queen and the monarch’s officers) and isolated in the legislative branch (the Parliament).

One consequence of this historical experience was that the political philosophers of the Enlightenment began to realize the necessity for factoring out the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of the government, then giving each power to a different, independent

branch of government. Then all government powers could act together only if the independent branches all consented and agreed to a course of action. Any act of tyranny could only become effective if those three separate powers acted together. If the powers were separated, the probability of tyrannical government was greatly reduced. The first expression of this idea of the separation of all three powers came from Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, usually referred to as Montesquieu, in his classic book The Spirit of the Laws (De l’Esprit des Loix).

The U.S. Constitution was one of the last fruits borne by the Age of Enlightenment. Acutely aware of the possibilities for tyranny from their recent

experience of King George III, the writers of the U.S. Constitution (primarily James Madison of Virginia, later fourth President of the United States) made sure executive powers were isolated in the President and the departments he supervised, legislative powers in the Congress, and judicial powers in the federal judiciary headed by the Supreme Court. Our Constitution outlines the structure and powers of our government allowed by the people. The first ten amendments to the Constitution, called the United States Bill of Rights, spell out the rights and personal freedoms of individuals, which federal, state, and local governments are not allowed to violate.

How Our Social Contract Is Threatened By Our Political Divisions

The  most common objection to social contract theory is that a social contract is not an actual consensual contract between every individual in society and the government. Not every citizen will agree with it. The obvious rejoinder is the social contract is sealed by its passive approval by the vast majority of the citizenry. Should the government become autocratic and tyrannical, John Locke said citizens would have the right to replace the government with another one more to their liking. In a republic like the U.S., the mechanism for conducting such a change is built-in with constitutionally mandated periodic elections.

However, what happens when different sections of society detest each other? What happens when the losing side of an election cannot abide rule by the other? This has already happened once in our history with a civil war caused by disagreements over slavery and states’ rights. Could it be happening again?

Ex-President Donald J. Trump has just been re-elected President with a majority of both the electoral and popular votes. Yet, various parts of the Democratic Party have vowed to fight against his administration. Consider the reaction of the New York Attorney General Letitia James shown below.

While AG James congratulates Trump on his election, her speech sounds almost like a declaration of war against the Trump Administration.

The most fundamental disagreement between the Democratic and Republican parties is over how much the American economy should be controlled by the government. Trump and the Republican Party want much less government regulation of companies and corporations than the Democratic Party. The Republicans also desire much less taxation and government spending. The reaction of Democrats to these policy differences has been extremely shrill. These disagreements have led Democrats to accuse Trump of being an enemy of democracy and a fascist. Some Democrats have gone so far as to say the election of Trump would allow him to become an American führer, and that he would allow no future elections. As an aside, these accusations display a remarkable misunderstanding of the word fascist. The German fascists of the 1930s and 1940s were given the acronym Nazi, which stands for die Nationalsozialistishe Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. This translates to “the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” Yet Trump would lessen government control of society, while the Democratic Party would strengthen strengthen it.

Will these political and ideological disagreements create a new American civil war?

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