SCRIPT:

My fellow Americans  -- ha! – what do we mean by a phrase like that, “Fellow Americans”?  What is an American, a citizen of this great and troubled nation? 

There are a couple of ways to answer questions like that.  

Sometimes we know who we are by what makes us different. Maybe you have a birthmark on your wrist; maybe you stayed on the farm when your siblings left home.  By all such differences you know who you are apart from other people. They make you an individual. 

At the same time we can know ourselves not by our differences but by what we have in common. You and your pal went to the same high school; you and your neighbors support the farmers’ market. All such unities, they give us a collective self, a common self that can happily live side-by-side with the individual.  

As for all of us as Americans, clearly our differences matter, especially in politics. Political parties by nature disagree and their disagreements give useful substance to public debate.   

At the same time, for that debate to be held in good faith, the differing sides need to stand on common ground. They have to have equal access to the airwaves, to money, to respect . . .  And as for the ends toward which they pitch their arguments, if we’re going to be a United States, then our goals have to be unitary too. The Constitution, long ago, offered a nice short list of what those goals might be. “We the People” aspire, among other things, to ensure “domestic Tranquility,” to provide for “the common defence,” and to promote “the general Welfare.” 

Now if we’re going to accomplish fine ideals like these, we’ve got to have politicians with the wit and selflessness to translate the divisions of debate into the singularities of the common good. Benjamin Franklin long ago showed us how to do that. He told his fellow delegates to the Constitutional Convention that he had doubts about the document at hand but that he would still support it. “The Opinion I have of its Errors,” he said, “I sacrifice to the public good.”  “I sacrifice to the public good.” 

Sadly, there have always been those who refuse that last step toward unity, identity-by-difference being for them only a means to its own preservation, toward the hardening of the walls between rich and poor, black and white, immigrant and native, the cities and the open country . . .  

Long ago, Henry Adams—great-grandson of our second president—gloomily wondered if American politics weren’t simply “the systematic organization of hatreds.” Surely that’s the case whenever one party feeds our necessary hunger for identity with nothing but the foul meat of resentment, grievance, and fear.

My fellow Americans, we have to draw the line at any call to country baited with those divisive lures. Draw the line when they claim to find “very fine people” in a neo-Nazi rally. Draw the line when they tell us a native-born Muslim American should go back to her homeland. Think of your own children when the children of migrants are taken from their mothers and held in cages as if cruelty could prove love of country. 

Who in heaven’s name would do or say things like that? Things that in no way can lead us to our promised ends, especially not now. Now when racism and climate change and public health so urgently demand that we work together. 

Nor can any public good ever be secured without that keystone public good, democracy, in whose practice lies the alchemy that can render the common good from the scattered goods of individual personhood. 

Three years now this very practice of democracy has been under attack. Peaceable assembly gets met with tear gas. The free press gets called the enemy of the people. Political speech gets replaced by money, the public square swamped with untraceable coin. 

Worst of all, voter ID laws are now the new poll tax while, shore to shore, one gerrymandered district after another has rendered simply talking to each other pointless. 

Democracy dies when these tactics succeed. It dies. 

That’s why this election isn’t like any other in living memory. We’d need to go back to 1876 to find a contest like this. That was the year our forebears replaced Reconstruction’ widening of the vote with a home-grown form of apartheid, Jim Crow. That was the year democracy died for our fellow Americans of African descent. 

The consequences of the 2020 election will be just as far reaching. Let us then answer the question—What does it mean to be an American?—by saying that above all it means refusing the sour politics of division. 

We are called again to see and affirm that we are / one people. In the face of natural disasters—a hurricane or this Covid pandemic—we must refuse the lure of partisanship and work together to protect one another. Nationwide, county after county, we must guard the ballot box, that cradle where the will of the people is constantly reborn. We must make sure that police officers are peace officers, and never assign them guard duty at some line between black and white, immigrant and native . . . 

My fellow Americans, democracy itself is on the ballot this November. When the votes are counted we will discover whether or not these United States are still home to citizens in numbers sufficient to deliver the Constitutional promise, “the Blessings of Liberty [for] ourselves and our Posterity.” 

# # #