Conclusion: The American Moment
My earliest political memory was the death of Lincoln when I cried inconsolably. I was four or five years old at the time and my mother read to me from one of those picture books with exemplary messages. The story of Lincoln's life unfolded in simple black-and-white etchings, from the humble origins in a frontier cabin to the White House. Young Abe learning to read by the light of the hearth, honest Abe the store clerk who walked many miles to return a customer's change, President Lincoln who freed the slaves and preserved the Union. Then, at the moment of triumph, the cruel assassination. The pictures ended in black bunting, a tragedy I found inexplicable.
My mother, who has romantic sensibilities, did not attempt to explain away the contradiction. Life is strange, life is wonderful, she often mused. The best and the worst, she meant, are frequently side by side in human experience. I came away, I suppose, with her melodramatic sense of things.
Lincoln, I believed as a child, was the actual fulfillment of America's democratic faith. He embodied the possibility that sovereign citizens, regardless of birth or status, could collectively decide their own destiny and somehow become greater than themselves. Yet the potential for tragic disappointment was also always present.
As an adult, I read deeper histories and learned the mature facts about Lincoln, the devious politician, the elusive and uncertain commander, but none of this contradicted what I had learned as a child. In fact, the full portrait made Lincoln seem even larger because, fully human and fallible, he could encompass every paradox about the nation's character -- the crass and cunning side alongside its virtuous principles, the blind willfulness and also America's capacity to defy history.
He was still Lincoln. He still stood for an idea of democracy that I think is now widely dismissed as mystical -- the belief that only from the many can this nation fulfill its larger qualities. My impression is that many Americans, perhaps most of them, no longer really believe this. Or they are sullenly resigned to the assumption that, given modern complexities, a genuine, full-throated democracy is no longer practical in America. Given the realities of power, it no longer seems plausible to them. Possibly, they are correct. If so, America will come to be identified, like other nations before it, by its grosser parts -- mere geography defined by muscle and appetites and national eccentricities.
I choose to believe otherwise: The American saga always was and still remains a difficult search for democratic meaning. This nation, more than most, is driven by a transcendental imperative, an idea never fully realized, often blunted and even suppressed, but central to the society's energies. Genuine democracy, as Vaclav Havel has said, is like a distant horizon that no human society has yet reached or perhaps ever will reach. But that does not end the story and, in some ways, the search in America may be only just beginning.
At this moment of history, Americans are in the awkward position of receiving congratulations from around the world for upholding the democratic example when they know, if they are honest, that this adulation is directed at a political system that is not functioning in good faith with its own ideals and principles. No one can contemplate American democracy in the late twentieth century without experiencing the dissonance between the idea and the reality. Some citizens, the energetic minority who still believe, struggle to resolve these contradictions.
In a cynical era, a childhood reverie on Lincoln may seem ludicrously romantic. Reflections on democratic faith are dismissed as "unrealistic," like the tired boilerplate of campaign speeches. My conviction, however, is that an active faith in democratic possibilities dwells at the very center of the American experience. The first step toward renewal is to free ourselves of the cynical expectations of these times and to reassert that faith without hesitation or apology -- to declare stubbornly that what we were all taught in childhood is still true, or can be true, if we decide to make it so.
The burden of this book has been critical, an attempt to explain the antidemocratic conditions that deform American politics. A clear-eyed understanding of these circumstances may be necessary in order to change things, but it is not a guarantee that things will change. Certainly, history provides abundant evidence of human societies that were well aware of their own contradictions and simply chose to evade them. Americans have the capacity for evasion too, as the nation's history amply demonstrates.
But the United States is still quite young as nations go and still a country capable of new departures, with the potential to surprise the world and even surprise itself. In the nature of things, this capacity is mainly a matter of faith.
***
After thirty years of working as a reporter, I am steeped in disappointing facts about self-government. Having observed politics from the small-town courthouse to the loftiest reaches of the federal establishment, I know quite a lot about duplicitous politicians and feckless bureaucracies, about gullible voters and citizens who are mean-spirited cranks. These experiences, strangely enough, have not undermined my childhood faith in democratic possibilities, but rather tended to confirm it.
Reporting for newspapers (or magazines or broadcasting) is not a reflective occupation, but the work has one wonderful, redeeming quality to it. Reporters have a license to go almost everywhere in the society and talk to almost anyone, from U.S. senators and corporate managers to bus drivers and schoolteachers and poor people on welfare. In a random, roving manner, a reporter may experience this country firsthand -- from top to bottom -- with a variety of encounters not accessible to most other citizens. What I learned about America deepened my faith in the democratic possibilities.
Among other things, I have seen up close the frailties of power. At the pinnacles of political command, whenever I have been able to peer behind the veil of platitudes, I have usually glimpsed a scene of confusion and often chaos -- the trial and error, folly and misapprehensions of people in charge trying to decide what to do. The randomness of human endeavor exists at the top too; history confirms that this is nearly always the reality of power.
For several generations, however, Americans have been systematically taught to defer to authority and expertise in a complicated world. The modern political culture, transmitted by schools and universities and the news media, teaches implicitly that those chosen to hold power have access to special knowledge and intelligence not available to others and, therefore, their deliberations and actions are supposedly grounded in a firmer reality. My own experience, on the contrary, has corroborated again and again the native American skepticism of elites. I believe that, if the real inside story were known, every statesman and politician would prove to be as recklessly human as the rest of us.
This fallibility should not be held against them; the same qualities exist in authority figures of every kind, from corporate executives to church prelates. There is a "reassuring anarchy," as I once called it, in the most exalted realms of power and this encourages my conviction that rigid arrangements of power are much more vulnerable to intrusion and change than the experts and authorities wish people to believe. If citizens could grasp, sympathetically, the human dimension of the political failures that are periodically revealed in high places, they might recognize a greater capacity in themselves for influencing and even commanding the larger outcomes of the society.
The people who are running things are especially prone to error when they are isolated from the shared ideas and instincts of the larger community. Indeed, that is the pragmatic argument for democracy: A governing system that is well grounded in the common reality of the society at large is likely to produce sounder decisions, connected to real facts and conditions. The hard work of democracy involves constructing and sustaining those connections.
My encounters as a reporter with ordinary citizens have also led to optimism about the potential for democratic renewal. America has its full quota of fools and scoundrels, but this is a nation of people who are mostly smart and capable and, on the whole, generously disposed. If one is open to it, the wild variety of American life is endlessly strange and entrancing. As one gets to know these different people in their own peculiar circumstances, it seems extraordinary that we are all Americans, living in the same vast nation and with more or less the same civic values, and yet we are.
As a younger reporter, I spent many years getting on airplanes, flying around the country and dropping down into the lives of strangers, often at their worst moments, when a local crisis or conflict had become newsworthy. Nearly always, I came away refreshed by these encounters and even awed by the people and their stories, their openness and level-headed sense of things, the raw eloquence and inventive humor and sometimes their courage. Some of those citizens have appeared in this book.
Even in the most benighted comers of this country, in burned-out slums or on desolate Indian reservations, I have always met some whose forceful intelligence shone through the barriers of language and education and class. I frequently came away thinking to myself: Those people would be running things if they had been born with a bit more luck. If they spoke in formal English and dressed in blue pinstripes, they could pass for U.S. senators or bank presidents. I recognized, of course, that my insubstantial sympathies did not answer their complaints. Their anger would be satisfied only when it could speak for itself.
This is difficult, I know, for the well born and well educated to believe about the ordinary run of Americans (and perhaps threatening to some) for it suggests there is a vast pool of unrealized ability dwelling in the American population -- people with important things to say who are not heard. America, it is true, would be a very different place if all of those unheard ideas and aspirations were given a full voice in politics. Democracy disrupts power.
Ordinary people, as this book has illustrated, do assert themselves despite the obstacles. Indeed, if there is one constant in all my years of observing politics, it is the single, shocking fact that the most far-reaching developments in my memory did not emanate from Washington or anywhere else in the elected structure of politics but came instead from obscure, unpredictable places where unanointed citizens found a way to express themselves. The civil rights movement is, of course, the most compelling example. It changed the fabric of American life more profoundly than anything else in my lifetime, save World War II.
I remember, in particular, interviewing the aging black leaders of Summerton, South Carolina, nearly two decades after they had filed one of the initial lawsuits that led to the Supreme Court's historic school-desegregation decision. These were yeoman farmers and laborers, a school principal, a minister, a cafe owner. Many of them had paid a terrible personal price for challenging the status quo. Men and women were fired from jobs, small businesses were ruined. Some had been driven out of the county permanently.
Looking back, they spoke with the pride of people who knew they had helped to move the national history but also with self-conscious precision, like witnesses wanting to set down the true facts, not inflated afterthoughts. Their struggle had begun over a pitifully small matter, they explained, when they asked the white school board to supply coal to heat the black children's one-room country schoolhouse. When the school board refused, their anger deepened. Some of these men had just come home from World War II and the contradictions of the racial caste system mocked their patriotic sacrifice.
So they raised their demands further. They also wanted school buses for the black kids and no more hand-me-down textbooks, and decent buildings with indoor plumbing. Politics failed and the dispute became a lawsuit. When the civil rights lawyer came down from New York (he was Thurgood Marshall, later a Supreme Court justice), he told them that, since they were in this fight, they might as well go all the way and challenge the caste system itself. The idea was frightening and some hesitated. These people were already enduring reprisals and the intimate hostilities that are part of life in a small town. They agreed to go forward, however. Their legal cause was expanded to challenge the law of racial segregation itself and eventually their suit became a companion in the decision known as Brown v. Board of Education.
Long years later, I am still awed by their elemental courage. "Courage" is another word not often used now in politics, along with "loyalty" and "trust," but these humble citizens were pulling themselves at risk in terms much more stark than losing an election and for a far larger public purpose.
They did not presume to reach for power for themselves and certainly not to change the social order. They embarked on a quite modest plea for justice and, improbably, found themselves perfecting its meaning. Years later, in fact, the underlying social order of Summerton itself had not changed that much, even though their struggle had helped to change the nation. Life is strange, as my mother said. These people balanced their political disappointments with the intangible rewards of self-realization. In addition to changing America, they discovered that they had also changed themselves and this achievement was permanent.
If there is a mystical chord in democracy, it probably revolves around that notion -- that unexpected music can resonate from politics when people are pursuing questions larger than self. As a reporter, I have seen that ennobling effect in people many, many times -- expressed by those who found themselves engaged in genuine acts of democratic expression, who claimed their right to help define the larger destiny of their community, their nation. Power can accumulate in mysterious ways, if citizens believe they possess this right. Their power atrophies when they no longer believe in it. This book is for the believers.
***
Rehabilitating democracy will require citizens to devote themselves first to challenging the status quo, disrupting the existing contours of power and opening the way for renewal. The ultimate task, however, is even more difficult than that: building something new that creates the institutional basis for politics as a shared enterprise. The search for democratic meaning is necessarily a path of hard conflict, but the distant horizon is reconciliation. Americans coming to terms with themselves -- that is the high purpose politics was meant to serve.
This renewal, if it occurs, will not come from books. A democratic insurgency does not begin with ideas, as intellectuals presume, or even with great political leaders who seize the moment. It originates among the ordinary people who find the will to engage themselves with their surrounding reality and to question the conflict between what they are told and what they see and experience. My modest ambition for this book is that it will assist some citizens to enter into "democratic conversations" with one another, asking the questions that may lead them to action. [1]
The random anger visibly accumulating in so many sectors of the society can be therapeutic, but only in a limited sense. The democratic problem requires hard work from citizens who have been taught to be passive consumers in politics. It means people must learn once again to come together and develop their own understanding of events, free of the slogans and propaganda. It requires them to take the daring step of assuming some personal responsibility for self-government.
The task of learning is naturally intimidating. This book has set out many of the complicated conditions that history has dealt to the present -- the political circumstances that confine citizens to cramped roles and warp the lines of accountability and control. I have also suggested various new ways that people might think about how to reform the political order. But there are no easy and simple ways around these barriers. In my estimate, the status quo is much more vulnerable to purposeful challenges organized by citizens than conventional wisdom supposes. But I do not presume to know exactly how or where the insurgency begins.
Democratic solutions will emerge only from the trial-and-error of active citizens who learn for themselves how to do politics, who discover the methods and principles that work because people have tried and occasionally failed. It requires of people the patience to accumulate social understandings that they have tested against reality and then to pass on their knowledge freely to others.
Strange as it may seem to an era governed by mass-market politics, democracy begins in human conversation. The simplest, least threatening investment any citizen may make in democratic renewal is to begin talking with other people about these questions, as though the answers matter to them. Harmless talk around a kitchen table or in a church basement will not affect anyone but themselves, unless they decide that it ought to. When the circle is enlarged to include others, they will be embarking on the fertile terrain of politics that now seems so barren.
A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect -- people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard. Those with specialized expertise serve as teachers, not commanders, and will learn themselves from listening to the experience of others. The respect must extend even to hostile adversaries, since the democratic objective is not to destroy them but to reach eventual understanding. At its core, the idea of democracy is as simple as that -- a society based on mutual respect.
This obvious human quality, seemingly available to all, is what's missing from American politics, drenched as it is in mass manipulation and deception and sour resentments. Indeed, mutual respect, above and beyond the usual social and economic distinctions, is missing from the general fabric of American life. A society that regularly proclaims democratic pieties also devotes extraordinary energy and wealth to establishing the symbols and trappings of hierarchy, the material markings that delineate who is better than whom.
The search for honest conversation, like other aspects of the democratic experience, can be its own reward, whether or not it leads to the fulfillment of power. It opens a path to self-realization grounded in social relationships -- knowing others on terms that are reliable and enduring. Americans are already searching for "relationships," almost frantically it seems, on a close personal level. What many of them fail to grasp is that politics, in its original sense, also offers a practical means for mending the damaged social relations that afflict American life.
Building a politics grounded in intimate human terms seems so remote from the present that many will regard it as an impossible task. The organizational barriers are obvious and formidable, reflecting the inequalities of private status and the fractured nature of the society itself. Certainly, it is work for years or decades, not seasons.
But ordinary citizens, as this book has demonstrated, have their own inherent advantages in this enterprise, including their ability to see the reality more clearly sometimes than those who hold power. In some scattered places, the democratic ideal is already in motion, often among humble citizens who lack any personal advantages. These are people who still believe, as the Ohio auto worker said, that "the ultimate power is in their hands." They regularly find their faith confirmed in actual experiences.
When incumbent officeholders begin to perceive a real threat developing to their power, that is the moment when electoral politics can begin to become serious and interesting again. A genuine democratic dialogue can follow, one that promises accountability and also trust between the governed and their government. When the organized presence of citizens can deprive others of power, all the deeper power relationships surrounding government will be put at risk too.
The cynical cannot grasp this possibility, but the believers know that it is the actual history of American democracy. At the most creative moments in the American past, the nation found its true source of political energy and ideas among those citizens in unexpected quarters who took it upon themselves to renew the search.
***
As a nation, Americans are coming to the hard part of the saga, I believe, the time when things become less easy and the true character of the nation is revealed. In my romantic optimism, I have come to imagine that this may be the moment of testing that history was preparing for us all along. After two hundred years of fabulous invention, adventure and abundance, we are on new ground: awesomely powerful yet insecure and dependent, a democratic beacon for others yet profoundly troubled in our own social reality.
Americans are about to learn whether the American experiment was truly unique -- capable of defying history -- or simply another chapter in the rise and fall of muscular nation-states. Until now, the national experience seemed to unfold without boundaries, either geographical or material or psychological. The transcendental expectations were regularly fulfilled and the promise of future fulfillment was kept alive for almost everyone. But the space of that promise has shrunk visibly and the nation is bumping up against some harsh new obstacles to its power. National reputation and the military might of empire do not necessarily prevail over the new economic forces at work in the world. Citizens are told to temper their ambitions and appetites; the new realities are said to be beyond our control.
If the idea of America as specially positioned in history was nothing more than legend, then the future seems fairly clear and is commonly described as decline. Nothing in history guarantees, after all, that the richest, most energetic and inventive place on earth will remain so forever. The usual story of great powers is that sooner or later, when the glory faded, they sank into social decay and bitterness. That is the usual ending for a political system that persistently ignores reality, and for a people who become alienated from their own values.
My own optimism insists that this new crucible can yield a different outcome. But this is the hard part: The only way I can imagine this may happen is through the restoration of the civic faith. The American moment cannot be about accumulating more wealth or weaponry or territory; the facts will not allow it. It must involve a more difficult and introspective search for social invention -- politics that takes the democratic idea to its next plateau in human history.
The present generation and the next, in other words, must find tangible ways to reinvigorate the social faith in the promise of democracy. The nation's sense of its own continuing search for something better is endangered and, without that civic faith, this nation is in deep trouble. If democratic character is lost, America has the potential to deteriorate into a rather brutish place, ruled by naked power and random social aggression. Innocent faith is what makes America work.
That faith does not imply impossible notions of perfection, but it does require convincing forward motion toward a social contract that most everyone will understand and accept -- mutual understandings that promise equitable and shared objectives. To achieve this in the contemporary circumstances, the present generation of Americans may have to face some of the Republic's oldest contradictions, contradictions that were always successfully evaded in the past.
Boundless prosperity and adventure, throwing off new wealth and dispersing it widely, allowed the political system to avoid confronting questions of hierarchy and class and race, the inequalities of poverty and plenty, the privileges embedded in the political order. Endless expansion ignored the accumulating damage to the natural environment. General abundance made it easier to accept a political system that had become steadily more distant from popular control. Now we are up against those questions again.
These matters have been evaded for good reason; they are the most difficult to resolve and no society anywhere that calls itself a democracy has succeeded in facing them. Americans, however, have much more at stake because this nation depends crucially upon sustaining the idea of a democratic society. It is the essential strand that binds diverse peoples together and enables the society to see itself as a functioning whole.
Americans need a new parable for themselves -- a story of national purpose that faces the present realities maturely but does not sacrifice the country's youthful idealism and inventiveness and self-confidence. If Americans set out to rehabilitate their own democracy, they may discover new democratic vistas for others. It is a chance to organize the future -- to lead the world to ground where no one has ever been before.
Despite the centuries of struggle and advance, democracy is still a radical proposition. "This is an unsanctioned idea," historian Lawrence Goodwyn observed, "but this is the democratic idea: that the people will participate in the process by which their lives are organized."
New possibilities are opened for any society that takes that idea seriously. The oldest questions of human existence remain unanswered by modern societies, despite the gloss of technology and wealth. The complexities of modern life have ensnared people in new forms of subservience. Why do millions still starve when the world is awash in surplus food? How can the modern economic system be transformed so that growth and prosperity do not depend so centrally on waste and despoliation? What are the outlines of a democratic system in which workers and owners and communities would truly share a voice in organizing their own lives? None of these matters remains unresolved because of physical constraints. They are political questions, waiting on democratic answers.
Americans should not suppose that they are the only people who need to ask such questions or are equipped to find the answers. While American democracy has decayed, people in the most unlikely nations have become the new inventors of democratic possibilities -- toppling the most rigid forms of power with the force of organized people.
Their experiments, even their failures, have provided a tonic for small-d democrats everywhere in the world. They have restored, above all, honest language-the capacity to speak about democracy with clarity and sincerity, as if the idea of self-governing people is fresh and alive and still practical. They have further restored an understanding that, as Vaclav Havel said, democracy is the unfinished story of human aspirations.
"Man must in some way come to his senses," Havel wrote from his prison cell. "He must extricate himself from this terrible involvement in both the obvious and hidden mechanisms of totality, from consumption to repression, from advertising to manipulation through television. He must rebel against his role as a helpless cog in the gigantic and enormous machinery hurtling God knows where. He must discover again, within himself, a deeper sense of responsibility toward the world, which means responsibility toward something higher than himself." [2]
The American beacon helped to teach people everywhere to aspire to self-realization and to rebel against powerlessness. Now, it seems, the former students must re-educate Americans in the meaning of their own faith. Perhaps that is when the American moment will begin: when Americans find the courage to speak honestly again in the language of democracy.