The purpose of Obama’s speech yesterday seems to have been not just to memorialize Selma, but also to defend his ‘love’ or belief in America. He gave a speech yesterday with multiple rhetorical flourishes involved around what “we” have done as Americans. Here’s one section:

We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened up the West, and countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights.

We’re the fresh-faced GIs who fought to liberate a continent. And we’re the Tuskeegee Airmen, and the Navajo code-talkers, and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied.

We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge.

But then to the point beyond the rhetorical flourishes:

Because Selma shows us that America is not the project of any one person. Because the single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” “We The People.” “We Shall Overcome.” “Yes We Can.” That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given, to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.

Yes, the “We” is important in the Constitution and in the context of America. “E pluribus unum”, “Out of many, one”. We come from everywhere but come together here to be Americans.

He dares lump his vapid campaign slogan in with “We the People” and “We Shall Overcome”. Just a tad presumptuous.

But “We” isn’t the most important word, or at least not the most important concept.

Yes, America is “not the project of any one person”. But it is the project about the person, about the rights of the individual and the rule of law crafted to protect those rights. It is the project started by those wanting to find religious freedom and continued by Founding Fathers who wanted to ensure those natural or God-given rights. It is that which makes this project America “exceptional”.

It is a project specifically constructed to work against the tyranny of the mob, the tyranny of the “we”, the tyranny of the collective.

So much so that our Founders specifically rejected being a democracy, despite what Obama, the ‘constitutional scholar’, claims.

A pure democracy is a one man one vote, rule of the majority over the individual, in the extreme, a lynch mob.

That is why we are a Republic, with a republican or representative form of government to protect the minority from being overrun by the majority, to constrain the government from stomping on the rights of the individual, to reduce the power of the government and of the collective.

This is what he misses, or consciously rejects, in his understanding of America.