The LAND of
FLICKERING
LIGHTS
RESTORING AMERICA
IN AN AGE OF
BROKEN POLITICS
MICHAEL BENNET
Copyright © 2019 by Michael Bennet
Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Cover artwork © MediaWhalestock/BigStock
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: June 2019
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4781-3
eISBN 978-0-8021-4782-0
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Susan, Caroline, Halina, and Anne, with all my love
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
The Accidental Senator
Power Play
The Corruption of Inaction
Giving Away the Store
No Prophets in Our Time
The Test of a Free People
Acting Like Founders
Four Freedoms
The American Dream
For Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
Back Cover
PROLOGUE
On the thirty-fifth day of the longest government shutdown in American history, I rose on the Senate floor to protest. As much as against the shutdown itself, I lashed out against the inaction that has seized our government throughout the last decade. The vast majority of Americans elect representatives to Washington in the hope that their representatives will do something useful on their behalf. Of course, they know this work involves argument and even principled disagreement, but most Americans, along with most members of Congress, would expect this disagreement at some point to give way to the work of governing a nation. The last decade, however, has seen our politics break down, and the American people become increasingly disgusted with the inability of the two parties to collaborate in the country’s best interest.
The five stories told in these pages are not ones parents would tell their children if they wanted them to be proud of America’s federal government. Civics teachers will not turn to them for lessons on how our republic ought to work. These stories will not form the basis for a book about what John F. Kennedy called “the most admirable of human virtues—courage.”
Bipartisan ineptitude, laziness, and an absence of vision gave loose rein to a small minority—mainly the Tea Party and, later, the Freedom Caucus, along with their wealthy backers—who turned American political processes against themselves. That small minority simultaneously demanded untenable policies and broke down public confidence in our government. After establishing one-party rule in 2016, that same minority set about making a new order that few Americans could imagine and none had asked for: a budget that spends money we do not have and expects our children to repay; a tax cut for the rich that widens economic inequality and steals opportunity from the vast majority of Americans; a foreign policy that drops our proud tradition of encouraging democracy and trade in order to start trade wars with our allies and play patsy to dictators; an approach to the environment that welcomes polluters and banishes the scientific community; a rush to fill seats in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, with judges of partisan political orientation and often of questionable legal qualifications; an immigration policy that forces millions to live and work in a permanent, shadowy underclass while turning our border into an international symbol of nativist hostility.
From the country’s unexpected beginnings in the eighteenth century, Americans built a nation on the high expectation that as a people we could govern ourselves better than any tyrant could govern us. These aspirations to self-government take many forms. They include our elections and the many offices in our three branches of government as well as our shared rights and obligations as citizens. They include our commitment to pluralism, democracy, and the rule of law. They include our most cherished beliefs: that we are created equal; that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable; and that it is our collective obligation to seek a more perfect union. We have never fully realized these aspirations, and more than once we have betrayed them. They remain, however, the constellation that guides us to a better place. When we have lost our course, we searched them out. When we found them, we trued ourselves up to a better way. Our finest moments as a nation form a story of citizens who challenge themselves and their country to live up to the high expectations self-government requires.
If we imagine Americans whose political awareness began in 2010, the stories told here illustrate the only political conditions they know. For those in their twenties who may have missed out on a serious American history class, Washington politics look like those of a nation slouching toward despair, dysfunction, maybe even despotism. With every month that goes by, it becomes more difficult to remember an American government that functioned in any other way. As a people, we deserve to know that in the United States there once were—and still can be—better courses.
It is easy for the burden of present circumstance to convince us that we are in a dark hour. But we must also be honest enough to admit that as a nation we have faced challenges greater than this. We are not at our radios after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 7, 1941, hoping that President Roosevelt might help us see our way through to the conclusion of yet another world war. We are not enslaved as human beings or enslaving other human beings. We are not now, as Native Americans have been, dispossessed of our homelands, subjected to serial broken promises, and only then offered the right to be citizens. We are not in the throes of civil war or torn apart by armed partisans and lynch mobs trying to roll back the progress of Reconstruction. Rather, we are, as we have been many times before, at political loggerheads and wondering, rightly, what we can do to emerge as a stronger union.
I think often about the words of James Baldwin, written deep in the crisis years of the American civil rights movement: “And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.”
Yes, everything now is in our hands.
—MFB
Denver, Colorado
January 2019
THE ACCIDENTAL SENATOR
How I got into this—and why I stay.
I. “Disenthrall Ourselves”
It seems like a trick question: what doe
s the Constitution of the United States of America have to say about politics? The answer is that it has nothing to say about politics, at least not in the sense we throw the word around today. The Constitution and its twenty-seven amendments contain 7,591 words. The word “politics” does not appear once.
The Constitution has a lot to say, however, about the purpose of the American republic and the responsibilities of its citizens. Look no further than the preamble. It reminds us that those who proposed and ratified the Constitution did so for specific reasons: “To form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
The Constitution is a document centrally concerned with accomplishing certain objectives and with the procedures we should follow to achieve them in a fair and orderly manner. It is not about a partisan game of capture the flag. It is not about spin. It is about doing things, which is something Americans have always seen as a national characteristic. We are a can-do people. Isn’t that what we tell ourselves? The Constitution may not contain the word “politics,” but it contains plenty of terms like “governing,” “do business,” “perform,” and “provide for”—all of them having to do with accomplishing tasks that serve the public good. We commonly refer to the president as the chief executive—“executive” is another term found in the Constitution—but we tend to gloss over its meaning. Whatever else the president’s duties are, a chief executive is a person who oversees, who manages. In his Farewell Address, George Washington emphasized the need to get things done. This, he believed, must be our North Star. The alternative was a civic culture that would spiral into excessive factionalism, which, in today’s terms, means permanent partisan warfare fueled by narrow interests and big money.1
It is a commonplace now in America that political campaigns never end. The less frequently noted corollary to that observation is that governing never begins. We have forgotten how to actually run the country. We have forgotten that honest deliberation between people with different points of view leads to better decisions than rule by one person or one party. Decoupled from any desire to govern, our politics has lost its purpose.
At a moment like this—if you find yourself tilting toward one end of the ideological spectrum or the other—you would be forgiven for thinking that the worst thing you could possibly do is let down your partisan guard. A sucker’s bet if ever there was one. The other side will never join you in good faith. You’ll be taken for a ride. Besides, there’s no point in seeking agreement with the other side because its red-faced undemocratic faction will never allow you to reach one. As citizens, when we reach this point in our thinking, we reach the point of greatest vulnerability. To believe that we can counter the threat of some bad version of one-party rule only by replacing it with a preferred version of one-party rule is to be charmed out of the very pluralism we must protect: the idea that we draw strength from difference and wisdom from honest debate.
Is it naive to believe that at this moment in American history we can restore public trust in our republic? Is it naive to believe that elected officials can live up to the high expectations of that trust? Some may think so. But it’s a pipe dream to believe we can move forward as a nation without devotion to the historic ideals that have offered us a path to address our problems in the past and can do so now.
In today’s Washington, our politics have emptied themselves of imagination, integrity, and efficacy. Politics do little except generate more politics. Yet politics are beguiling. They are a strange force, simultaneously repulsive and seductive. Luring us with flattery and outrage, they flood our cable channels and social media feeds with opposing fronts of hyperbole—a never-ending series of melodramatic episodes with their penny-ante villains and heroes. We find ourselves spellbound by a face-off between mutually exclusive and untenable positions.
Under these circumstances, our first duty, as Abraham Lincoln advised, is to “disenthrall ourselves”—to snap the spell of dogmatic and useless commitments and remodel our politics for our uniquely stormy present. We should ask ourselves whether the repetition of last night’s talking points on cable TV has any chance of educating our children, providing affordable health care to more Americans, securing our economic future, or defining America’s role around the globe.
We need to remind ourselves that the real work of politics—in its best and highest sense—is not merely about disagreement. It is not about slaying the dragons of some demagogue’s invention. It is about our families and our neighbors and the quality of their personal and civic lives. Our families and our neighbors: whether they are down the street, on the other side of the country, or yet to be born.
This book is partly about how we disenthrall ourselves and partly about our neighbors in the largest sense of that term. It is about where we went wrong and how we can become citizens again. This book is not a memoir. I couldn’t bear to read such a thing, much less expect you to. But in the following few pages I share a little of my personal story just to give you a sense of where I came from and how I got here—not to the United States Senate, but to seeing things as I do.
II. Pioneers
In 2008, when my life took an unexpected turn, my immediate neighbors were the people of Denver, Colorado. I had lived in the city since 1997, and after a number of years in the private sector reorganizing distressed companies, in 2003 I became chief of staff to Denver’s mayor, John Hickenlooper. Shortly thereafter the board of education selected me to become the superintendent of Denver’s public schools, a job that brought me face-to-face with America. Five years later, Barack Obama was elected president, and he soon nominated Ken Salazar, one of Colorado’s senators, as secretary of the interior. This created a vacancy, and to my surprise Governor Bill Ritter appointed me to fill it. I had never run for office. Polls pegged my name recognition in Colorado at 3 percent. And my Rolodex—yes, I still used one of those—consisted of people I had met in business and education. My circle of neighbors was about to expand very quickly.
To say the least, I was not an obvious choice. A national political website greeted the news of my appointment with the encouraging headline: WTF?!! Colorado’s Republican Party chairman derisively referred to me as “the accidental senator.” He could not have been more right. I was not a native of Colorado; in fact, I was born in New Delhi, India, and grew up in Washington, DC.2 None of this made for the kind of origin story that would carry much weight as I prepared to run for a full six-year term in 2010.
The truth is, though, that having an unusual background is not unusual for an American. When my second-grade class was asked to line up in order of whose family had arrived most recently and whose had been in America the longest, I turned out to be the answer to both questions. In their very different ways and for very different reasons both strands of my family were pioneering. My mom, Susanne Klejman, and her parents, John (once Jakób) and Halina, were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. They were split up during the Nazi invasion of Poland. My mom was sent out to a village in the countryside to live with a nurse, my grandmother lived as a Catholic in a convent, and my grandfather hid, among other places, in the cellar of the best-known candy maker in Poland. My mom learned that her own mother, my Babcia, was still alive only when she arrived (along with thirteen nuns who then went on to a convent that had escaped destruction) at the cottage where my mom was hiding. My grandfather found them together after the war’s end. The reunited family lived for two years in Warsaw, then emigrated to Stockholm and Mexico City before arriving in New York in 1950.
My mom, then twelve, was the only member of the family who could speak English. She enrolled herself in the New York City public schools, eventually graduating from Hunter College High School. The three of them spoke Polish at home, but my brother, my sister, and I never learned more than a word or two of it. I have traveled widely throughout Colorado and our country, and I have never met anyone with
a stronger accent than my grandparents’. They knew how lucky they had been to survive the Holocaust, but that luck was colored by the memories of all and everyone they had lost. By contrast, the luck of being Americans filled them with pure joy. They never once let my siblings and me lose sight of how fortunate we are. And they saw to it that we received the best education they could afford. They knew the difference their education had made in their lives and wanted to make sure the next generation shared in that treasure. As the beneficiary of their commitment, I have learned many things, but one is that every American child deserves the same advantages.
I was born in New Delhi because my dad, Doug Bennet, motivated by Kennedy-era idealism, had taken a job as an assistant to the US ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, a former Connecticut governor who had worked in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. My dad grew up in Hamburg, Connecticut, a little river town. His side of the family could trace its lineage all the way back to Edward Fuller, who had arrived with more than a hundred other religious refugees on the Mayflower, in 1620.3
In 1964, the year I was born, Bowles was serving as ambassador for a second time, and he had attracted a number of young Americans, like my parents, who were committed to helping India develop its economic, educational, and agricultural systems. Along with Bowles and many other Americans, they believed this was an important moment during the history of the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union were jockeying for influence among Asian nations—India, in particular. They believed they were on the front line of President John F. Kennedy’s effort to counter Soviet influence. Today, India is one of our closest friends, but the relationship still carries the strain of Cold War international politics.
My parents’ experience in India persuaded my dad to pursue public service as a career. That led us to Washington in 1968, the year the city erupted in anger and flames in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. My dad became a speechwriter for Vice President Hubert Humphrey and then the administrative assistant for a young senator from Missouri, Tom Eagleton. Throughout my childhood, he held a number of jobs with increasing responsibilities—ultimately taking him outside government, to the presidency of Wesleyan University. My mom was a librarian at my elementary school and made sure my siblings and I always had a good book. (She continues to make book recommendations to her grandchildren.) I had a strong sense that what my parents did for a living was virtuous and worthwhile. I still do.
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