Are we already hanging over the edge of our Founders’ flawed sovereign “We THE people…”?

King Charles dramatic Coronation as THE King of England, crowned by the Arch Bishop of Canterbury, granted a golden scepter topped with the jewels of justice and mercy, again reveals the proposition’s fallacy.

Who else noticed his upper lip briefly tremble on Sept. 19 when in Westminster Abbey he heard for the first time a thousand voices soar to “God Save the King?” Who besides me remembers “God Save the King,” not the “Queen?” Charles lost far more than his mother, his nation’s unifying monarch for nearly all of his life. On the palace balcony seventy years ago, the small four-year-old boy had looked up at his young mother, newly crowned Queen Elizabeth. Now an elder man, from all that he was, he has been born again under the crown to devote all of himself to all his people without an equal.

The paradox of our democracy became newly focused during President Donald Trump’s inspired January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol over his ongoing election loss denial, and the subsequent House Select Investigation Committee.

Unlike a coronated crowned king, is the presidency beyond the law? Inaugurated by the chief justice of the highest court of law, the president is an unendowed pinnacle of political power, leadership, aspirations and morals. President Grant accepted his arrest by a Black Police Officer for speeding in his horse and carriage. New York Governor, William Seward, running for the 1860 Presidential nomination against Lincoln, opposed slavery by declaring his accountability to the office’s guiding “Higher Power.” An equally devout Lincoln kept his opposition under the Constitution, as interpreted by the Justices of its Supreme Court, whom he believed erred in the Dred Scott Decision. Richard Nixon resigned his office. Vice President Pence Certified the 2020 Election at the risk of his life. Our president serves for a limited term, accountable to the voters, checked both by an elected Congress, and life-appointed Supreme Court justices, and subject to removal by House and Senate Impeachment. The office, not the officer, endures. A monarch is both.

Lacking executive authority and neither making nor subject to judicial judgments, the Crown exercises cultural inspiration and leadership, with immense personal influence, royal wealth and social power. The American idea has no such living embodiment. It is a sacrificial tomb, of an Unknown Soldier — likely a black man, perhaps gay?

Thomas Jefferson’s political double mind of what binds a nation without an embodied sovereign echoes his duplicity of slavery and liberty, and an imagined unknown racial border of Whites and Blacks. Who did he think are the persons “created equal and endowed with life and liberty?” He upheld a gendered, and racial slave state. Other slave-owning Virginian Founders include James Madison, of the Ten Amendments; George Washington — owning 127 personal slaves at the time of his death, and now revealed, as president, to have had his false wooden teeth replaced with those of a slave. Patrick Henry of “Give me liberty, or give me death,” held 67. Even Pennsylvanian Ben Franklin owned household slaves. In fact, only two Founders, Massachusetts’ John Adams, and his son, John Quincy Adams, did not.

We are a “people” only insofar as we abide by disagreed decisions, struggle and responsibly participate in a common identity with this American idea. Our sovereignty is plural. We — without a common scaffolding. Our identity politics of difference often mislead us. Our blind spot still prevails. No living sovereign transcends or shapes our politics. “The” is the singular noun of a monarch.

This discord between people, or voting persons, disturbed me in my nine years as Colorado’s Secretary of State. Under oath to “the people of,” and the Colorado Constitution, among my duties was to assure fair and free elections, certify ballot candidates and Issues, and then total the lawful vote to certify “the people’s” Legislative and Executive Constitutional Officers, including my own. My responsibility to legitimate the voters’ choices as “the people’s” depended on the public’s belief in both their elected County Clerks and my integrity, and the procedures we implemented and enforced, as well as the judges who upheld them. Accountable to all the people of Colorado, twice elected by substantially more than my party’s Republican voters, some dared claim I was obliged only to them.

Pure individual voting begins Colorado’s elective politics, at the 10,000 political party precinct caucuses, each often tipped by a single vote. Party rules often ignore caucus results, impose criteria, and allow County Chairs to appoint the delegates to the tiers of candidate ballot nominating assemblies. These mediating selection procedures, to build consensus and electoral victories, also invite raw, backroom individual power plays of every means.

Supreme Court Justice Alito wrote the one-vote majority decision that stated the “terminatation of a woman’s pregnancy is to be made by the people.” Which ones? He means either the majority voters of the whole country, or of their elected Congress, or of her state, or its legislators.

Anyone but her.

Can our proposition of a sovereign people, replacing a parliamentary, millennia-long inherited monarchy, ever be workable under an inherently aging Constitution that is difficult to refresh?

For two generations we have abandoned teaching civics in our greatest aspiration of quality public education to make citizens of all, able to approach a “People.”

How can a virtual asocial age of anonymous, paid social media, and machine-generating artificial “intelligence,” disinformation and cyber aggression serve an ignorant, and no longer informed civic interest?

We far exceed Great Britain’s gun deaths, especially of children, and use of assault weapons. Without a reassuring monarch’s stature, one fully educated to its responsibilities, what today can make a diverse people feel safer, less alienated from and fearful of each other?

Will self-protective “Make my day” laws replace face-to-face political campaigners and canvassers with the internet and AI data? Must volunteer Census takers wear badges?

Jefferson’s double mind is in fact the American truth. We share, but skeptically trust an aspiration because it is inherently beyond our reach. We extend from tropical Key West, FL. and Hawaii, to the Aleutian Islands and Barrow, AK., above the Arctic Circle; from Puerto Rico to Guam to the Navajo Reservation. A unique nation of curious, optimistic, voting people on the move, we all want to be safe, secure, healthy, educated, enjoy economic and social opportunity, be left alone, and belong to something. We enjoy no permanent wealth or titles. We care and want to participate together and trust in this project both for, and beyond our individual selves.

Somewhere between our imagined nation and one of Nehru’s hysterical, distrusting, Hitler named “mongrels and gangsters,” our shared history is still forming out of radically diverse histories. We are both practical and idealistic survivors of new world encounters in dread, fear, yearning and hope. With determination, hard work, inventive and successful competition, we create new opportunities for decency, respect, power, engagement and service.

Why aren’t all who graduate from junior high school required to take the citizenship exam passed by all naturalized immigrants? As well as all candidates for public office who fail it required to complete their course of instruction? Make their election campaigns be instructive.

Our depth of differences offer, as well as demand, creative, unusual, non-transactional and transformative win-win cooperations of enhanced learning, arts, talents, inventions, principles, communities, personal liberties and competitive excellence, toward deeper, mindful understanding of greater meaning.

To reform our institutions, restore our sociability and national pride, and overcome the governing flaws of our disunity and structural paralysis, without violence, will require a conscious mitigation of unconscious biases, and open-ended critical thinking beyond AI machine logics. In the spaces of freedom beyond the State, where immigrant cuisine has enriched our culture; jazz, shofars, lutes, fiddles, drums and voice have formed a new American music; and diverse tongues and rap have created an American English language, within our open and spacious environments, may greater cultural wisdom rise to match this necessity with a higher, collective faith that invokes our fortune’s blessings.

Mary Estill Buchanan served as the Secretary of State of Colorado from 1974 to 1983. Buchanan lives in Boulder. Email: mesbuch22@yahoo.com.