The Next Resistance & Our Own Self-Reckoning

Understanding Today, Preparing for Tomorrow

Truth is, democracy has always skated on thin ice, at best in contention with all the other worst forms of government.  This battle for the better angels of our nature has never been so tested in our lifetime. 

In his age Lincoln, though he tarried and delayed, knew that ultimately it would prove impossible to compromise with evil.  He spoke poignantly in his first inaugural address, words often cited but less often considered for the depth of sentiment, the plea, the pain so plainly present about to erupt.  He wrote,

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

I hear in this voice the recognition of moral failure and the painful truth---that there are many we love, neighbors, friends and colleagues whose political choice is no mere disagreement of policy or difference of opinion.  What we are seeing, once through a glass darkly but now face to face, is far more devasting to our hearts, to our personal relationships, in our society, to the deeply flawed but noble experiment of democracy.  It is difficult to witness moral vacuity that strains our most human affections.

We know and love people whose character, whose core is now beyond our grasp of reason and in violation of our most heartfelt convictions and values.  We may know them as kind and loving, as self-sacrificing and honest even was we contend with the fact they are complicit in venality and shameless mendacity.  It’s all so hard and we tell ourselves it is wrong for us to regard another’s acts and values so deplorable.  But truth, like love and all things we cherish, invariably brings with it the shadows of disappointment and discomfort.

The more we care, the more we love, the more acutely vulnerable we become to the painful facts of life.  Lincoln sees not enemies but friends and the bonds of affection, and they are being tested, severed not by mere dissent or controversy but rather by touching the boundary of irreconcilable difference.  What then?

The strife, frustration, anger, and fear we feel is real because we cannot hear swell the chorus of the Union and must instead come to terms with a vulgar triumphalism that means to replace conversation and compromise with vengeance, religious dogma, and a cruel inhumanity.  We know the worst is yet to come, so how can we celebrate what the majority has chosen?

What do we say and do when we engage those with whom we feel such discord of soul?  This is no misunderstanding that can be remedied with mutual disagreement; this is no disparity in sympathies.  This is divarication the likes of which we have not before experienced.  It cuts so deeply we must pretend it does not exist, agree not to talk about matters of great importance just to share a meal or gather for holiday.

We repress and compose ourselves; we restrain and control, muffle, and quash not only our feelings but some part of our souls---all because “we are not enemies, but friends.”   We do all we can to keep ourselves on simmer because bringing it to boil won’t make it better.

We’re going to feel exhausted and consumed because this self-smothering is silencing the heart that is, at once, crying and seething.  There is no point in othering or projecting our rage when it’s clear that such unappeasable dissonance has no remedy but our own response.  However withdrawn we feel, silenced with threats spoken or implied, in avoidance of further estrangement we wish not to exacerbate by confrontation, our true power lies, as Viktor Frankl told us, in how we choose to respond.

Take note, we may choose not to call out the failure of character that is now so plainly evident because the passions of memory object---friends, neighbors, family we love or loved failed us and we cannot easily break these bonds.  Acrimony does not serve us; compassion will not cure us anymore than its offering will heal or awaken those who have made their alienating choice.

Loving our enemies may sound a sublime clarion call but to believe such love conquers all or serves to mend can just as soon prove an act of bypass or artifice, a self-subterfuge denying deeper truths.   Our soul feels violated because nothing we can experience as human is inviolate: we are most truthful with ourselves when we recognize to be human is to be vulnerable and come to appreciate that neither clarity nor candor is necessarily remedial.  Sometimes the pain just is.  These may not be problems we can solve.  Rather, these may be conditions with which we come to terms.  How you choose your terms is, of course, up to you.

If love is not ‘the answer’ we also know that hate only makes it all the worse.  We may call a truce just to share a meal or attend a birthday but the divide we feel is real and the need to attend to boundaries postponed indefinitely because that is our safest recourse.  We could choose to live further embittered, keeping that to ourselves, but this only proves we have yet to make better choices.

The boundaries and the choices we need to make belong to us when they can no longer restore or redress our fractured relationships.  What must you tolerate because you believe you must?  What makes it possible to live with yourself?  That is the last boundary we each much draw.

What then of our more expedient options?

Let us be honest about what we cannot control.  The majority has spoken and been given almost unimaginable power.  We need to see what more is coming and rally to coalitions that are suffering with less trust and little confidence that those with whom we so vehemently disagree will be reasonable, much less compromising or conciliatory.

We will become smaller as a nation. We will become further estranged from its ways, its claims, its future. There will be corruption on scales we have never considered. It will be less safe for everyone and much worse for people of color and women.

Nothing will be safe from this nihilism. The law will mean less than ever; the deep divisions already present in society will grow and harden. We must prepare ourselves to live under despotism and to live, as Vaclav Havel said, as if we are free.  They cannot steal our conscience; they cannot crush our hearts unless we surrender those inner redoubts.

We will resist and perhaps there will someday again be a chance for liberal democracy. America failing right before our eyes, we must not tire of reminding each other that we can only make better together.  Despotism depends on our capitulation and anticipatory compliance.  When such cowardice appears, let courage remind you that the virtues of decency and integrity must not be stolen or sullied.

Like others in failing democracies, we must prepare ourselves for this despotism.  It is naïve to believe he will not enact the cruelties and retributions he has made into shameless vitriol. We're not without examples or the ability to learn.  We'll need to create new ways to support institutions that create the bulwark to resist and to articulate the value of ideas that may not persuade but provide foundations for change.

If there is to be a future for this American experiment or for any notion of liberal democracy, our hopes must lie in education, organization, and coalitions committed to the ideals of freedom we have never lived up to.

Teach your children and grandchildren what is no longer taught (or will be taught) in public schools: civic-education, art and music, the achievements of the human heart and mind. Support the lawyer fighting for the rule of law in courts, knowing that incompetence, corruption, and injustice will be new norms. Expose these corruptions and do your best not to let them consume the systems we need to forge a healthy democracy.

Reject passivity. Instead win back the cause of decency and insist on government dedicated to those propositions that offer the alternative to this nihilism. When this government cares not for those oppressed, answer not with performances of radicalism but freedom made manifest in the integrity of the experiment we have sought to protect. 

Lincoln understood,  “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”  But let us be frank: we may not long be blessed with such checks and limitations.   Still, we must insist that the true sovereign is as much the freedom to which we aspire for all citizens of a democracy.

And so let us conclude with Thomas Paine: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

A special thanks to so many who have inspired this effort, including writers with whom I have no personal contact including a recent piece by David Frum and the wealth of insight left to us by Christopher Hitchens.