INTRODUCTION

Democracy Is in Our Genes

The grand experiment of American democracy didn’t come out of thin air, and it was only marginally based on the experience of the Greek democracies and the Roman republic, contrary to what most people believe.

The one great universal impulse that animates humans working toward self-governance the world over is freedom: an escape from bonds laid on one people by another, by the powerful over the powerless, by the rich over the poor.

As Europeans began driving deep into the American landscape throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, stories began to trickle back to Europe about people who had figured out how to live in civilized society without the chains of oppression—both political and religious—that were the hallmarks of that era.

Some came from French missionaries to the Indians, others from trappers and traders, and still others from people like Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter, who made maps and traveled in what became the Commonwealth of Virginia for his work.

Stories spread of these extraordinary people—these Indians—who governed themselves without prisons, chains, or even police. Native Americans who’d become fluent in English or French traveled to Europe and challenged inequality, theocracy, and royalty to its face.

The intelligentsia of France, in particular, was consumed with the idea that egalitarian self-governance might not just be possible but might even be the “natural” or “original state” of humankind. These viral ideas swept Europe every bit as completely as had Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.

As the philosophers of the European Enlightenment were struck by these novel ideas contradicting their biblical and historical notions of the evil nature of humankind, the notions of equality and fraternity flowed back across the Atlantic to inflame the minds of 18th-century American colonists.

While there’s not a one-to-one correlation between the governing principles of, for example, the Iroquois Confederacy and the US Constitution, the core principles animating both were nearly identical: equality of citizenship. Government is legitimate only with the consent of the governed. Men who claim power through hereditary lineage or a direct line to the gods must be limited in the power they can acquire or possess. Greed and unbridled power are evils. Society’s highest obligation is to care for all its people, not merely to serve those with the highest status or wealth.

Our Founding Generation integrated these concepts into a coherent governing philosophy and then, after independence, crafted them into a clumsy attempt at constitutional self-governance.

It was a bold and dangerous experiment, defying, as it did, a thousand years of European history and the greatest powers of the world at the time.

Democracy within tribal communities has a long history that’s not limited to modern nations or the New World. Jefferson was obsessed with the democracy practiced by his tribal ancestors living in the British Isles before they were conquered by the Romans 1,700 years earlier.

Virtually every ethnography of tribal people living the way humans did for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture and the rise of modern warlord kingdoms describes them as egalitarian, be they the ancient San of southern Africa, the seafaring people who populated the South Pacific, or the tribes of Central America before they were conquered by the Aztec and Mayan empires.

Democracy, it turns out, is the default state of virtually every animal species on Earth, and humanity is no exception.¹ Only with the power of great wealth, control of media, or the force of arms and technology is it overcome by dictators, popes, and kings.