I had a dream that our constitutional democracy is really the product of a group of computer nerds, working with a supercomputer to put every possible constitution through every possible stress test in search of a winner (a little like programming IBM’s “Watson” to beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov).
To make their task more challenging, the nerds began with what appeared to be an internal contradiction. Their creation had to be acceptable to people who owned slaves and people who believed the statement, “All men are created equal.”
In my dream, I could see that the resolution of this paradox would require a constitution that was capable of juggling the above two contradictory views without falling apart. Even winning the Civil War was not conclusive, since it was followed by Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the rise of White supremacy, renewed Black voter suppression and a Republican Party looking to use these developments to put itself permanently in power.
As my dream ended, the question facing the programmers was the following: Had they reached another dead end or was their current model capable of surviving as a constitutional democracy? I woke up just before the answer arrived.
Frederick Longacre
Hockessin
