The American mythologisation of their own political history is something I find fascinating, as evidenced by some of my previous writing on the subject.
The history of the US is to this day blighted by the legacy of slavery; this is not to say that other countries haven’t got their hands dirty with slavery too; many countries bear the social ills of deprivation and poverty which can be traced back to the trade in people; nevertheless there is a definite tension to that particular racial history.
Which I find a little weird, frankly, because it was the Native Americans who got a lot more screwed by the incursion and growth of the European transplant American nation. At first contact, it’s estimated that there were around 20-50 million Native Americans; by 1890, there were only 250,000, and today there are but 2.8 million. They were ravaged both by the transmission of European diseases, and by deliberate policy to drive them from their lands and way of life.
The history of the relations between the Native Americans and the new nation show the hypocrisy with which the lofty ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were treated. 800 treaties were made between the United States and various Native American nations; 430 were never ratified by the Senate (though their conditions were still taken to be binding upon the Native Americans) and the United States violated provisions of the remaining 370 treaties which it did ratify.
When they said “all men are created equal” they meant: “all white, preferably Anglo-Saxon, males are created equal”. The consent of the governed meant nothing if you were black, or Native American, or god forbid, a woman. Black people were counted for 3/5ths of a person in determining the number of seats in the House of Representatives, for instance, and neither black people nor women could vote at all.
I should point out that the only crime displayed here is that of hypocrisy; the ownership of African slaves and the brutalisation of native peoples by colonial powers were entirely commonplace in the rest of the world, and a thing to be remarked on as abhorrent only in their totality; singling out any one nation only serves to obscure the collective nature of our guilt.
The extent to which the founding documents of the United States, and the men who drafted them, are venerated is totally incommensurate with their intrinsic worth. The trouble with this veneration is that it makes these ideas inviolate; one cannot hold these founding documents up to critical scrutiny, let alone revision, without committing blasphemy against this mad secular religion.
For instance, gun-lovers point to the second amendment to the Constitution almost like it was scripture, guaranteeing their right to possess arms as if it were holy writ. The easiest way to solve the gun control issue would be to simply amend the second amendment itself, and remove the right to bear arms, or at least clarify the notion of a well-regulated militia.
Unfortunately, this will never happen; as a brief historical note, the first ten amendments constitute the American Bill of Rights, and are more-or-less contemporaneous with the Constitution itself, and can thus be considered as de facto part of it. The possibility of amending the second raises the spectre of amending the first (the right to free speech) or the fifth (the right to not self-incriminate). One wonders what the outcome will be when the language in which the Constitution is written becomes ever staler and divorced from the English of the day, and the meaning of the words is slowly shifted to something steadily more unrecognisable, the text left unaltered as the language evolves around it.
This is luckily not a problem in the UK; that great document of ancient English freedom, the Magna Carta, has been more-or-less entirely repealed and replaced with newer legislation, the most recent of which being the Human Rights Act. It’s never the document that’s important; the document is only a symbol. What’s important are the ideas, and the principles, and keeping those principles alive in the hearts and minds of mankind. Our documents should never be inviolate; our ideals should be.
Some facts and figures on Native American populations and treaties were drawn from the book “Why Do People Hate America?” by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies. Others were from Wikipedia. Interpretation and conclusions entirely my own (terrible) work.