Activism

Peter Josephson’s Remarks

From the Rally May 3 – It’s Your Constitution

Thank you for welcoming me back to Groton. My wife taught at Lawrence Academy, and we lived here and raised our kids here for 14 years. It’s good to be back.

And I want to start with some thanks and some very, very deep thanks to Virginia Wood – to Whistle, for giving me this opportunity. We’re all struggling a little bit with how we might contribute. When an opportunity arrives, and we have the wherewithal to take it, then we should take it. 

Six weeks ago I had the good fortune to interview Heather Cox Richardson at my college, Saint Anselm College. Heather and I have known each other for a long time. And we come from very different disciplines – she’s a historian and I am really not a historian. At the end of that interview I reminded everybody that the name of Heather’s latest book is Democracy Awakening. It’s not called “Democracy in Twilight.” It’s not called “a Republic if You Can Keep It.” Heather calls her book Democracy Awakening. Because she knows this is our opportunity. This is our opportunity to recognize our weaknesses – as individuals and as a nation – to call on our greatest strengths and virtues, and to engage ourselves – perhaps for the first time – in the noble calling of politics. One of the things I try to impress upon my students, who are young and naive and optimistic and beautiful, is that politics reveals the most sclerotic and cynical and selfish and ugliest of human nature. But it can also call forth what is most noble and best and most generous and most beautiful in us. That is true of democratic politics especially, and of American politics in particular. Now is our opportunity to show just how noble we can be in the defense of our Democratic Republic. 

I never thought of myself as a patriot. I went in to the study of political philosophy precisely because I was not a patriot – because I read Socrates’ story of the Cave and I knew life in a political society is life inside a cave and I wanted to live outside of the cave. In 2016 I found my inner patriot. It turns out I love my country. And so today I want to talk about the great opportunity that is before us. 

The great philosopher of opportunity is Machiavelli. Machiavelli called it “fortune.” He said it was Moses’ good fortune to find the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. For Machiavelli, a crisis is an opportunity, if we have the virtue to do something with it. We certainly face a crisis today. The statesman who said that we’re in a struggle for the soul of America wasn’t wrong. We are. It can be difficult to sort through all the things we are confronted with, and to understand what we’re facing, and to do some political triage so we can see what matters most to each of us today. We can each make different judgments about that. Some of the issues are truly constitutional crises; some are what we can think of as legal crises, but perhaps not rising to the level of a constitutional problem; very many are crises of really terrible – unAmerican, I’d like to say – policy. The current issue of tariffs actually works at all three levels: constitutionally, only Congress can levy a tax; legally, the president has improperly invoked a law giving him power to impose tariffs in time of crisis; and as a matter of policy, the kinds of blanket tariffs the administration has pursued are pretty idiotic – it’s almost as though the great businessman has no idea how international trade actually works. 

The Trump administration’s complete disregard for due process ought to be a focus of our concern. Due process is the most fundamental right of a free people. Without due process the first and second amendments mean near nothing. (You can outthink the United States government, but you will never outgun it.) Due process means the government has to prove its case, under a rule of law and rules of evidence, to an independent judge or a jury of one’s peers. Guilt may not simply be assumed by the executive. The power to determine who deserves due process must itself be a subject of due process. Due process is not a technicality, or what our current Attorney General calls “paperwork.” The determination of guilt cannot be left to an unchecked executive if we want to remain free.

But in my view the fundamental crisis is not really about policy. They used to say of Mussolini that “at least he made the trains run on time.” That’s a good thing; people need that. But if you think having trains run on time weighs more in the great balance than having an authoritarian or totalitarian or unconstitutional government, well I think you’ve got the wrong priorities. The person who says “I don’t care if the government is authoritarian as long as the trains run on time” is not a free person. Some things just matter more than others.

We need to recognize where and when we are. We’re not in a policy debate. We can argue about transportation and schools and taxes later. This isn’t about policy; it’s about the soul of America. 

We have already spent more than enough time debating what words to use. I don’t want to talk about whether “fascism” is the right word. That’s gaslighting. And we know what this is. 

Every day I’m surprised by a new offense. I will confess that one of the lessons I’ve learned in the last hundred days is that I simply lack the imagination of a tyrant. I’m having trouble anticipating the day-to-day offenses. Be we shouldn’t wonder; we know what this is. We recognize this. We’ve already considered – often the gaslighters ask us to reconsider – but we’ve already considered. We’re allowed to make a judgment. 

Our great constitutionalist James Madison, in Federalist 49, wrote that tyranny is the concentration of power in a single hand. He said such a concentration of power “is the very definition of tyranny.” And what we recognize is an attempt to concentrate power in the White House. We’re seeing an effort to concentrate power over education, overt he professional civil service, and over the arts. Wee’re seeing an effort to dictate to science what conclusions it must reach in support of an official ideology. We’re seeing – and this may be most far-reaching, most egregious – a grasping for power over the legal apparatus of the state which is frankly and truly and terrifyingly Kafkaesque. We know what we’re seeing.

And please let’s remember that there is nothing new or strange or – I’m sorry to say – even unAmerican in this.

Machiavelli teaches that the challenge of our times is a challenge of human power. Do we as human beings have the power to make a world we want to live in? His answer was yes. But his successors, the philosophers who most shaped the American founding, were well aware that when we pursue liberty we also exercise dominion. Hobbes, Locke, and Hume – each one warned us that our project of liberty would be bound up with projects of dominion, and that when people speak of liberty they often mean only liberty for themselves but not for others. Of course: when’ I’m looking to extend my liberty I’m usually trying to extend my power over the world around me. I’m trying to extend some dominion. It’s easy to speak the word of liberty, but it’s morally complicated to claim our liberty and also to respect the liberty, even to defend the liberty, of others. The liberty of early Americans entailed enslaving others, and the conquest of the West involved us in the attempted genocide of indigenous peoples, and even our opposition to colonial power abroad led us to become a colonial power ourselves. Liberty is a very great human good, perhaps the greatest. It is worth pursuing and defending. But we need to recognize our moral hazard – that when you find the coin marked “Liberty,” you’ll find the word “Dominion” embossed on the flip side.

Because the exercise of liberty can lead us, even unaware, into an exercise of dominion the crisis we face is not only a crisis of Trump or the Trump administration. We are facing a long-simmering social crisis that is now expressing itself in White Nationalism, in toxic masculinity, and in Christian Dominionism. I think – I’m actually confident now – that these movements will exhaust themselves, and I even think they will exhaust themselves in my lifetime. There are simply more of us than there are of them.

My great fear after the election in November was that the American people is done – that Democratic republicanism is done. That this whole grand ongoing experiment in self-government has in the end failed, or that the world has just changed too much. That we’ve spent too much time bowling alone, or playing video games or leaving government to others – being governed instead of governing ourselves – to sustain the experiment any further. We haven’t been vigilant; we’ve hunkered down into private life. Perhaps we’ve lost the experience of working in our communities to govern ourselves together. And so ignorance and viciousness seem to dominate our culture today. But I think that is only a seeming. And here I think we can find some solace in our greatest and truest conservatives. I mean Cicero, Montesquieu , Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville – each of whom teaches the enduring power of culture. The culture of America will not be rooted out so easily. The culture of America – our insistence on our Liberty, our insistence on equality, and our insistence on basic rules of fair play – let’s call them rules of law – that culture is not going to be rooted out by the Stephen Millers of the world. 

The carnival will not last. Martin Luther King famously – in a June 1965 graduation speech at my alma mater Oberlin College – the speech is called “Remaining Awake Through a revolution” – Martin Luther King famously said “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” But in that same speech he warned, “Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem.” And just three years earlier writing a letter from the Birmingham jail, King reminded us all – and specially those who counsel inaction or more patience – that the arc doesn’t bend by itself. The arc of the moral universe bends because we bend it. 

David Hume, who was a great influence on our first great constitutionalist James Madison, David Hume said that the whole secret of politics lies in properly arranging the distribution and balancing of powers. Madison called this checks and balances. Like the arc of the moral universe, checks and balances don’t work of their own accord. Checks and balances work because they distribute powers in ways that allow people to exercise power. Checks and balances work because human beings are empowered to be the checks and the balances. Remember it was James Madison who warned that the concentration of power in one hand is “the very definition of tyranny.” That’s what we’re seeing in this “unitary executive.” It’s not democratic, not in the sense of a democracy ruled by law, a liberal democracy, a democratic republic. And that is what Mr. Trump is trying to do, and what some of his supporters want him to do. 

Madison very explicitly did not confine this principle and practice of checking and balancing to the workings of government alone. He didn’t suggest that this principle and practice of checking and balancing the executive should be left to our legislators and to judges. In Federalist 51 Madison wrote that this policy – I’m quoting now – that this policy of checks and balances “might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.” He had in mind not only the federal government, but the system of having states with governments independent of the federal government, with powers of their own with which to check and balance an executive in Washington who wants to concentrate power in his own hands. And he had in mind that people outside of government can find their power, too; and that people in what we think of as private life, or at least out of public office, have a role in checks and balances. When a local church announces that it will sanctify the marriage of a gay couple, and a local caterer offers to cater their reception, and a local landlord rents a home to them – all of these are checks and balances. We can be the checkers and the balancers. 

How do we do that? You’re already doing it.

The great difficulty is the challenge of level-headedness and clarity. We each face our own problem of liberty and dominion, a challenge of standing up for what we know is true, and acknowledging that we don’t know everything. If you’re like me, and I know some of you are, you want to be sure to hear all sides of the story. But we know what this is. Trust that you have listened, and know that you are allowed to make a judgment. 

Of course we want to win, but this isn’t only about winning and losing. Some things – the most important and highest things – are worth doing regardless of whether you win or lose. The question then becomes: Faced with the greatest public challenge in at least a generation, and maybe more, what kind of people will we reveal ourselves to be? I want to win this fight, but what concerns me even more than winning or losing is I whether I will have the courage, the prudence, the commitment to American justice that these times require. Will I have what Lincoln called the firmness to stand in the right, as it is given to me to see the right? Worse than losing is to sit on the sidelines. 

And so we must recognize bullying and gaslighting and call them out. Don’t expect a conversation – the dominionists don’t want a conversation. But don’t be silent. And we must build social networks face-to-face, in person, and locally. Gather in groups both small and large. Nothing expresses power in a democracy better than number. The reality is that one vote doesn’t matter – so go get some more votes.

Most importantly, keep being human. Tyrants hate that, because our persistent humanity disproves their whole brutalizing project. They try to dehumanize us and to break human relations. Don’t let them. Every little gesture of relationship adds a crack to the great wall of tyranny. Every act of beauty, every mustard seed, is an act of hope for tomorrow that refutes the whole project of tyranny.

We can take some inspiration from our good friends in Canada. The great Canadian poet Leonard Cohen sang “Democracy is Coming to the USA.” Because Machiavelli is right – this is our opportunity to make the America of the future that we envision and hope for. Now is our opportunity. And Heather Cox Richardson is right – democracy is awakening here and now.

(Emphasis added by the web master)