Did America Invent Something Even Better than Democracy?
In America on March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address. It should have been his big moment of triumph. He had the secessionists beat. The Civil War would soon exhale its last decaying breaths.
He didn’t crow about the impending victory. Just a brief note on the army’s progress, which he called “reasonably satisfactory.”
What Lincoln spoke about was God’s judgment. Not just for the vanquished South, but for the nation as a whole, all who had been a part of the bloody conflict and the 250 years of slavery that preceded it. Here we are 12 months into the Trump administration, and the dictionary people have chosen “complicit” as Word of the Year. But having passed through the utter darkness of a civil war Lincoln chose to leave the matter of blame to a higher power. “Let us judge not, that we be not judged.”
He entered the war to save the union. He came out of it with the same agenda.
Lincoln understood the union itself is America’s great invention.
You could make the argument democracy owns that distinction; or even our bright beacon, freedom. But democracy has been around since the ancient Greeks. Freedom has had its moments as well, long before it was enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Both are necessary conditions. They’re just not the thing itself. The dollar bill doesn’t say Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death. It says E Pluribus Unum.
The idea of an entire landmass of people coming together in the interest of self-government, this was breathtakingly new in the heady days following the Constitutional Convention. So new Hamilton & Co. spent a good part of the next year writing The Federalist Papers to explain how it might work.
Previous attempts at organizing governments across large geographies had always required an ungentle prod with the point of a sword. The Pax Romana. The Pax Britannica, to bring up the particular empire whose excesses inspired the American Declaration of Independence. For most of recorded history it was possible to put a democracy together at the local level, but after that it was all kings and emperors.
By some odd stroke of luck, or brilliance, or pure Yankee grit, we made it work in this country. Most likely it was a combination of all three. Movement conservatives like to credit an American exceptionalism ordained from on high, and maybe there’s a healthy amount of that in the mix as well. If there is it would make the betrayal by the current regime of so many of the principles fueling said exceptionalism all the more unfortunate.
And this brings us to the present moment. There is something broken in the mechanism driving American unity. Some vital spark gone out of it. You know this is true. You feel the parts knocking together like misfiring pistons every time you read the morning news. We don’t need to go into detail on what snapped to cause the fracturing. Smart people have written whole books about it.
Suffice it to say we’re dizzy with the troubles launched at us from every direction. We know we need to plant the flag somewhere on the hill and begin beating them back. We just can’t seem to agree about where.
The opportune move would be to plant the flag at unity itself.
Admittedly, “Reunite!” doesn’t pour dopamine on the political fires with the same intensity as, say, chanting “Lock her up!” But there’s a latent power in the idea of turning our first energies to repairing this fundamental thing that makes us function as a people.
Consider the unlikely election of Democrat Doug Jones to an Alabama senate seat that should have been a cakewalk for the opposite party. His media strategist Joe Trippi and pollster Paul Maslin wrote in the Washington Post that it was crazy to think their candidate’s insistence on reaching out to his state’s conservative Republicans, and at the same time hoping to inspire women, young people and African Americans to turn out at the polls, would work. But listen to Jones’s words in a campaign ad that begins with a story of soldiers from Alabama and Maine meeting on a Civil War battlefield. “I want to go to Washington and meet the representatives from Maine and those from every other state, not on a battlefield, but to find common ground. Because there is honor in compromise and civility, to pull together as a people and to get things done.”
This would be boilerplate stuff in ordinary times. At a moment when the Leader of the Free World trades on the confidence man’s instincts for dividing and planting uncertainty, such words strike a formidable chord.
I’ve watched the ebbs and flows of popular culture from my perch at an ad agency for a long time. My gut says there is something new building under the surface, a wave of revulsion with leaders who seek political fortune in political division. It just might be ready to break over the heads of those who return to the same old hate factories to create their dog whistles and attack ads in the coming political season. Post-truth politics was the buzzword of the last election cycle. Post-anger politics could describe the next one.
Think of this as the optimistic scenario. It won’t happen automatically. It’s something that needs to be rallied around. Insisted on. Fought for. Most of us are more patriotic than we know, and the sense that something fundamental in the country needs repair digs at us like a bone spur. National uncertainty becomes personal uncertainty. The loss we feel is as individual as it is collective. Thus the seed for a grassroots effort.
Bringing such an effort to the full boil of political action may require getting out in front of our leaders and their donor class. What it asks of us reminds me of Hunter Thompson’s famous description of the counterculture of the sixties: “…that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…”
The good news is the common ground is also the high ground. The symbols available to those who would spur us toward a less corrosive national conversation are good ones. Our treasured public lands. Our public schools and exceptional universities. The tradition of strong American leadership abroad. The Internet that brings us social media and streaming TV to binge watch. These are the things we built together. All are under assault by those who see advantage in diminishing or selling off for a quick profit the things the rest of us cherish. As we say in the ad business, the message of a restored sense of national unity has legs.
All of this is a back-of-the-envelope sort of political analysis, but often that’s the best way to identify the broad themes. Lest I get too far removed from actual scholarship in the field, I’ll finish my rumination where it began. With Lincoln. He’d been to the abyss of disunion and back. His style and his wisdom set a useful example for the work ahead.
If people know nothing else about Lincoln, they know the nickname Honest Abe. As the story goes, Lincoln earned it as a boy working as a store clerk when he walked three miles to return the few cents he’d accidently overcharged a customer. The story dovetails nicely with the myth of George Washington confessing he chopped down the family cherry tree because, “I cannot tell a lie.”
Honesty is the first thing every kid in grade school learns about our two greatest presidents. Astonishing dishonesty is the governing style that threatens to send the current occupant of the Oval Office to the nether regions of the list. If we truly want to fix the polarization that’s afflicted the nation this would be a helpful place to start. Honesty is fundamental to the national narrative because without it there cannot be trust. And broken trust is a fundamental force driving disunity.
Lincoln’s Second Innagural Address was designed to restore trust. He searched for the inarguable truths even people who were still in the process of trying to murder one another could not deny. “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” You can begin to trust the man who applies that to himself as much as you.
We’re luckier than Lincoln. Battered as they are, the institutions that allow us to peacefully resolve our differences remain intact. The one good thing to come out of the year just finished is we can still say that. The work now is to keep them that way. Restore the trust that is at the root of a people’s ability to come together for the collective good. Demand honesty from leaders who have profited too long by trading in fabrication. It’s not to late to do this. Maybe, at long last, it’s even the opportune moment. But only if we remember the words from Lincoln’s speech as he began his abbreviated second term in office, “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”
