The Land of Flickering Lights

by Michael Bennet

  Here’s how I would answer the question if I were asked today to look back over the last twenty-four months or so, the period during which I was working on this book.

  American Founders

  • Thomas Paine, Common Sense. A case could be made that this brief pamphlet was almost as important to the American Revolution as the Declaration of Independence. In it, the English expatriate urged his fellow American colonial citizens to throw off the yoke of tyranny in the name of republican self-government.

  • George Washington, speeches and writings, but especially his Farewell Address. A Senate tradition originally intended to honor these words has degenerated into an annual ritual where one of us is chosen to read them on the floor to an empty Senate chamber. The hall is empty because in the era of televised coverage we are not compelled to be on the floor unless there is a vote. Maybe some of us are watching in the privacy of our offices.

  • The Federalist. Somewhere between AP American history and law school, my best teachers taught me to appreciate these fascinating commentaries for what they are—high-potency campaign literature arguing for ratification of the Constitution and written by future political rivals James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, along with John Jay. As Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda has reminded us, these essays are not sacred scrolls recording our original constitutional thought. At their best, they offer insight into our republican aspirations; at their worst, they quibble over long-forgotten points of debate. Nonetheless, their distinction between the “energetic” government they propose and the “imbecilic” government they want to put behind them remains relevant today. I find myself frequently returning to “Federalist No. 1,” where Hamilton convincingly makes the case that the American experiment in self-government is an example from which the world could learn; to “No. 10” for its insight into the “mischief of faction”; to “No. 14” when I need to be reminded of the radical defiance of conventional political wisdom that informed our political system; to “No. 62” and “No. 63” on the nature of the Senate; to “No. 51” on the role of checks and balances in our government; and to “No. 78” for its explanation of the necessity of an impartial judiciary.

  • Thomas Jefferson, speeches and writings. Although he is rightly remembered for his state papers, especially the Declaration of Independence and his first inaugural address, his letters offer an even more rewarding glimpse into his sometimes brilliant, sometimes contrarian, and nearly always restless intelligence. Jefferson’s writings are numerous enough to encompass many of our nation’s founding contradictions—not in a heroic consensus, but in a way that should nag at our latter-day conscience. When we read him with what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “a hard memory,” we cannot imagine “a Monticello without slavery.”

  • Seneca Falls Convention, “Declaration of Sentiments.” Aside from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, there may be no finer reworking of the best ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence, in part because “Sentiments” calls attention to the most egregious omissions.

  • Abraham Lincoln, speeches and writings, including “Remarks to Congress, December 1, 1862.” Lincoln stands with Jefferson and Frederick Douglass as the trinity of our greatest political writers. I am always struck that both Lincoln and Douglass were entirely self-taught, and in this way less caught up in the tangled net of conventional wisdom. At almost any point in his life as a writer, Lincoln was capable of a deeply thought passage, a brilliant argument, a perceptive turn of phrase. Nonetheless, it is what he wrote as president that I find most compelling. His words should be the model for all holding elected office: he is always searching, certain only when he knows he must act, and keenly aware of our place together as Americans.

  • Frederick Douglass, speeches and writings, including “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” “We Have Decided to Stay,” and “Oration in the Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” As noted, I think of Douglass and Lincoln as a pair, two stars pointing the way forward in one of our darkest moments. Douglass plays the part of the citizen who knows the republic can offer more. Lincoln is the official who must respond to those demands. In this regard it is all the more fitting that Douglass outlasted Lincoln by decades: we live our lives as citizens; as elected officials we take our turn. The story of their four meetings and the story of how Douglass’s appraisal of Lincoln changed throughout his life is told and told again. Those retellings teach us of our obligations to one another.

  • Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. I can’t remember when I didn’t turn to Whitman to prod my thinking. He combines his expansive understanding of America with a dynamic sense of individual and collective potential that should serve as an aspiration for all of us. I keep an 1884 reprint of the 1881–82 edition in my office. It’s an antique; I suspect I should leave it alone.

  • Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.” In an age when we’ve shut down the government over a border wall, we should pick up her poem, read it again, and remember that we once saw ourselves as a welcoming nation.

  • Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in All of Its Phases.” No one makes the case for the importance of a free press in an imperfect republic better than she.

  • Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Her place among the American founders is established with every word she wrote, although public recognition of her stature was long overdue. This short and very subtle essay alone earns her this place.

  • Susan B. Anthony, “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” The right to vote is easily taken for granted until we remember how long and hard the fight has been to earn it and how much longer and harder the fight has been to protect it.

  • Margaret Chase Smith, “Declaration of Conscience.” Smith was a Republican senator from Maine. Anyone looking for an example of telling an uncomfortable truth to her own political party need look for no better one.

  • Martin Luther King Jr., speeches and writings, including “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King’s letter to the city’s white clergymen explains why they, through their tolerance of injustice, are doing violence to our founding principles.

  • James Baldwin, “A Letter from a Region in My Mind” (sometimes called “The Fire Next Time,” which is actually the name of the collection it is part of). In my view, this is simply the best magazine piece ever written.

  • Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, “I Am Joaquin /Yo Soy Joaquin.” His family still leads the civil rights work he started in Colorado.

  • Cesar Chavez, “On Democracy” and “On Public Schools.” Chavez’s successor at the United Farm Workers of America was Roberto Rodriguez, a great ally in the Gang of Eight negotiations.

  American History and Contemporary Affairs

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates, the books Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power and the essays “The Case for Reparations” and “I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye.” Coates offers a fundamentally different understanding of our history, demanding that we face up to those systematically excluded from the way we shaped our republic. He places on all of us the burden of answering the hard questions he persistently asks. We may not always agree, but he gives us nowhere to hide.

  • Jill Lepore, These Truths. Maybe the most important thing about this American history is its considered ambivalence. This is better than can be said of nostalgic consensus narratives or relentlessly disenchanting ones. She gives us the full promise of American history—promises made, broken, and patched together again.

  • Matthew Desmond, Evicted. Among many other contributions of this extraordinary piece of reporting, Desmond shows how hard we make it for the poor to work their way out of poverty in America.

  • George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Packer’s relentless reporting, combined with John Dos Passos–style storytelling, reveals how economic immobility tears at American families.

  • Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” published in The Atlantic. Stewart assembles th
e factual case that our economy no longer offers opportunity to most families, a case critical to understanding why the stories told by Desmond and Packer persist in our country.

  • David Frankel, Thank You for Your Service. An ironic title that reflects America’s careless treatment of our returning veterans.

  • Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow; and James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own. Their full critique of our system of mass incarceration reminds us that inequality in the United States is a matter not only of economics but also of race. Alexander describes an epidemic of cruelty that has reinforced a system of American racial castes. Forman’s careful research and beautiful writing recount a history that resulted in a brutal erosion of rights.

  • Adam Serwer, “The Nationalist’s Delusion,” published in The Atlantic. His reminder that “history has a way of altering villains so that we can no longer see ourselves in them” is vital to understanding the American story. But his later advice is equally important: “Nothing is inevitable, people can change. No one is irredeemable. But recognition precedes enlightenment.”

  • Sam Quinones, Dreamland. A former Los Angeles Times reporter, Quinones tracks how, almost in plain sight, many Americans became addicted first to legal opioids and then to black-tar heroin.

  • Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Isenberg’s rarely told story of white poverty would never have been found in my university’s course catalog.

  • Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism. This was my favorite of many books in the post-Trump-election wave. They all serve us well in their reminder of the risks facing our republic. Few, however, offer as much insight as Luce does into how our present problem is at least partly one of our own making. Others in this genre include Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, and Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy.

  • Casey Gerald, There Will Be No Miracles Here. I read this thirty-one-year-old’s astonishing memoir as I was finishing this book and bought copy after copy for family and friends. His book reminds me of what it would mean if we treated every American child as a future founder and what it looks like when we don’t.

  • Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. I cherish this book, which is still the best book I have ever read about people living in poverty.

  • David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace. My brother James was the Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times. I once asked him what was the best book he had ever read about the history of the Middle East. This was his answer.

  • Dexter Filkins, The Forever War; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; and Marc Lynch, The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East. These exemplary books are part of a rich literature that should make us cautious about our intervention in the Middle East and aware of unintended consequences of both action and inaction.

  The Bigger Picture

  • Plutarch, Roman Lives. There may be no better proof that as far as politics goes, there is nothing new under the sun. His biographical sketches illustrate stories of political failings and, less frequently, successes. If we changed the names and places, the tales could easily have been torn from the headlines.

  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. When I am in the Capitol I often see statues of people, unremembered today, who died at the right time to generate such sculptures of themselves. Ironically (since his book actually survived), Marcus Aurelius reminds us over and over that even Roman emperors eventually will be forgotten. This perspective, he writes, should lead us to do our best in the present.

  • Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. I picked up this volume to help deepen my understanding of a period of history our eighteenth-century founders knew as well as their own.

  • Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline and The Spirit of the Laws. Although Montesquieu offers much to readers, including insight into what our eighteenth-century founders were arguing over when they began our republican experiment in government, his most important lesson may be that republics, always fragile, are obliged to repair themselves through their own political processes if they are to stand strong.

  • Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin’s formulation of positive liberty and negative liberty and their importance to the citizens living in a pluralist society strikes a balance that would be very familiar to Coloradans.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I first want to thank the people of Colorado for the privilege of representing them in the United States Senate. Whether you voted for me or not, the give-and-take we have shared over the past decade in town halls and less formal settings formed the basis for this book and my service in the Senate. Those conversations—in schools, small businesses, and county courthouses; on farms and ranches; on our public lands and in our wilderness—instill me with confidence about the future of our democracy. I am indebted to Governor Bill Ritter for appointing me to the Senate in the first place. It is said that someone who makes such an appointment creates one ingrate and a thousand enemies. Conscious of that conventional wisdom, I have tried to prove it wrong.

  Throughout my career, I have had the chance to work with extraordinary colleagues every step of the way. I want to thank them for their patience, allowing me to learn from them and integrate a view of the world informed by their work in business and in local, state, and federal government. I particularly wish to thank the students, families, teachers, and other employees of the Denver Public Schools. I continue to draw inspiration from your example.

  Sometimes people drop by my office to ask for career advice. I usually tell them that my secret is hiring people who are much better at doing their job than I ever would be, and then letting them do that job. This has never been more evident than in the Senate, where the quality of my staff has often compensated for my shortcomings. In particular, I would like to thank Riki Parikh, Candace Vahlsing, Brian Appel, Vivek Chilukuri, Maria Mahler-Haug, Charlie Anderson, and Jack Turnage for volunteering their deep knowledge to this project. Jonathan Davidson, Kristin Mollet, and Sarah and Craig Hughes made it all possible.

  I am indebted to my agent, Rafe Sagalyn for selling this book. But, much more than that, for introducing me to Cullen Murphy, my editor. Upon hearing Cullen’s name from Rafe, I called my brother, James, himself a distinguished editor and newspaperman. Not having read any of these pages yet, he told me, “There is no one in this country that I would have edit your book before Cullen Murphy.” He was right. After reading my manuscript, Cullen observed, “There is a lot of good writing here, a lot of good information, but if you want anyone to read this outside a proctored examination there is more work to do.” If you are reading this outside a proctored examination, you have Cullen Murphy to thank.

  I didn’t come to Washington looking for the dysfunction described in these pages, and wish the reality I found was other than it is. I also didn’t want to write a who’s-up, who’s-down, backroom political book—the challenges of our times, and the inspiration provided by our history, provoked a different ambition. George Gibson and Morgan Entrekin at Grove Atlantic saw the possibilities, and I am grateful for their confidence and for their team’s professionalism.

  Before I accepted the offer to become superintendent of the Denver Public Schools I placed a call to Brad Jupp, explaining that I would only take the job if he would work with me. Brad is a middle school language arts teacher, a leader of the 1994 teacher strike in Denver, and a deep believer in the urgent need to confront the profound inequities in our public education system. He agreed to come on board, and, with that contingency resolved, I went to work in the school system. As I once said to Arne Duncan, the secretary of education in the Obama administration, “There is only one Brad Jupp.” Arne agreed—and he, too, hired Brad.

  Over the last two years, Brad compiled binders filled with some of the be
st-known and most obscure American writing, much of it by founders of one kind or another. We read this material together and discussed its implications for many months. At the same time, he patiently sat at his computer at home in Washington, as I sat in front of mine in my study in Denver, working and reworking together one Google doc after another. He shares none of the blame for any faulty conclusions that I may have reached, but this book simply would not exist without Brad Jupp.

  Finally, my wife, Susan; and our daughters Caroline, Halina, and Anne have sustained me in and out of politics and allowed me the time to pursue this additional project. I am grateful for their love, as well as their suggestions and advice. I am glad to have had the chance to put in one place what I have learned about the republic our daughters, along with the rest of their generation, will soon inherit. In that context, I also want to thank my brother, James; my sister, Holly; and their families for sharing so well the legacy conferred by our parents, Doug and Susie Bennet.

  INDEX

  Access Hollywood tape, 55

  “accidental senator,” 5

  achievement gap, 126

  acid rain, 77

  action

  ideas for taking, 156–158

  inaction blame and, 257

  possible courses of, 257

  Adams, James Truslow, 273

  Adams, John, 239–240

  Adelson, Sheldon, 93, 175–177, 182

  Affordable Health Care Act, 136, 145, 149, 216, 230, 236

  airport infrastructure, 153

  Alien and Sedition Acts, 239

  American dream, 27, 121, 273–281

  American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 189

  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 135

  Americans for Prosperity, 94–95, 97

  American values, 201, 204

  America’s honor roll, 24