Self-government is a major principle by which the United States and many other nations yearn to live and to be judged. This principle does not mean people necessarily deny there may be another source of law not simply comprised of what is voted upon by the majority, only that we tend to believe people combined together in their local communities ought to have a right to determine their own method of governance.

There has been much debate within the United States about the meaning of this fundamental principle.

It’s the major ideal seperating political parties and philosophies of government. Depending on how a person views the nature of self-government, so follows many of his positions on the major political issues of the day. The issue carries wide social, political and moral implications in our nation and throughout the world.

‘That all men are created equal’ is the universally, well-known assertion of the Declaration of Independence. Many people will quickly affirm its veracity, but its equitable implementation has varied throughout the ages. It has served as a rallying cry for many political movements, including the civil rights movement, where it was skillfully embraced by orators such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The debate over self-government was the pivotal aspect that tore apart the nation during the Civil War. Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debated the issue in 1854. Douglas drew from the popular sovereignty of the people to determine that laws shall be as they are approved by a majority of the citizens in their local communities.

The evident nature of this maxim should not to be lost on us today.

If local communities and individual states ever lose the right to establish the laws by which they shall be governed, even in the name of a set of noble ideas, it will effectively disenfranchise the local population. Freedom is strongly contained in the idea that we individually have a say in how we are governed. Douglas’s view is effectively summarized by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’

The counterclaim made by Abraham Lincoln is that self-government itself depends upon certain rights being expressly guaranteed to all people. These are certain rights that can not be infringed upon by majority vote. Likewise, we know without such protection the whole basis of self-government becomes faulty.

Lincoln made the case strongly that selfishness is permanently engrained in the nature of man and stands in contrast to our knowledge of justice and fairness.

‘Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature ‘- opposition to it, is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism,’ Lincoln said in his debate with Douglas. ‘Repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.’

As human beings, we have the notion of justice in our hearts, but it is not always quickly evident. After the bitter struggle of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment emerged to state effectively that, ‘[No State shall] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’

These principles clashed hotly in the bloody conflict of the Civil War, where the lives of too many Americans were sacrificed to defend them. They continue to have broad policy implications from the most mundane affairs of government to the most controversial of ideological flashpoints.

We see this play out when politicians seek to balance equity in educational opportunities for all students versus the ability of parents to have the maximum say in how their children are educated. It can be found in the debate over the availability of legal abortion, which poses serious questions over the rights of both the mother and the child, along with the sovereignty of cities and states.

Even discussing international affairs, arguments are often made that appeal to the higher notions of justice centered on precisely along the same themes. We desire to see international standards for human rights. We profess them in international treaties and we occasionally place the guardianship of these ideals into the hands of international institutions such as the United Nations. But, few of us are as eager to forgo the sovereignty and self-determination of individual nations.

The survival of liberty requires the steadfast and precise balancing of the two competing principles as understood by Douglas and Lincoln, exemplified by the Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments. While there is much professed piety when we dedicate ourselves exclusively to one of these ends, it is actually more difficult to balance these ideals in a just and compassionate mean. The ideal to be sought is to maintain unequivocally that certain inalienable rights belong to every individual, while placing ultimate sovereignty in the direct hands of the people.

Eric Magazu is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].