On MLK Day, was on Twitter (yes, Twitter, but if it’s good enough for Biden, Obama, and professor Tribe it’s good enough for me) when in response to a post, I posted:
Politics is a reflection of values. You either believe in equality or you don’t. You either believe in
democracy or you don’t. You either believe in communitarian policies lifting up all people or you don’t. You either believe in voting rights or you don’t.
I’m not enamored with superficial sloganeering or 15 second sound bites but this is Twitter so whatever you say in a post you’d better be succinct. They only give you 280 bytes to express whole thoughts, and that includes spacing and punctuation.
Twitter is the new public square on steroids. Like any public square, Twitter may reflect a cross section of the broader community, but like other public squares probably not - it just reflects who shows up at a given time.
Like most people, my posts live on in anonymity, not because I use an assumed name but rather there are so many posts that any individual post goes virtually unseen or unrecognized. Prior to the above post, my personal best was somewhere around 24 “likes,” but then I may be inflating that number.
So imagine my shock at the number of “likes.” “reposts” and “comments” this post generated! As of this writing, I’ve gotten 1430 likes, 127 reposts, and 32 comments. And climbing! For a moment I felt that I was in the rarified Twitter air of a Lawrence Tribe, but I soon got over myself.
That said, there still remains the question of why this post elicited such a response? It certainly wasn’t its literary flourish or quality. I think the answer lies in its simplicity. While I was not intending to make a profound statement (to me it was obvious) evidently I did.
Most politics and policy in a pluralistic society are not binary. They’re as complex as the society in which they exist. And as we’ve seen over the years, complexity turns people off, leaving them to yearn for a non-existent past when things were simpler, even seeming to be binary.
But “values” tend to be binary. Good vs. Evil, Hope vs. Despair, Justice vs. Injustice all tend to be, at least in the abstract, binary. Clearly when applied they become complex, but starting from a binary absolute provides some agreed upon guidance in their application.
These absolutes provide a starting point when dealing with today’s political/legal complexities. Applied to today, it seems that there is a contest between the forces of democracy and those of authoritarianism. Each are defined using commonly accepted standards to provide a measure as to where our democracy is vis-a-vis, say, Russia, a nation commonly accepted to be authoritarian.
Our world is in the throes of a full fledged competition between democracy and authoritarianism. And according to a recent report from Freedom House, an organization that uses commonly accepted criteria to measure the expansion or regression of democracy in all the countries of the world, the United States lost ground over the previous year.
To sum up the report, the drivers of our lost ground were unequal treatment of persons of color - both in the political arena and in the judicial system, the influence of special interests in our elections and in policy making, and the partisan divisions evidenced in the gerrymandering of voting districts. Although we’re still rated “free,” we are trending in the wrong direction.
Mercifully the report didn’t mention the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol Building. In the coming months much will be said about this insurrection. For my purpose it’s sufficient that thousands went to the Capitol, and hundreds of that number broke into the building, to prevent the governmental function of counting Electoral ballots ensuring the orderly transfer of power.
It would be glib to describe these insurrectionists as poor losers in the prior election. These are people who chose to support an authoritarian in his failed attempt to illegally hold onto power. They abandoned democratic principles in violation of the rule of law - a central tenant of all democracies - to assist that lawless authoritarian to remain in power.
They did not believe in democracy. They believed in lies, and violence, and an attempt to use brute force to compel their desired outcome and impose it on 81 million voters.
They did not believe in facts, even those coming from their candidate’s government and appointed jurists, both having failed to find any fraud in the 2020 presidential election. For democracy to survive, we have to agree on a common set of facts in order to work on our common challenges.
The insurrectionists, in spite of many proclaiming support of law enforcement, attacked Capitol police, beat some officers with poles and clubs, and bear sprayed one officer resulting in his death. Rather than adhering to the rule of law, these people adhered to the law of the jungle where the strongest impose their will and life for others is nasty brutish and short.
For months prior to the election, the incumbent, at every opportunity, unequivocally stated that if he lost it would only be due to the election being stolen by his opponent and supporters. This was echoed by sympathetic sycophants in the news media. This lie was repeated by lawmakers at all levels of government. Attorneys were procured to challenge - without a scintilla of evidence - the election in courts throughout the country.
But in a nation where opinions and lies are called alternative facts, it didn’t matter that there was absolutely no evidence to support what was exposed to be a foundational lie, still extant to this day.
A nation, any society really, must exist on a common set of values. Our nation is no different. From our inception, we held the value of a democracy. We have long held the value of equality. We believe in the value of citizen participation in free and open elections. And we believe in the communitarian value of assisting those needing a little help.
These are values, imperfectly realized, that have held our society together through all our challenges - foreign wars, economic dislocation, the inclusion and integration into our society, a raging pandemic, and even a bloody civil war. We have a long way to go and much work to do before we can even approach the ideal of our values.
For years if not decades, our society and its underlying values have been under an assault by those within and outside our country, with the goal to undermine our values, institutions, history and law to advance their own purposes. They exploit the existing divisions that exist in our society. They undermine journalism, books, and institutions so they can impose their own “facts.” They question the outcomes of our elections to undermine the foundations of our democracy.
Make no mistake, our society is under attack, perhaps the most threatening and lethal in our history. But if we hold our foundational values as our North Star we have a chance to prevail and better meet the promise embodied by those values.
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