What We're Fighting For
July 4, 1776, has something to tell us about July 4, 2024
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We are not fighting a battle for democracy. Democracy does not die in darkness.
Democracy is not a lights-on, lights-off kinda thing.
We, the collective, all-inclusive we, have never had democracy.
I’m not making the pedantic “we’re a republic” or “we’re a representative democracy” argument. The democracy I’m talking about, that we’ve never had, is the Schoolhouse Rock version, the version everyone lacking degrees in political science thinks of.
Majority rules (with basic rights of the non-majority protected).
Freedom of speech.
Freedom of/from religion.
Divided government.
Checks and balances, especially for the unbalanced.
Blind justice.
All that shit.
America has never been that. Not perfectly.
America came out of the gate leaving behind women, people of color, non-landowners, non-citizens, and others. After its birth, America continued the pre-natal genocide of the people who lived on land America wanted. America systemically abused and sought to erase them right up through modern times. The details are still emerging. From living people.
America has murdered workers for trying to bargain as one. It has shredded poor communities to improve white commutes. Poisoned communities that stood in the way of chemicals or petroleum that some rich person wanted somewhere else. Committed war crimes. Committed crimes to start wars. Tortured. Executed. Imprisoned for profit. Tomorrow’s generations will inventory atrocities we’re committing to this day. The list goes on and on and on until it feels like the only way to end it all is to end it all.
But.
The point of this litany of awfulness is not that we “are” bad. But that we’re improving.
The moral arc of the universe, etc. Progress isn’t an unbroken curve. It’s more of a seismograph. We have, in our history, been more and less democratic. Never perfectly.
Things can never be perfect, because new generations will re-assess and either identify or invent new concepts of justice. Just as the Founding Fathers never envisioned justice for Founding Fathers transitioning to Founding Mothers, we can only extrapolate guesses at where our descendants will trace the moral arc.
So, Democracy is not an absolute. It’s not a line that we crossed on Jan. 20, 2017. We won’t cross it again on Jan. 20, 2025.
Democracy is relative.
The administration of Pres. Joe Biden does all kinds of undemocratic things. So have they all.
In Congress, legislation quantifiably hews to the desires of the rich, grossly distant from the policies favored by the vast majorities.
We will never be the democracy of our imaginations. That’s okay. We were never intended to be.
Our system of checks and balances was not handed to us immaculately, as perfection to maintain. The founding fathers built a jalopy in the garage and left it for us with instructions for how to improve it.
That is literally the first mandate for us in the Constitution. The reason for the ostensibly sacrosanct rules of the Constitution is “to form a more perfect Union [and do some other obvious shit].”
“We the People of the United States, in Order 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, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Look at the vagueness of those goals. Establish Justice. Tranwhateverthefuckthatisquility. The Blessings of Liberty. That’s one hell of an open-ended gift card.
The independence asserted 248 years ago today had a point. Independence and democracy were means to an end. As later articulated in the Constitution, by the people who had won that independence, the point of what we commemorate today was to make shit better. Not perfect, more perfect.
Any fucking shit you can think of — if it’s general Welfare, or conceivably counts as a Blessing of Liberty — it’s yours, you lucky motherfucker.
Originalism, the putative creed of the January Six who control the Supreme Court, is on its face absurd because the original intent was not to be bound by original intent.
Today, however, and for far too long, both parties have signaled that this fight, this noble, aspirational, heroic, ugly, mud-slinging, ally-shivving, glorious fight…is beneath us. “I don’t pay attention to politics,” thoughtless people routinely say so they can return to lives that are shaped by politics someone else is controlling.
Oh noes, the campaign is ugly so now our saintly business-owners won’t run for offices.
Good.
Y’know who pays attention to politics? Who doesn’t see politics as beneath them? Book-burners. Drag-show phobiacs. Homophobes. Misogynists. Control-freaks. Autocrats. Theocrats. Kleptocrats. White Christian nationalists. Losers.
But at least they know enough to fight.
Go look at all those Democratic Party emails I fucking know you get don’t lie to me. What does the Democratic Party want? Money. For Election Day.
Why not volunteers? Why not candidates? Why not lawyers and organizers?
Because America has succumbed to the lie that democracy is what happens on Election Day; that Americans are voters who show up that one day to root for their team rather than players who are on the field always and forever.
So, no, don’t despair that democracy will die if Donald Trump wins. It will no doubt get worse. But it has been worse before and we have made it better. Union workers. Suffragists. Civil-rights activists. And on and on. Many lived in even less democratic times and they pushed America forward and did not despair.
And they showed us how it’s done. It happens the same way. Every single patrifuckingotic time.
It’s fighting. Not for what’s possible in the moment. Not for compromise. But for what can be. You can still compromise — when you’re negotiating their surrender. But you fight for the ideal.
The Founding Fathers didn’t write the Declaration of Semi-Autonomy. They didn’t fight The Conciliatory War.
We are meant to fight. That’s the legacy: Individuals fight for office, parties fight for power, the people fight for change.
What does that mean today, July 4, 2024? We have a crappy media — not for the first or last time. Media influence is the gift a shrinking handful of viewers keep giving away, even though we know it’ll get tied around the feet of the Jimmy Carters facing the Ronald Reagans. The Mike Dukaki facing the George W. Bushes. The Al Gores facing the Lesser Bushes. The Hillary Clintons facing the thieving, lying, rape-committing, bigotry-indulging, amoral, solipsistic nightmare candidate whose feared emergence kept our Founding Fathers awake at night even though they knew they had to be up at three to shovel turkey shit or apply poultice to porcine ulcers by hand or whatever the fuck.
If you want the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, fight for it. That’s the system we inherited, because it works. That’s the justice system. That’s the scientific method. That’s politics. That’s life.
The party pre-empted the political fight and declared Biden the winner without anyone laying a glove on him.
Turns out, that only delayed the battle. And now it’s fight time.
Don’t tell me the fight will bruise him or weaken him. There are only two possible outcomes for Biden the weak, Biden the infirm. He loses and another Democratic seizes the nomination — after making history by taking the nomination from a sitting president. Or Biden defeats his challengers.
Either way, bruises and all, the emergent victor faces Trump as a victor. This is part of the point of fighting.
All of this is a good thing. The public and private angst of the party. The pressure on Biden to show what he’s still got. The call for challengers.
So go ahead and be bummed about where we are. But don’t despair at the fight. The fight is the life bequeathed to us, the price we pay for liberty. Every day, not just in November.
Don’t fret about who’ll win; I can tell you who’ll win: Someone. So get out there and join that fight, cheer your champion.
But stop seeing the fight itself as a loss. It’s not.
And take heart that we’ve been worse off. The darkness of our days is not unprecedented and therefore not inescapable. Our history is a story of turning again and again to battle. That’s what gives us more better candidates. And a more perfect union.
"The penalty that good people pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by people worse than themselves"--Plato, 427-347 BCE
“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ”--Pericles
"They imagine that the atrocities of the last month will be the last, or at least that the universal horror that they have provoked will lead to a long respite. They do not realise, I fear, that the gears move faster and faster, and that one can always go further in atrocities; the limit is never reached"--Leon Blum on life in Nazi-occupied France
Happy 'Murrika, kids
Poignant words on the 4th. Every time I think I can't take any more reading about what's really going on in the world, I get another brilliant piece of writing from you. I wish someone, anyone would give you a louder bullhorn/bully pulpit/bully ANYTHING so that the last of the Americans that can READ and COMPREHEND could get a clue. Thank you for fighting on Mr. Larsen. Thank you.