Drafting the Promise
The Promise has been drafted through a survey of founding American documents such as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, The Federalist, and selections from the private correspondence of the nation's founders, as well as a survey of many of today's prominent progressive sources, including Free Press, the Economic Policy Institute, The Small Planet Institute, Democracy for America, George Lakoff, The Rockridge Institute, The Longview Institute, and Ted Kennedy's January 2005 "Progressive Vision for America" speech.
I had hoped at one time simply to quote the opening of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but which one? And what about all that follows the introductions? What about the Bill of Rights? Each of the founding documents carries a different set of invocations and each ranges from grand principles to details of procedure or historical fact. And to all this add the elaborations and explanations in written correspondence between the founders and in the series of essays by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay called The Federalist. Then add to all these the speeches and policy visions of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and today's progressive leaders. There is no single document to quote. There is instead a library of reading. We need a statement of principles we can hold in our hand. It is my hope that the Promise can serve this purpose or at least serve as a prototype to inspire more gifted writers who may follow after me.
The original version of the Promise was reviewed in 2005 by four citizens who generously volunteered as advisors: the Rev. Vince Anderson, Jordan Caldwell, Peter Foley, and Elizabeth Pizzulli. In the years that followed, with the help of an expanding base of Promise Advisors, the Promise has been refined to better focus on the core ideals necessary to fulfill the founding promise of democracy in America. Please contact me to recommend how you think the Promise can be improved.
Read about the Promise Advisors.