The Land of Flickering Lights

by Michael Bennet

  Two or three days earlier, Bill Ritter had stopped by and explained that Colorado’s own Senator Ken Salazar would be appointed interior secretary. The governor asked whether I would consider adding my name to the pool as a potential replacement. To this day, I really don’t know why Ritter made such an unusual appointment. Appointing me to the vacancy did absolutely nothing to help him politically. I was relatively unknown in the state. No one, including myself, knew whether I had the skills required to win a statewide race, which I would have to launch immediately after the appointment. I did recall a moment from my tenure as superintendent that may have had some influence. After finishing his own Democratic Party meeting, the governor wandered into a town hall I was having at South High School. As often happened when we made changes, tempers were running hot. In this case, we were proposing to elevate the graduation requirements for students. The high school auditorium was filled to the rafters with concerned students, parents, and teachers. But, as I would do many nights during my time as superintendent, I invited every question and criticism that people had, and we parted with a better understanding about each other’s points of view. Perhaps Governor Ritter thought that skill might come in handy. He would have been right. The worst Tea Party town hall I ever had was a thousand times easier than the best meeting about a school closing I ever had.7

  In truth, my toughest town halls have sometimes been in places with strong Democratic majorities. There, after I’ve cast a vote that has gone against the grain of the Democratic Party—though very much in the interests, I’d argue, of the citizens of Colorado—people are often taken aback that I have not toed the party line. Usually, after I have had the chance to explain myself, most people are satisfied that I represented Colorado fairly, even if they still disagree. In the more conservative parts of the state, on the other hand, town halls are filled with people whose news comes largely from Fox and who sometimes are predisposed to view me as a Bolshevik. By the time my town halls there are over, people often ask me where I am getting my news and invite me back to continue the conversation.

  My town halls give me all the faith I need that our republic will endure. I am fortunate to represent a complicated state that is about a third Republican, a third Democratic, and a third Independent. But most people don’t define themselves primarily by those categories, and, after all those town halls, I believe there exists in Colorado—and probably in many states—a broad consensus about the policies our country should pursue to secure our children’s future and our place in the world.

  In our time, much of the political drama plays out in continual thirty-second TV spots slamming opposing candidates, eight-hundred-word op-eds under a byline, talking heads on radio and TV, countless tweets, and, in the end, millions of votes. Nevertheless, I believe we are at our best when we are face-to-face in a town hall meeting or discussions over dinner, obliged by proximity to acknowledge the humanity and citizenship we share. Maybe I am nostalgic. Too often, as on Facebook or Twitter or in the fevered, anonymous reaches of the internet, isolation affords us the lazy convenience of diminishing one another with impunity. My Facebook feed attracts plenty of vitriol soloists. I accept as a duty of elected office that I should receive input in this form. But we are not going to make a better future for our children out of this form of discourse. We should be embarrassed to think they will ever see this stuff.

  Instead, we ought to take a page from the town halls, engaging each other as Americans—not as enemies whose battle lines have been drawn by politicians raising money, cable commentators chasing ratings, or billionaires and big-money influence outfits protecting their narrow interests. Too often over the last decade these actors have set our agenda. It is not an agenda that accurately assesses or addresses the challenges we face. It is an agenda that thrives on ceaseless conflict, without requiring any responsibility or sacrifice from the American people to achieve real results.

  Americans have a lot more on their minds. We owe a debt to the generations of Americans who secured the republic and its prospects for us, and we have an obligation to provide at least as much to the next generation. Our responsibility requires us not to shade the truth but to face what Lincoln called “the unprecedentedly stern facts of our case.” We are obliged to uphold enduring principles. And as we do, we must recognize that not every disagreement is one of principle and that out of disagreement we have the chance to fashion durable, imaginative, and unorthodox solutions.

  The ties of citizenship are as demanding as they are precious. Citizenship is a bond of trust—trust that we will work out our differences and land on the side of generosity together, even as we know we will be sometimes disappointed with the outcomes as individuals. The necessary give-and-take of citizenship is enacted now—in the present. It is not some cloudy reservoir of memory from the past we can draw on whenever we like. It is not a resolve to behave better in some indeterminate future, like Augustine’s famous prayer: “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.” The moment when we must act as citizens is always now: in the present.

  Self-government is the only form of government that depends on virtue—on the goodwill of the people—to perpetuate itself. Montesquieu, the French political philosopher known and admired by many of our eighteenth-century founders, once observed that, in an autocracy, the king, the despot, or the political boss rules by coercion. Every act of omission by the state justifies and perpetuates the state. A “wise republic,” on the other hand, where all citizens share in action through government, requires the people to take responsibility for their own freedom and prosperity. This means making decisions in common in the face of risk and uncertainty. I have always been stirred by the example of Ralph Carr, a former governor of Colorado, who alone among his peers stood in opposition to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Taking responsibility also means placing trust in the goodwill we share with other citizens. We are not equally or perfectly virtuous, and we should not expect to be. Among us are people whose politics is aimed at stripping some citizens of their rights and opportunities, who despise pluralism, who succumb to fearful hatreds like racism, or who care for nothing but themselves. My own experience in politics tells me this: such people are small in number. Their presence means that the rest of us, most of us, whom Martin Luther King Jr. called “the great decent majority,” must share an even deeper understanding of our patriotic obligation to our fellow Americans and our republic.

  James McHenry, who represented Maryland at the Constitutional Convention, recorded in his notebook this story about Benjamin Franklin from the day after the meeting adjourned:

  A lady asked Dr. Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

  “A republic,” replied the Doctor, “if you can keep it.”

  Too often, this story is told to dramatize the fragility of American democracy or to add color to a warning that as a country we are on the verge of losing something we should hold dear. It deserves to be understood in a more optimistic light—as a crystalline summation of every citizen’s obligation to the republic. The “you” in this story isn’t the woman who asks the question. The “you” is every one of us.

  IV. Reclaiming Our Ideals

  I arrived in the Senate in early 2009 at the depths of the Great Recession. Although I had little experience with partisan politics, my expectations of our governing institutions were high. I believed the election of a new president combined with the severity of the economic difficulties facing the country would produce a coherent political and policy response from Washington.

  Over the past decade, my expectations have been dashed by our inability to get almost anything done for our country. Time and again I have wondered, and my constituents have often asked: Why do the characters in our national political dramas so frequently take the path of least resistance? How is it that symbols become more important than outcomes? What caused our checks and balances to veer so far out of whack? Given the urgency to act on matters critical to this re
public, and given the even graver urgency of the consequences of failing to act, what motivates Washington to accomplish so little?

  To my mind, much of the cause must be laid at the feet of trivial, unprincipled partisanship masquerading as principled disagreement. The framers who drafted our Constitution knew that disagreement would be a defining characteristic of our republic. In Europe, no monarch cared what you thought. In America, no tyrant could tell you what to think. The Constitution the framers wrote established the most elegant mechanisms ever devised in human history—our three branches of government, our freedoms as citizens—to resolve a nation’s political disputes and govern the country.

  During my time in office, I have come to realize that our country is no longer using the mechanisms the framers provided in order to achieve results. We are using them to have disputes. We are damaging what generations have preserved and advanced—and what the next generations deserve to enjoy. The causes of our government’s breakdown are poorly understood by the American people and even by their representatives in Congress. The election of Donald Trump, a reality TV star, is a symptom of this breakdown, not its essential cause. We arrived at this perilous American moment for many reasons, but they include specific episodes when Washington and our country failed to live up to obligations our best predecessors have fulfilled.

  The purpose of this book is twofold. One purpose is to describe five moments when uncompromising factionalism in pursuit of ideological goals disabled both political parties and destroyed any bipartisan incentives to govern the American republic. Another purpose is to make an urgent case that to find our path forward Americans must reclaim the ideals of the founders and repair the damage already done. In doing so, we should reconceptualize the word “founder” itself. We should think of founders as those who constructed the ideas upon which our republic was built and which enable it to endure, thrive, and grow. The term encompasses the Americans who declared independence from England and the framers who drafted the Constitution. But it also should include all of those who, down the years, have expanded America’s promise: for instance, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, José Martí, Emma Lazarus, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Jordan, Cesar Chavez. Your list, your neighbor’s list, the list of the senator across the hall—they all will vary. Combined, our lists make up America’s honor roll, an assembly who put the republic before themselves and any narrow interest.

  The first episode described in the book considers how the Senate has destroyed a long-standing custom of bipartisanship. The Senate’s filibuster rule required sixty votes to act on presidential nominations and in so doing established a bipartisan equilibrium. Because it was rare for either party to control more than sixty seats, the rule forced a measure of bipartisan consensus. Although the Senate’s patience with the rule had been straining for years, things took a turn for the worse in President Obama’s second term, when Senate Republicans abused the filibuster to effectively freeze his nominees. This accelerated a cycle of preemptive retaliation, in which both parties tore down the written and unwritten rules of the Senate—a result that not only has degraded that institution but also threatens to infect the judicial branch with rank partisanship.

  The second episode tracks the Republican Party’s departure from its relatively honorable legacy on the environment to embrace an ideology of denial when it comes to threats to the global environment—culminating with President Trump’s senseless commitment to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The episode explains this devolution by pointing to the way our campaign finance system has corrupted Congress. A series of Supreme Court cases opened the door to unlimited spending by so-called independent groups, allowing billionaire donors to cajole and threaten politicians at every level of government. This flood of money has created in Congress a corruption of inaction, stalling work not only on climate but also on a host of other issues.

  The third episode chronicles how an insurgent faction of Republicans—first the Tea Party, later the Freedom Caucus—seized control of their party and ran their political playbook with no intention of compromise. Using the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, they repeatedly blocked legislation to stabilize America’s economy in a time of crisis while persistently refusing to make strategic investments that would improve opportunity for the next generation. At the movement’s outset, and sometimes as it developed, its members claimed to revere the framers and American political institutions. And yet they were willing to break those very institutions to try to impose radical views that could never earn bipartisan support. They used government shutdowns and debt-ceiling showdowns to impose their highly divisive factional will. Instead of improving the fiscal condition of the government, they acted as fiscal hypocrites and made matters worse. They degraded the public’s faith in our institutions and modeled a destructive hyperpartisanship that helped to cripple Washington.

  The fourth episode examines the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran and the failure of Republicans in the Senate to engage constructively with the president on matters of war and peace. In 2016, President Obama negotiated a multilateral arms control agreement with Iran to curtail its development of nuclear weapons. The vast majority of Republicans opposed the deal even before studying it. Instead, they lined up behind Senator Tom Cotton and signed a letter to Iranian religious hard-liners, undercutting President Obama’s negotiating position. By 2017, the deal was clearly succeeding. Despite this fact—and the overwhelming view of US intelligence agencies and the international community—President Trump sacrificed our national security interests and withdrew from the agreement, capitulating to some of the Republican Party’s largest donors.

  The fifth and final episode considers one example of effective bipartisan legislating in the Senate—the work undertaken by the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” several years ago to pass comprehensive immigration reform. This episode reminds us that the mechanisms of our republic may still be put to effective use. Within a short time frame, the Gang of Eight delivered a legislative package with a historic increase to border security, a massive overhaul of the nation’s complicated visa processes, high-tech upgrades to our enforcement systems, the most progressive Dream Act ever written, and a pathway to citizenship for America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. The bill passed the Senate with sixty-eight votes but then met its death in the House, where the hyperfactionalism of a vocal minority on the right scared off the Republican leadership. That same factionalism—and that same stoking of unwarranted fears—sustained the rise of Donald Trump, who claimed falsely that our borders were out of control and in the speech announcing his candidacy slandered immigrants as “rapists” and “terrorists.”

  V. “What Is Wrong with You People?”

  Each of these episodes demands the question: what has our government in Washington lately done to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”—the central mission defined in the central document of our nation? We no longer have a good answer. The incredulity of the American people is entirely understandable. To borrow from what I hear in my town hall meetings: “What is wrong with you people?”

  Let me briefly advance an argument that will run through this entire book. The state of our politics and the quality of life for ordinary citizens are not two separate things. The United States has had a social contract spelled out on parchment and engraved in our hearts and minds. It is that every person is endowed with inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A government of, by, and for the people secures those rights. I won’t indulge in romanticism: the indelible sin of slavery blighted all of society and was recognized in the Constitution itself, and we will live with the consequences all our days. But the point is this: In a republic, the health of self-government and the health of society as a whole are not different things. They are bound together, inextricably. During the past several decades, we have seen much of our social contract—call it the American dream—erase
d. We used to tolerate some degree of stark income inequality because we were a land of opportunity where anyone could strike it rich (or at least live a middle-class life). Today, we have less economic mobility than most industrialized countries and our income inequality is higher than it has been in a century. Over the past fifty years, nine out of ten Americans have not seen their incomes rise. The vast majority of the benefits of economic growth have accrued to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans. Far from ameliorating this economic inequality, our education system actually reinforces it.

  In Colorado, and around the country, people who work a full week cannot afford housing, health care, higher education, and child care. In other words, in America today, most people cannot afford a middle-class life. If you are born poor, a person of color, or on the other side of the tracks, matters are much worse. Our politicians don’t seem to care. Since 2001, according to the Institute on Taxation and Policy, Washington cut taxes by $5 trillion in the name of the middle class, but roughly two-thirds of the benefit has gone to the top 20 percent of Americans; the Trump tax cuts are even more skewed toward the top earners. At the same time, Washington spent $5.6 trillion on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, China’s economy has quadrupled since 2001, tripled since 2004, and doubled since 2009, the year we entered the Great Recession. Imagine what our country would look like today if we had spent a fraction of that $10.6 trillion on our actual needs. Imagine what we might have accomplished if we had not been distracted by the five episodes of political shortsightedness (not to mention the foolishness, greed, and even cruelty) recounted in this book.

  Meanwhile, our deficits and national debt have soared—largely because of those same tax cuts—and to deal with this, some voices now cynically cry for cuts to social programs for the poor and the elderly, cuts to health care, and cuts to loans for college students and to support for public schools. At the same time, globalization, which is a dynamic reality, has been pursued with great regard for Wall Street and little regard for the impact on working Americans. The real estate pages of the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal and the House & Home section of the Financial Times display mouthwatering properties available to a transnational global elite—but the reality for tens of millions of Americans is the economic hollowing out of towns and cities. In some places, there is an abiding sense of hopelessness, cynicism, and abandonment. Far more people, most of them young, now die from opioid overdoses than in automobile accidents. For three years running—unlike in any other industrialized country in the world and not seen in the United States since before World War I—average life expectancy in the United States has fallen. The reasons: opioid addiction and suicides (half by guns).