Michael Bennet - The Land of Flickering Lights: Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics

On the thirty-fifth day of the longest government shutdown in American history, I rose on the Senate floor to protest. As much as against the shutdown itself, I lashed out against the inaction that has seized our government throughout the last decade. The vast majority of Americans elect representatives to Washington in the hope that their representatives will do something useful on their behalf. Of course, they know this work involves argument and even principled disagreement, but most Americans, along with most members of Congress, would expect this disagreement at some point to give way to the work of governing a nation. The last decade, however, has seen our politics break down, and the American people become increasingly disgusted with the inability of the two parties to collaborate in the countrys best interest.

The five stories told in these pages are not ones parents would tell their children if they wanted them to be proud of Americas federal government. Civics teachers will not turn to them for lessons on how our republic ought to work. These stories will not form the basis for a book about what John F. Kennedy called the most admirable of human virtuescourage.

Bipartisan ineptitude, laziness, and an absence of vision gave loose rein to a small minoritymainly the Tea Party and, later, the Freedom Caucus, along with their wealthy backerswho turned American political processes against themselves. That small minority simultaneously demanded untenable policies and broke down public confidence in our government. After establishing one-party rule in 2016, that same minority set about making a new order that few Americans could imagine and none had asked for: a budget that spends money we do not have and expects our children to repay; a tax cut for the rich that widens economic inequality and steals opportunity from the vast majority of Americans; a foreign policy that drops our proud tradition of encouraging democracy and trade in order to start trade wars with our allies and play patsy to dictators; an approach to the environment that welcomes polluters and banishes the scientific community; a rush to fill seats in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, with judges of partisan political orientation and often of questionable legal qualifications; an immigration policy that forces millions to live and work in a permanent, shadowy underclass while turning our border into an international symbol of nativist hostility.

From the countrys unexpected beginnings in the eighteenth century, Americans built a nation on the high expectation that as a people we could govern ourselves better than any tyrant could govern us. These aspirations to self-government take many forms. They include our elections and the many offices in our three branches of government as well as our shared rights and obligations as citizens. They include our commitment to pluralism, democracy, and the rule of law. They include our most cherished beliefs: that we are created equal; that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable; and that it is our collective obligation to seek a more perfect union. We have never fully realized these aspirations, and more than once we have betrayed them. They remain, however, the constellation that guides us to a better place. When we have lost our course, we searched them out. When we found them, we trued ourselves up to a better way. Our finest moments as a nation form a story of citizens who challenge themselves and their country to live up to the high expectations self-government requires.

If we imagine Americans whose political awareness began in 2010, the stories told here illustrate the only political conditions they know. For those in their twenties who may have missed out on a serious American history class, Washington politics look like those of a nation slouching toward despair, dysfunction, maybe even despotism. With every month that goes by, it becomes more difficult to remember an American government that functioned in any other way. As a people, we deserve to know that in the United States there once wereand still can bebetter courses.

It is easy for the burden of present circumstance to convince us that we are in a dark hour. But we must also be honest enough to admit that as a nation we have faced challenges greater than this. We are not at our radios after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 7, 1941, hoping that President Roosevelt might help us see our way through to the conclusion of yet another world war. We are not enslaved as human beings or enslaving other human beings. We are not now, as Native Americans have been, dispossessed of our homelands, subjected to serial broken promises, and only then offered the right to be citizens. We are not in the throes of civil war or torn apart by armed partisans and lynch mobs trying to roll back the progress of Reconstruction. Rather, we are, as we have been many times before, at political loggerheads and wondering, rightly, what we can do to emerge as a stronger union.

I think often about the words of James Baldwin, written deep in the crisis years of the American civil rights movement: And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

Yes, everything now is in our hands.

MFB

Denver, Colorado

January 2019