This record reminds me of a game my children played with my wife and me when they were young—“opposite day.” It was a way to have pancakes for dinner, stay home from school in the middle of the week, and generally try to persuade us they should get anything they wanted. It was fun, but Susan and I were sharp enough not to be fooled all the time—no dessert before pancakes. My daughter Anne points out that truly embracing opposite day means acknowledging a never-ending sequence of opposites, much like facing mirrors in a barbershop. One opposite begets another in an endless series—not unlike the ruinous political dynamics we’re in the throes of now.
This is no way to run a government. None of the decisions we made—or failed to make—in the episodes recounted above brought our country more security. None of them made our communities or our institutions more robust. Meanwhile, we failed to address in any way the central economic challenges facing our country. Indeed, with Donald Trump’s tax cut, we made income inequality even worse. Set this record against the mission laid out in the preamble of the Constitution and we would all have to admit our abject failure. To take this state of affairs in stride—as just another night of gambling at Rick’s Café—misjudges the degree of Washington’s political degradation and profoundly underestimates the stakes.
Looking ahead, we have only three possible courses of action. We can continue to do nothing and hope that the problems facing the American people will work themselves out on their own. We can treat problem solving as a winner-take-all game and wait for moments of one-party rule to push through a partisan agenda (or reverse one). Or we can return to the pluralist mechanisms that were created by the framers of the Constitution and have been periodically revived and reinvigorated by subsequent founders.
Recent history offers ample evidence of the effects of doing nothing. In the years 2010 through 2016, the legislative pace in both chambers of Congress wound down to a sluggishness not seen in the past hundred years. We came to accept politics that substituted small disputes for legislative action. Many politicians perfected the craft of accomplishing nothing while casting the blame for inaction on their opponents. With every year, it seemed we moved closer to a system where members created controversy to raise money in order to win elections—all for the privilege of creating further controversy to raise money in order to win further elections. In Congress, as on cable television, we accepted a level of debate that has little to do with anything of importance. Meanwhile, the roughly 90 percent of Americans on the wrong side of the wealth and opportunity divide saw that divide only widen. It’s hard to imagine how another decade of doing nothing will help.
That’s why many Americans are tempted by the second course—one-party rule. Republicans finally achieved that in the last Congress, and they used their power to reshape the Supreme Court and the judicial branch for a generation. They reversed decades of environmental legislation. And they passed a tax cut that will exacerbate inequality, curb upward mobility, and create more national debt. But even if all these policies had been wise, the one-party course would still be wrong—wrong on grounds of both principle and expediency. It’s reasonable to assume that if Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, they will do everything they can to throw the policies of recent years into reverse. But sound, stable government can’t be a perpetual game of shirts and skins.7 That aside, most of the time there isn’t one-party rule: power is shared, with a presidency of one party and a House or Senate of another. And even at those moments when one-party rule exists in theory, the power of faction within the party often makes doing business impossible—as the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, displaying an arrogance of righteousness that would have drawn contempt from the founders, have done in recent years.
The third course requires us to sail waters first charted by our founders and then to do more than replace one version of single-party rule with the version you or I find more acceptable. Electoral victory is not an end in itself. It is intended to set in motion a pluralist process to resolve disputes and move the country forward. It is a process that Americans live out in almost every other aspect of their lives: when parents decide where to send a child to school, when city council members balance a municipal budget, when local commissions draw the line between commercial and residential zones, when universities chart their way forward, when nonprofit organizations spend money. In all of these venues the principles of respect and compromise are shared by everyone. To argue that somehow our national government deserves a waiver from pluralist dynamics is absurd.
It is commonplace now in America that campaigns never end. The corollary is that governance never begins. We have forgotten how to manage the country and forgotten as well the important role politics plays in providing guidance to our decision making. Decoupled from governance, politics has lost its purpose. It has degraded into endless fund-raising and dishonest promises rendered in a vocabulary sometimes indistinguishable from Russian propaganda.8 Returning to Montesquieu, a republic that fails to correct itself by its laws slides into tyranny. There are many points of view in this country, and rediscovering our will to reconcile, navigate, and negotiate them is the way we correct our course.
This is not a call for lazy moderation or lame bipartisan agreements that split the difference between obsolete ideas. It is a call for the difficult, imaginative give-and-take that can produce enduring results. It is the kind of work the founders did when they laboriously picked their way through what seemed like intractable issues: how to treat big and small states equally and yet not equally at the same time, whether states or the federal government had the right to levy duties on imports, and whether the Constitution should or should not include a bill of rights. They didn’t get all of the answers right, and none of what we face will be easy to solve in the context of a national government that is awash in special-interest money and in which elected officials quake at the first sign of a social media storm. But that’s the reality. The Depression wasn’t easy. World War II wasn’t easy. The civil rights movement wasn’t easy. We’ve shown the necessary mettle before.
IV. At the Center of the Arc
As I was finishing this book, I had the opportunity to visit Americans in two very different communities. One visit was with a group of young men who lived in West Garfield Park on the West Side of Chicago. The second was with a group gathered in the River Rock Café, a breakfast and lunch spot on Colorado State Highway 125 (which also serves as Main Street), in the county seat of Jackson County, Walden (population 1,385). In my meeting there, someone pointed out that I had won 275 votes in the county or 28 percent of all votes cast. When I said I was sorry I lost the county, the local reporter congratulated me for outperforming the county’s Democratic registration of 9.98 percent by 177 votes.9
The meeting in Chicago was unlike any I had ever had as the Denver Public Schools superintendent. In that job, I spent many hours visiting with children living in poverty, with their moms and dads, and with the teachers and principals who were determined to give the kids a better future. I had never met American children as hard hit by violent crime, especially gun-related murders, as the ones in West Garfield Park.
The conversation had been made possible by Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education. Now back in Chicago, Arne has devoted himself to the cause of preventing young men from killing each other. While I was there, he explained to me that to reach the per capita level of handgun homicides in New York City last year, Chicago would have to reduce the number of murders from 650 to 97.
Several months into their work with Arne and his colleagues, the young men were making progress, partly through their own efforts and partly because of a nurturing environment they had not previously experienced. One said he had never known what love was before joining the group. Another said that learning about the Bible had changed his life. Still another talked about the satisfaction of learning a skill and being paid for it. That was good news.
West Garfield has the highest hom
icide rate and the lowest life expectancy of any neighborhood in Chicago. The young men told me that in grammar school they were first made to choose “sides”—sides in gang warfare. They talked about how they grew up on their blocks just hoping to survive until the end of each day. They described a world in which escalating provocations and signs of disrespect—some known and some unknowable—created crushing stress and tension.10 As the young men introduced themselves, each told me about friends he had lost to guns and other violent crime. Every young man knew more than one. Some said they had lost count. Almost all had been incarcerated.
It was as if they had come from a neighborhood in Iraq or Afghanistan, but this neighborhood is in America. It is a place with no jobs. There are no schools where any members of the Senate would send their children. There is no peace. The Americans living in Garfield Park have no place on Washington’s do-nothing calendar.
Walden, Colorado, is a long way from the West Side of Chicago. There, a dozen or so citizens talked about the joys of raising children in a small community where if your kid looks sideways in school or on the way home, you get three calls from neighbors before the child gets home. They talked about how at every sporting event, even if it is hundreds of miles from town, the stands are filled with blue and white, the North Park Junior-Senior High School’s colors.
But the school is down to under 200 kids, from prekindergarten through twelfth grade. And there are few jobs that pay a salary that allows people to own a house in a market where out-of-towners pay top dollar for second homes—a bargain compared with prices in Colorado’s resort communities. Virtually no one at our meeting had health insurance except for the county commissioner and the school principal, who had it through their jobs. The owner of a local restaurant and pool hall explained that he had job openings but that he could not hire anybody, because potential applicants would lose their Medicaid if they went to work. He had to cut back the days his business operated because of the labor shortage; his wife was working fifty hours a week. Neither of them had health insurance. These Americans also have no place on Washington’s do-nothing calendar.
If we were truly pursuing the interests of the republic and the next generation of Americans, we would be asking ourselves how we could generate greater economic mobility in our society and how we could better mitigate the effects when there is none. We would consider why our health care system creates such misery for so many and how we might fix it; we would take seriously the challenges faced by rural and urban communities where the word “economy” is a joke. We would ask what we could do differently so that more children had high-quality early childhood education, more college students could pursue their studies without incurring debt, more people seeking an alternative to college could undertake high-quality apprenticeships, and more Americans throughout their lives could advance their careers by improving their existing job skills or learning new ones. I ask these questions not to generate some worthy checklist but to emphasize a point made earlier: the health of society and the health of republican government cannot be separated. We do not get to pick. The erosion of the quality of life for most Americans erodes our politics. The erosion of our politics erodes the quality of life for most Americans.
Thomas Paine, one of the founders, understood the urgent necessity of the long time horizon, of looking at the present from the point of view of a more distant future. (A cantankerous and difficult man, he himself looks better in retrospect.) In his book Common Sense he wrote:
As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure anything which we may bequeath to posterity; and by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.
He was writing about the government of Great Britain, and the debt of which he speaks is figurative, but in our present context these words should be clear enough to stun us into attention.
It is an American cliché to believe that any child could one day grow up to be president of the United States. But it is a belief proved by everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama. It is a belief that parents whisper to their children and kindergarten teachers proclaim to their students on the first day of school.
As superintendent of Denver’s public schools, I had many occasions to ponder what this aspiration actually meant when it came to thinking about the future of tens of thousands of students in our schools. It occurred to me that perhaps their future (as well as our own) would be more secure if we thought of each of these young Americans as someone our country requires to become a founder in the same sense that Hurston followed Thoreau, that Douglass followed Franklin, and that King followed Carr.
Unfortunately we are a long way from that.
Tonight, as I bring this book to a close, I sit near the marble chambers of the United States Senate with their paintings, statues, and other lavish furnishings that tie us to our past, but I am thinking of our future. I am thinking of the millions of children our founders could not have imagined heading home after a long day at school, shifting their backpacks of books to find a more comfortable position, sharpening pencils for math and pastels for art, clearing a space on a crowded dinner table for homework. I’m thinking about children teaching other children, older brothers and sisters teaching younger siblings, expecting they will all have more opportunity than their parents. And, as I think about our children, I know that each of them has a job to do as well. That job is to learn what creates the powerful force of a volcano or what Janie knows at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God that she didn’t know at the beginning or why to invert the second fraction when they divide. They are up to those tasks, but they are right to expect that we, their elders, will also fulfill our responsibilities.
I come back to James Baldwin’s words, as I began with them. At the end of his essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” written deep in the crisis years of the American civil rights movement, he said:
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. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
I wish I could tell those children doing their homework that we have settled the long-enduring problems that Baldwin confronted in his essay. I cannot. They are among the problems we must and can still solve today. But Baldwin’s creed must be ours today. Everything now is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.
1 The number varies from one historian’s account to another’s. I drew mine from Dumas Malone’s Jefferson and His Time. I used to think there was a present-day consensus of outrage at the Alien and Sedition Acts, despite the times when we as a nation have slid back to the repressive tendencies they embodied. The rise of Donald Trump and his administration’s relentless scapegoating of immigrants and journalists have put my trust in that consensus at risk.
2 Teddy Roosevelt warned: “Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic.”
3 The Constitution granted the states the power to set their own voting requirements. A few states—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina—offered the vote to free
men of color. Maryland excluded Jews, despite the prohibition of religious tests in Article VI. New Jersey permitted women to vote. Kentucky permitted women to vote if they were the head of a household.
4 Actually, Douglass addressed the audience on July 5, at his own request and in keeping with the traditions of the New York African American community. Historian and biographer David Blight is among many who speculate that this practice was due in part to African American’s awareness that July 4 was a day for slave sales in the antebellum South.
5 Joaquin Gonzales is not a creation of his father’s famous poem. He is a resident of northwest Denver.
6 Even Edmund Burke, a political hero of Mitch McConnell’s and often quoted by the majority leader’s fellow conservatives, recognized the need to make progress in our governing institutions. Burke wrote, “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation.”
7 As George Washington recognized, factionalism “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”
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