Who has democracy’s back?

When my wife, JoAnneh, and I divorced there was a small band of folks who rescued me from too deep a plunge. Since we have refound and remarried one another, there’s no one who has my back more than JoAnneh.

This is a not-to-be-taken-for-granted gift — this standing by another — and once I knew this, it radiated into my bones in unexpected and rather surprising ways.

For instance, not long ago, at a dinner party, I probably bored the other guests by asking what in their lifetimes had made them proud to be an American. When it felt like the country had had their backs as citizens. One person suggested the election of Barack Obama. Someone else said the original decision in Roe v. Wade. Another mentioned the speed with which the COVID vaccine was developed.

I said Watergate, the scandal that embroiled President Nixon and forced him to resign from office. There was a scandal, certainly, but the media, the courts, and the politicians in Washington all worked together, using the tools of democracy, to ensure that democracy did not lose the faith of the American people. One might say they had democracy’s back. Imagine that. They understood that democratic citizenry requires courage and action, not merely complaint and apathetic cynicism: that it’s an endeavor that must be practiced day after day. Robert Kennedy said, “The future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control.” I like to think those citizens of 50 years ago — these defenders of democracy — though they’d never know us, were looking out for us all the same.

So what’s one to make of a recent nationwide poll that had seventy-one percent of all voters saying democracy was at risk — but just seven percent chose this as the most important problem facing the country, identifying, with reason, more immediate concerns, such as inflation and the loss of federal abortion rights. But, ominously, many people also mentioned that they’ve lost faith in the country’s representative system of government. That democracy isn’t a good way to run a country, and because of that, voting doesn’t matter much to them, complaining the results were — and will be — fraudulent. Thus, many of us speak as if it’s all a purposeless joke, as if we’re revisiting the playgrounds of our youth — but playgrounds from an episode of “The Twilight Zone” where no balls are kicked out of bounds because there are no longer any boundaries to the field. Anything goes.

For me, democracy at its moral heart, is about defending beliefs you do not believe yourself. It means working unceasingly on behalf of the knowledge that my truth is always partial, as is yours, and though we must always speak and act upon our own version of the truth, we must never forget to measure that version against the truths of others. And, finally, we must accept that our feelings about these truths are often different than the evidence, the square-and-fair facts.

Beyond this, we must acknowledge that to succeed, the impulse of democratic politics — this non-stop experiment — must be outward-expanding and outward-reaching. Without this generosity, this aspiring to a common bond — which today is being severely tested and threatened — the collaborative nature of a thriving, living democracy and its demands is perilously debased.

I often think about how our imperfect, uncertain moment of history will be judged. What will those history books written after we’re gone — with their own pages of acknowledgments — make of this brief time in which our country’s safeguarding was bestowed upon us? How each of us, in our own small ways, had democracy’s back. And whether those who follow us — in the country’s constant act of becoming — regard what we have rendered unto them a dawn or a foreboding twilight.

Mike Nagler is a member of the Burlingame Library Board of Trustees.