Coming to democracy’s aid

That dawn must be upon us again.

Our country is testing us. Certainly, by a president who believes he exists beyond constitutional law — the law is what he says it is — but also by our system of government, which to survive is demanding of us the exercise of our participatory democratic muscle. A muscle that for many — myself included — has atrophied because the freedoms and rights we take for granted have never been much in doubt. We assume them to be our natural condition. But, democracy’s erosion begins when its citizens lose the practice of taking up the cause of democracy. In ways large and small, we must come to democracy’s aid.

A few days after the marches where more than 7 million people gathered on the streets of our country to protest the authoritarianism of our nation’s current president, I came across a book by the historian Arthur Schlesinger about John F. Kennedy’s brief presidency — “A Thousand Days” — written soon after Kennedy’s time in office.

There was an inscription handwritten at the front of this particular book — it apparently had been a Christmas gift from one woman friend to another — which ignited a powerful wave of nostalgia within me. But my nostalgia was not precisely for President Kennedy.

Besides Kennedy’s breath, winter-white on the frigid Washington January day of his inauguration when he asked what people could do for their country, and later, his tragic assassination, the historical details of his presidency slipped by my young experience.

But the personal inscription inside Schlesinger’s book held weight: “To one, as you are,” the friend’s words read, “who follows in the light of this President’s idealism. Always may it shine for you.”

That was it. But those 20 words reached out to me from a time when our country, to paraphrase the poet Langston Hughes, was about letting America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.

I cannot imagine seeing those words written in the books of history charting our current era, for idealism finds little sanctuary when the leadership of our country demonstrates so little faith in the cathedral of democracy.

The worst has ceased to surprise us — many have become desensitized to it. The ideal as found in “the better angels of our nature” can feel as distant as President Lincoln reciting those words at his first inaugural in 1861. Just then, slavery was alive in the land and the country was soon to be riven by Civil War. But, even then, our president spoke of our “bonds of affection” and the “mystic chords of memory” enshrined within the democratic vision of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Terrible trouble loomed before him, yet he still implored a fractured nation to find a common national feeling that might lift all people up. He believed compassion and equality must reside in democracy’s heart if democracy is to survive. Certainly, he never would have approved of the vilification of opposing thought and speech and the dark retribution that has been unleashed against millions of his fellow citizens by our current president.

No country is exactly like our own, our always fragile — sometimes frail — political project. Yet because we don’t live at the end of history and we cannot see democracy beyond our lifetimes, our vigilance — our public engagement on democracy’s behalf — must be constant so that our self-government will endure.

The Founders ended the Declaration of Independence with the word “honor.” They pledged their “sacred honor” so that self-government might become the truth of a new nation. It’s this sacred honor that connects us to those revolutionaries who bequeathed us our country 250 years ago. We share the burden — and the ideals — of that honor, calling to us from our past to protect the soul of this country: its justice, its freedoms, its compassion.

To protest demands of us idealism: a belief that voices matter, that standing up means something, that we’re never without power.

It is our turn in our nation’s history to pledge ourselves to the difficult task of not losing what was once found.

Mike Nagler taught for many years at Cañada College and was a member of the Burlingame Library Board and Foundation.