We Hold These Truths: The Global Quest for Liberty (Free to Choose Media, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Capitol Fourth KPBS showed a really quirky special called We Hold These Truths: A Global Quest for Liberty, about the U.S. Declaration of Independence and its effect around the world as an inspiration for independence movements and challenges to authoritarianism. My husband Charles heartily disapproved of this show, calling it “Cold War propaganda” and immediately putting on a YouTube video of Paul Robeson singing Earl Robinson’s anthem of tolerance, “The House I Live In,” as a palate-cleanser after it ended. We Hold These Truths was hosted by U.S. Court of Appeals Justice Douglas H. Ginsburg, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Ginsburg was also Reagan’s second choice for a U.S. Supreme Court appointment in 1987 after the first choice, Robert Bork, was voted down by the U.S. Senate 58-42. But he withdrew his name from consideration after reports came out that he had smoked marijuana as a young man. (So what?) Ginsburg’s withdrawal from Supreme Court consideration opened the door to Anthony Kennedy, a pretty standard-issue Right-winger who wrote the Court’s loathsome Citizens United decision allowing super-rich people effectively to buy U.S. elections, but there were two issues on which Kennedy diverged wildly from Right-wing orthodoxy: juvenile justice and Queer rights. I should have known what this show would be from the name of the producing company, Free to Choose Media, after Milton Friedman’s 1980 book and TV series celebrating lassiez-faire economics and denouncing just about every government regulation of industry as “socialism.” The show was actually good in its acknowledgment of just how many Americans were left out of the Declaration of Independence, including its statement that “all men are created equal.” It didn’t include women, slaves or just about everybody who didn’t own land. The show took a surprisingly progressive view of the struggle to expand the promise of the Declaration to more and more people, including ones who hadn’t been included in 1776: women, slaves, free African-Americans and the like.

On the other hand, when discussing the influence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on other countries, this show cited Ho Chi Minh’s quotes from it in his 1946 Viet Namese Declaration of Independence but only as refracted through the Viet Namese who left after the U.S. and its puppet state of South Viet Nam lost the Viet Nam War in 1975. Two Viet Namese women are interviewed here to the effect that Ho “gave up on democracy,” when it might be more accurate to say democracy gave up on him. Like Fidel Castro, Ho began his movement as an independent nationalist wanting to avoid alignment with either the Communist or the capitalist side in the Cold War – only the U.S. did not admit that as an alternative. Rather, our attitude as the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union hardened in the late 1940’s was, “Either you’re with us or you’re against us.” Ho, Castro and other non-aligned nationalists were told by the U.S. that you had to align – and if you wanted to be part of the U.S. camp and have our protection, you had to allow virtually unfettered capitalism in your country, including protecting both your own 1 percenters and those from other countries who wanted to invest with you. So instead both Ho and Castro aligned with the Communists because they, at least, would allow them to do redistributionist land reform and deliver at least some measure of economic equality. It’s quite fascinating how We Hold These Truths reaches almost exclusively to Left-wing dictatorships in illustrating countries that have held out against the world’s trend towards democracy – it even calls Russia a democratic country now, which couldn’t be further from the truth, and it ignores Right-wing dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Narendra Modi of India and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who have taken power through ostensibly democratic means and then rigged the systems of their countries to ensure they will never lose it again.

The fact remains that the overall trend in the world these days is towards authoritarianism, and in all too many countries (including Brazil and the Philippines) authoritarian leaders have taken over and persuaded enough citizens to vote for them that democracy in those countries is at best under siege and at worst on life support. And that, alas, is true of the United States as well: with Donald Trump polling just a few points behind Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election, a favorable map for Republicans to regain control of the U.S. Senate, and a six-member radical-Right supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly determined to gut all civil-rights protections for women, people of color and Queer people in service of a hard-line Christian-Right agenda, it’s an open question just how long the United States, a country that’s long been considered the holy grail of long-term functioning democracies despite its many imperfections, really can retain that status. At one point Charles called out when the documentary mentioned Venezuela as an example of a nation that lost its way when it embraced a Left-wing populist movement that became anti-democratic, and said, “You can’t talk about Venezuela without talking about Haiti!” I give We Hold These Truths major points when it acknowledges how often the U.S. has talked a far better democratic game than we’ve actually played (though even there it only barely mentions the genocide against the Native Americans, which Hitler even cited as an example when he told Edward R. Murrow, “I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians”), even though it’s exasperating that though it soft-pedals the Right-wing lassiez-faire capitalist ideology that underpins it, it’s still very much a film of the Right rather than the Left or center.