America Can Still Renew Itself
Our history is a series of blunders and failures leading to rebirth and rededication.
UPON ACCEPTING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S nomination for president, Kamala Harris proposed, “Together, let us write the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.” After her defeat by Donald Trump, her next chapter looks more like an epilogue to her American story than a continuation of an epochal saga in human history.
Harris lost the political battle, but her version and understanding of the American story as “the promise of America” clearly also came in second to an alternative story of America that Trump and his acolytes have been promulgating for a decade. In and out office, Trump’s language and deeds have constructed another American reality and narrative that put a priority on power over the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the principles of the Constitution.
At a time of disappointment and despair, the first impulse may be to turn inward, to declare “a separate peace” with politics and to design a personal narrative of existential rebellion and alienation, to abandon the hope of reviving the American story and surrender to dark forces in our politics, culture, and human nature. Before yielding to the authoritarianism before us, it is worth remembering that the renewal of the American story invariably occurs through relentless struggle, often after painful and profound failure.
The American experiment offers fresh starts and new beginnings. The very freedom and democracy we seek to preserve generates the energy and faith to revivify the American story. In our long history of national rebirth, the recent presidential election must be considered a challenge to our political and ethical imagination to rethink and renew the American idea and story to match the crises of our time. We should seek to overcome the anger, cruelty, and exclusion of one narrative with the love, hope, and inclusion of another.
After undertaking such a mission of regeneration, it is possible we will find that following centuries of creating new ways to advance freedom and democracy, the American idea of a nation of liberty and equality cannot survive the challenges of our own age. Modern media, technology, and economics may prove incompatible with a vital and thriving democracy. Such forces may succeed in eroding the structures of self-governance and self-determination. By various means, anti-democratic forces may overwhelm and demolish resistance to their power. Such forces also may gain momentum by riding the surging waves of authoritarianism around the world. In a climate of political outrage and violence, opposing the powerful can be dangerous.
Nevertheless, the rejection by a majority of the electorate of Harris’s new chapter of American promise compels a response from advocates of liberal democracy. Far from permitting us to compromise with authoritarianism, her defeat demands us to take up the challenge of renewing the American story by transforming and modernizing the American system, to advance and deepen democracy and freedom for all people.
WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE, many times. We have a history of renewal going back to John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, which many consider the origin of the rhetoric of American rebirth, in which he proclaimed that “wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop’s next line could serve as a warning to us today about the danger and cost of failing the mission of regeneration. The people, he says, will “be consumed out of the good land whether we are going.” Winthrop believed that the settlers would be excoriated and cursed “through the world” and could lose their new homeland as punishment for failing in their mission to be a beacon of renewal.
In the revolutionary era, Thomas Jefferson embedded the concept and commitment to renewal in American political and historical consciousness. He declared “the sacred principle” of continuing majorities, meaning that in American democracy, as ruling majorities constantly shift, so the country would undergo a form of legal, legitimate, regular regeneration to reflect the changing will of the people, even when that will may be fickle, shallow, or misguided.
Similarly, Thomas Paine in words worth repeating declared, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now.” He believed “the birthday of a new world is at hand.”
The vision of perennial renewal informed and structured the American story for successive generations. In their effort to express the American spirit during the nineteenth century, the five great writers of what F.O. Matthiessen termed “The American Renaissance” challenged and castigated fellow Americans in the name of the values and ideals of America. Matthiessen says that “the common denominator” for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville was “their devotion to democracy”: “They felt that it was incumbent upon their generation to give fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate with America’s political opportunity.” (Matthiessen’s focus on his writers’ commitment to democracy didn’t blind him to extremism, even potentially incipient fascism, in their work and thought. He believed there was a tendency in Whitman, for example, to proclaim “the individual as his own Messiah.”)
Thoreau chose July 4, 1845, as the day to affirm his commitment to the values and beliefs of the American Revolution by declaring his own revolution to renew the American idea of freedom and democracy. On that day, he went to Walden Pond to enact his personal declaration of independence, followed by “Civil Disobedience,” in which he challenged America’s support of slavery, sympathized with the Native American condition, and condemned the war with Mexico. Thoreau writes, “I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”
In their lives, language, and leadership, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass epitomize the vitality, power, and complexity of the American story of rebirth. They both were radical in their commitment to end slavery and strengthen freedom, but conservative in their devotion to preserving and advancing the principles and values of the founding of the Republic. Their efforts inspired the Second American Revolution to end slavery and advance human and civil rights for all Americans.
Lincoln’s great speeches turned arguments for freedom, liberty, and democracy for all people into political and rhetorical poetry. Douglass, the genius of American political thought and oratory, condemned the American conscience for failing to live up to its own creed of freedom and democracy.
Lincoln also foresaw the danger to American democracy from the rise of unrestricted wealth among a small number of people and corporations. The emergence of a new millionaire class of people as a result of the Civil War made Lincoln “tremble for the safety of my country.” He wrote, “By a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
Others followed Lincoln in trying to revise and renew the American story to deal with the threat to democracy of the “money power.” The commitment of the American idea to freedom required new thinking and strong action to engage the challenges of industrialization and the Gilded Age. William Dean Howells was a leader in the movement toward a new economic and social democracy. Along with his close friend, Samuel Clemens, Howells helped create a new American literary and intellectual culture that reconsidered the American experience. Howells inspired the development of a literature that focused on a realistic portrayal of changing American life under explosive economic expansion. His most important novels, such as A Hazard of New Fortunes, dramatize how economic and social crises of the time required a new story of America that placed attention on the rise of economic inequality and social alienation in America. His work often focused on the plight and condition of the impoverished, the unemployed, the homeless, and the desperate. His most important essays directly challenge the transmogrification of America into a plutocracy with insights that speak immediately and directly to our own time.
Louis Brandeis was a vital voice in reimagining a new social and economic democracy as part of a new American story in the modern age. Brandeis worked to democratize the American idea, helping to make it fairer, more equal, and more supportive of ordinary men and women. Known as the “people’s attorney,” he became a leader of progressive politics and reform causes. His successes included arguing in 1908 in Mueller vs. Oregon for the legal rights of women to have limited working hours and mediating the 1910 cloak makers strike in New York City, which was dubbed the “Great Revolt. Explaining how “social justice” was crucial to the perpetuation of modern democracy, he said, “We Americans are committed not only to social justice in the sense of avoiding things which bring suffering and harm, like unjust distribution of wealth; but we are committed primarily to democracy.” Separately, he wrote: “What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty, and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.”
Franklin Roosevelt undertook a radical rebirth and renewal of the American story. At home, the New Deal reinvented the relationship between the state and its citizens, proposing to provide greater freedom, security, and protection to the American people. His leadership during World War II secured America’s place as the leader of the free world to advance democracy in opposition to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. For many, his legacy involves a renewal of the American story as the struggle to propagate what he termed the Four Freedoms for all peoples: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
The second half of the twentieth century was as rich with movement for American renewal as the first. Much of the world saw American renewal in John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and his call to “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” President Kennedy’s brother Bobby Kennedy exuded and acted on his passion for social justice and economic progress, especially for minorities, the disadvantaged, and the forgotten. Lyndon Johnson’s leadership in passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act deepened American democracy more than any other acts since the Civil War. History recognizes and honors Martin Luther King as a modern founding father. Ronald Reagan’s revivification of the symbolism of the “city on a hill” and his consistent invocation of the strength and promise of freedom were calls for national renewal. Reagan’s addition of the word “shining” to Winthrop’s phrase signaled fresh confidence and certainty in the continued relevance and power of American exceptionalism.
Joe Biden and Harris continued the tradition of American renewal and recommitment to the ideals of the Founding. They upheld the ability of free people to govern themselves. The public chose other leaders, but it is up to us not to let those ideas die.
MEETING TODAY’S CHALLENGES to preserve and advance our democracy and freedom seems quite feasible in light of the immensity of the struggles, sacrifice, and achievements that have preceded us. We’re not at Valley Forge or on the Delaware. We’re not at Antietam or Gettysburg. No one is beating or shooting striking workers in Michigan or Washington. There is no Midway, D-Day, or Battle of Iwo Jima on our schedules. Cancel culture is not as threatening as McCarthyism. There is still racism and antisemitism in the country, but we are not being attacked by Bull Connor and his dogs. After fighting and winning battles on many different fronts for sexual and gender equality and freedom, life has become more secure with more freedom for millions of women and men.
Our fight today must be primarily to organize, persuade, and proselytize.
Mostly, we must inform and educate our fellow citizens about American history and a way of life and thinking that we could lose. We must try to convince disbelievers that our American story holds out more promise and hope than a public policy of fear, prejudice, and intimidation. We must devise strategies to convince our neighbors that the American Creed offers opportunities for all of us that continue to make America, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of earth.”
Today we have a legacy of responsibility to Americans and the world to struggle yet again for another fresh start and new beginning for the American story. It is not just a political task but a moral and ethical responsibility to pass on to future generations the freedom and democracy we have been given. It is also a moral and ethical responsibility to pass on the ideals and values of fairness, equality, love, and openness that have defined the best of the American experience. Fulfilling such responsibilities can help assure future generations of having their chance at their own fresh starts.
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