Now We Know (for Ron)

                When the Senate vote to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial went down to defeat, as we certainly knew it would, the thud that followed was the faith that a generation of mostly white liberal and educated people had in American democracy.  Not only was it not hard to find, it was hard to avoid the commentaries about the death of democracy.  It is true that the Republicans failed to honor their oath to the constitution and that Trump is the worst president in history, but the democracy was in tatters before that.  In fact, I’m guessing it came as no surprise to most Americans who have seen the ‘system’ fail them over and over again that the rich and powerful got off.  What was notable is that the last segment of people who believed in the myth of American democratic virtue are now left to figure out where they go from here.

                If you were a white liberal who was even fairly well educated, then you grew up not just saying but believing in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Even in the face of multiple examples that it wasn’t, we believed the system, if not exactly fair, was mostly just and in the process of improving.  We thought equality and goodness would triumph in the end, and someone or something would always arrive in the nick of time and save the edifice from ruin.  Well, I guess we know that’s just not true anymore.  Part of the problem was the passive faith we had in laws and institutions that allowed us to live individual lives away from the constant pursuit and protection of justice.  A bigger part of the problem is that the America we lived in was never real.  This has always been a country where the end justifies the means, where money and power always meant more than justice and equality.  Watching my friends watch the trial was like being in the movie theater as a kid watching Peter Pan.  We all kept trying to bring Tinkerbell back to life – just one more witness or one more fact would surely save us.

                America is built on a lie.  It was colonial and genocidal before 1619, and the legacy of the slave trade is still an original sin on our collective consciousness.  It took suffragettes decades to get the right to vote.  Even we got it right by ending slavery, it was followed by Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Klan.  The Voting Rights Act didn’t end voter suppression and intimidation, which is increasing again.  Even the hard-fought rites of unions have been eroded and characterized as ‘counter-productive.’  Tell the miners at Blair Mountain or Matewan that the system worked.  Tell the survivors of the Tulsa race massacre that justice mattered.   Whether it was Shays’ Rebellion or the tent city of WWI veterans seeking the promised benefits being routed by the Army, there has been little in the way of justice or fairness in our history.

                If we want to live in a democracy, the first step is realizing that we can’t just restore it.  We have to build it over again, and we have to build it with an honest and inclusive history of who we are and where we’ve been.  We have to finally face down and defeat the hateful impulse of purification and division.  We have to have an honest history and be more humble about what we stand for.  Most importantly, we have to engage.  Democracy is not a passive political endeavor.  There is no candidate or party platform that will change anything unless and until we change our attitude toward political action.  Trump and McConnell are the culmination and inevitable conclusion of a system that, Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric notwithstanding, that was always rigged.

                If you felt let down and betrayed on that Friday, start the road back by taking a sobering account of what we had become.  Nothing ended that day that hadn’t been on the ropes for a long, long time. 
We are the only ones who can change this, and the first step is to stop romanticizing what America was.  There was never going to be a magical witness in the Senate.  There is no Atticus Finch waiting in the wings to offer a high-minded but essentially useless defense of our principles.  Tinkerbell is dead.