(I present a guest commentary by my Ethical Society colleague, and also nUnitarian clergy, Ben Bortin.)
If you’re like me, you hold a fervent belief in democracy. Democracy is a gift, a most cherished principle in human affairs. Again, if you’re like me, you also tend to take it for granted in this country.
But as an actress on the new Hulu season program, The Handmaid’s Tale, pointed out, democracy is not a given. Democracy is something we choose, and something we must vigilantly uphold, protect, and defend. It can disappear faster than it appeared. And increasingly we are hearing that democracy right now in the United States is in unprecedented danger, and that democracy itself is on the ballot next month.
And just so we know what we’re talking about, what is democracy? It’s government by consent of the governed, in John Locke’ words, meaning that every person of age in the society has a vote at election time, and everyone’s vote is faithfully counted. It’s an approach to governance whereby people can speak and write freely without reprisal, where people are able to practice their religious faith freely, where people can peaceably assemble to express themselves without interference by the government.
And in electoral democracy, there’s something else, a phrase we’re hearing a lot in recent times — a peaceful transfer of power. That means that the candidate who receives fewer votes than his or her opponent — guess what — concedes to the winner of the greatest number of votes. Some of our most admirable leaders have lost elections at one time or another in their careers, including two from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. Lincoln, in fact, in 1864, at the height of the Civil War, wrote that he would hand over power to his rival candidate, a candidate who wanted the Union to surrender, if Lincoln lost the election.
As we know, there was not a full democracy with the founding of this great nation. African Americans were enslaved and could not vote or be considered full citizens, women could not vote for nearly 150 years, men without property could not vote. It has been a slow evolution to reach a truer sense of democracy, culminating with the 19th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the latter, already subsequently weakened, and under further threat from a current Supreme Court case. People face obstacles to their voting in this country, in the form of intimidation, a sheer lack of polling places leading to hours-long lines, sometimes without access to drinking water, or time-honored shenanigans like gerrymandering, making votes not count.
In Unitarian Universalism, a commitment to democracy is embedded in our religion. In our Principles and Purposes, “We… Affirm and Promote…” according to the fifth Principle, “the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.”
Should we, as religious people, Unitarian Universalist or not, feel free to speak out about the preservation of democracy in our country? Emphatically yes. We live with the brilliant principle of separation of church and state, protecting a pluralistic government from becoming a theocracy, and free worship from being suppressed by the government. But that does not for a moment preclude religious individuals and institutions from using their free speech to witness to social and moral issues, which are also often political issues. And one of those key issues now is the survival of democracy itself in this country.
Many religious leaders and followers feel, as I do, that it is not only our right but our responsibility to speak out about abuses and injustices in the larger society and world.
Since the days of the Hebrew prophets, 2500 and more years ago, religion in its finest moments has been a conscience for society. As we know, it was religious leaders and congregants who crusaded for voting rights for African Americans in the mid 1960s,– another struggle for democracy, including, of course, notable figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., along with numerous other Protestant leaders, Catholic nuns, rabbis, and Unitarian Universalist ministers and laity. That is again occurring today, in the form of “Reclaim the Vote…” and “UU the Vote,” not endorsing particular candidates, not supporting particular political parties, just working to safeguard everyone’s right to vote, which includes the right to have that vote counted.
Before continuing, I feel moved to mention one other matter pertaining to democracy. We often hear of democracy as a European and American concept, one that others in the world will not necessarily understand or welcome. I disagree. I believe that democracy is appreciated by any and all who cherish freedom, from Japan, to the Ukraine, to Argentina, to northern African countries during the so called “Arab spring.”
It’s true that one of the earliest democracies of which we’re aware was in the west, namely ancient Greece, as we’re taught in our world history classes. “Democracy” is of course a Greek word. I did not know the name, Cleisthenes until this year, but Cleisthenes presided over a democracy in Athens in 506 BCE. Granted, the vote in ancient Athens was confined to propertied males, within a society that engaged in slavery, something like democracy when it started in this country.
But democracy also appeared in Vaishali, India in the sixth century BCE. Vaishali was where the Buddha allegedly gave his final sermon.
Some claim the oldest continuous democracy on the face of the earth is that of the Iroquois Confederation of Native Americans, whose constitution has many points in common with ours. Benjamin Franklin, in fact, invited representatives of the Iroquois to speak at the 1776 Continental Convention. Democracy appeared in New Zealand in 1893, the first country of size in the world to allow women the right to vote.
And democracy is the heart and soul of our country and its vision, or at least it should be. And I’m here to say that democracy is in peril in this country. The unprecedented siege on our democratic governance dramatically came into focus on one day in particular.
It was a day on which you may recall exactly where you were and what you were doing. Like November 22d, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or September 11th, 2001, or for those who were alive and conscious then, December 7th, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The day of which I’m speaking, of course, was January 6th, 2021.
We have seen videos of the siege on our nation’s capital month after month, for more than a year and a half, particularly those who watch MSNBC. We have seen the footage on television of the individual pounding a window of the Capitol building, eventually smashing it, and the individual walking around the Capitol lobby, triumphantly displaying a confederate flag, or the other with a Camp Auschwitz shirt, and especially excruciating, the police officer trapped in the door by rioters, wincing in pain. For me, however, the shock of that day was displayed with unprecedented vividness during the final hearing of the January 6th Commission a week and a half ago.
We saw for the first time Senatorial and House leaders, hiding in an underground then-secure location, frantically calling for additional law enforcement assistance. Congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Stenny Hoyer, and Mitch O’Connell phoned for National Guard and police protection, phoned the Attorney General, phoned the mayor of Washington DC, phoned the governors of Maryland and Virginia, saying there needed to be re-enforcements, now, not in a little while. The run-around response was audible. Of course, the one person who could have halted the danger, the then-President, who had sole jurisdiction over numerous law enforcement entities, was not halting the danger, just watching it unfold on television.
The more I’ve learned about January 6th, the more stunned I’ve become. But there’s something about the aftermath of that momentous day that to me is just as stunning, just as extraordinary, just as profoundly disturbing.
I had thought that violent uprising would shake the emotional foundations of the country, that people, irrespective of political party, would be deeply shocked and outraged. Many were. But many seemed to shrug their shoulders. Even elected officials, who were in danger for their lives that day, not long thereafter seemed to love nothing more than to forget that day. They were terrified that afternoon and evening- I’ve heard with my own ears Congresspersons who support Donald Trump say so. But then those same people voted against a bipartisan investigation of that uprising, the worst domestic attack on the Capitol and our democracy in our history.
The facts are irrefutable, and the whole world could see them. An armed, angry crowd overpowered U.S. Capitol police, injured 130 of them, killed one, Brian Sicknick, who was pummeled with a fire extinguisher, caused millions of dollars of damage to the Capitol building, ransacked Congressional offices, and threatened to hang the then-Vice President, bringing an actual gallows to the outside steps of the Capitol building.
What happened was shameful enough, but what almost happened could have been so much worse.
For example, but for the quick-wittedness and courage of one police officer, Eugene Goodman, who led a crowd of rioters up a staircase away from the Senate chambers, who knows how many Senators might have been harmed or killed, Senators who were only a few feet away when Goodman diverted the mob – yes, mob. Similar quick-wittedness caused someone to seize the official ballots for the Presidency, as senators frantically escaped their chambers.
We now know that firearms were carried by members of the insurrection – I’ll use that word too. What if, heaven forefend, someone witn an AR 15 had made his or her way into where the Congresspeople were sequestered.
Yet some Congresspersons wanted not only to dismiss those events, but act as though they never occurred. My late father spoke of how some people are “ignorant” in the sense that they deliberately ignore reality, even a reality that is right in front of them. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, for example, declared that the people who stormed the United States Capitol in order to overturn an election were actually left-leaning people, Antifa followers, disguised as Trump supporters, Proud Boys, and confederate flag wielding white supremacists. He seems to have retreated from that claim, but voted against investigating then event.
Congressman Andrew Clyde said, “You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from Jan. 6, you’d actually think it was a normal tourist visit,” said. He went on to describe the armed and violent mob as “people (who) in an orderly fashion” stayed “between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures.”
He conveniently omitted the fact that he, himself, Congressman Clyde, helped barricade a door to the chambers of the House of Representatives, when that area was about to be breached by an angry throng of these “normal tourists,” some of whom, by their own admission, were calling out that they were ready to take the lives of elected officials. Again, when questioned later about the matter, he chose not to discuss it.
If we pretend something doesn’t exist, maybe it will go away. Just as Covid was going to go away, like a miracle, then-President Trump said on February 27th, 2020, just before the pandemic began killing thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of people in this country.
Another value of our free religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism is truth-seeking. It is also a foundational premise of our educational system. Truth for many has been drowned in this case in a sea of obfuscation and fabrication…and people are willing and ready to accept falsity, which they hear repeatedly on social media among other venues.
Blessings on leaders in both parties, Congressmen Bennie Thompson and Jaimie Raskin among others on the Democratic side, and Congresspersons Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger of the Republicans, for steadfastly pressing on nonetheless to get the facts of this momentous day before the American people.
Something false preceded and precipitated the uprising on January 6th.
As we know, Mr. Trump repeatedly said in the weeks after the election that the election abounded in voter fraud, that a victory had been stolen from him by, as he put it, “emboldened radical-left Democrats, …and … the fake news media.” That’s despite the fact that by January 6th, over 50 court challenges, later 61 challenges, instigated by the Trump campaign concerning voter fraud, had been rejected by judges Democratic and Republican, some of those judges appointed by Donald Trump. One of the courts to reject the claims of the Trump campaign was the United States Supreme Court. Donald Trump’s formerly loyal Attorney General also denied such fraud, using a common pithy word starting with the letter “b” to describe such a claim.
Falsehoods, such as claims that briefcases full of false ballots in Georgia had been delivered, or that voting machines reverse people’s votes – and what kind of a voting machine is that, were said loudly and confidently, and many in this country fell for them and continue to fall for them, including nearly three hundred candidates for office. The former President even asked, quite boldly and publically, for the Secretary of State of Georgia, to “find” 1178 votes. If that’s not election tampering, I don’t know what is. But people are committed enough to their beliefs and feelings as not to be distracted with facts, even ones that are out in the open.
January 6th, traumatic as it was, was the proverbial tip of the iceberg. What we now know led up to that attempted insurrection, and what has occurred ever since, and continues to occur, is also an insidious and deep-seated threat to democratic governance in this country.
There is a multi-pronged, deep seated campaign to that effect.
First of all, we now know that the siege against democracy on January 6th of last year was planned and orchestrated, and Secret Service and the President knew armed people were descending on Washington DC to undermine the election that had occurred.
Second, since then, more than 400 anti-voter bills have been introduced in 48 of the fifty states. Based on the disproven pretext of widespread voter fraud in the last election, early voting and mailbox voting have been radically curtailed, affecting working people, the elderly, the young, and people of color disproportionately.
Third, those who administer voting, charged with making sure a community’s or a state’s vote count is tabulated fairly are being replaced by partisan non-professionals, quite willing to report their candidate of preference as the victor, rather than the person who gained the most votes in the respective district or state. The lives of current election officials, with track records of professionalism and fair-mindedness, have been threatened, along with their families’, and have understandably resigned their positions.
Candidates who believe, without evidence, or in contradiction of evidence, that the last election was stolen are running for Secretaries of State. These are state officials who often are the final arbiters when it comes to administering elections.
There was no reason to doubt the outcome, and the former Vice President knew it. The votes in close states had been re-counted, and re-counted again. Mike Pence didn’t have the power as one person to countermand those certified votes, and to his great credit and glory, he realized it.
My paramount concern is that we preserve democracy in this country. I realize we are at the proverbial eleventh hour, with the next election on November 8th. But I urge us in the remaining days to be in touch with UU the Vote and Reclaim the Vote.
With Ukraine, the clear and present danger to democracy comes from outside the country, in the form of the dictator, Vladamir Putin. In our country, the danger comes from within.
As one of my fellow UU ministers said, I never thought I’d say that we should be sure that fascism never takes over this country. Sinclair Lewis’ ironic title to a novel was It Can’t Happen Here. There were plenty of stirrings of fascism in this country when he wrote the booi.
And our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, had these words, which he uttered just before the Civil War…
“At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I would answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must, ourselves, be its author and its finisher.”
And to paraphrase him again, may we do whatever we can to ensure that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people not perish from the earth.
dsprintz 