Sam Smith - In recent months there have been three notable examples
of a politician being judged severely by events in his or her past: Virginia Governor
Northam, Brett Kavanaugh and Elizabeth Warren. In only one instance – Kavanaugh’s
– does history seem significantly to help lay the ground work for present
values of the target and thus is useful in defining that person today.
In
the case of Northam and Warren, the flaws of the past reveal little about who
they are now. And it is notable that, given the attention to these old errors,
there is so little coverage of Warren’s remarkable rise as a defender of
consumer rights or the list of liberal policies advocated by Northam what I could
find in only one media outlet other than the Progressive Review.
But
we live in a time when, thanks in no small part to the increased percentage of college
degrees among the powerful, where action often takes a second place to analysis
and the past challenges the present for importance.
For
example, when I started as a journalist, over half the reporters in the country
only had a high school education. You learned to judge people instinctively by
how they were acting today. There was no Google to check out the past.
Of
course, history is important. But whether it helps to define how one is today
varies markedly. History is of a different time and different folk. Were we not
able to learn from history – as opposed to being defined by it – we could kiss
the idea of progress good bye. And democratic policy is at its heart, imperfect
people taking past failures and turning them into something better.
One
of the things you find in dysfunctional families, is folk who are inexorably and
interminably tied to an awful past rather than rebelling and changing from it.
A
few years ago, I wrote of our problems:
The best metaphor for all this may
be the dysfunctional family. It, too, can be indifferent to logic, morality,
kindness, cooperation, courage and decency. Much of our behavior as victims of
the elite mimics the frustrated reactions of familial victims. We respond with increasing anger,
aggressiveness or, on the other hand, apathy and surrender, but in either case
with a striking lack of independence from the community that brought us down. And
we easily turn on others for having failed to save us.
There are other choices. In the
past these have included the creation of countercultures such as beats and punks, in which a new generation
declared its cultural independence from the past. Nothing of that scale exists right
now.
And we have had efforts such as the
civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements that redefined an era by collectively
tossing out old evils in favor of new dreams.
Part of the secret of these past
efforts was that you could join without clearance of one’s correctness, and
with an understanding that change included the transformation of presently
misguided or indifferent hearts. It was what one did now that counted far more
than where one once stood.
We live now – thanks to a variety
of factors ranging from cellphones to activist group competition for funding
and media – in a far more atomized world in which it is easy to ignore or
suspect people and groups that once would have naturally been seen as allies.
And so we are often dysfunctional even working for change. From right to left,
it is increasingly common to diss those who do not share all our presumed
virtues and to believe we can define ourselves simply by condemning others. The
fact that in this rejected pool are the very people we need to convince or convert
is increasingly forgotten or ignored.
It is easy in a dysfunctional family
or community to be so used to seeing the mistakes and cruelty of those around
us that we fail to see the potential of others and how to share and build upon
it. Both right and left suffer from this.
Conservatives contrive an ever
growing hate list of supposed threats to freedom even as they campaign for
those actually removing those liberties. Liberals and libertarians fail to
unite on issues about which they agree. And both ends of the spectrum define
themselves by what and who they dislike.
Part of the trick in changing all
this is to understand our past but not to let it rule our present and future.
If our only response to the evils of the past is anger and protest, then we
have added little to the story. But if we take the past and figure out how to
redefine and redraw it for time to come, then we not only defeat the wrongs of
the past but start to create a better future. We learn to treat anger and
protest as the alarm, and not the ambulance.
With blacks consisting of only 12%
of the population and liberalism defining about a quarter of the vote, finding
and building new allies couldn’t be more fundamental to positive change. Thus,
neither Bernie Sanders nor Black Lives Matter can pull it off without new and
stronger friends and working with each other is a good place to start.
Part of the secret is to organize
by issues, and not ideology or identity. Part is learning how to enjoy the
partnership of those with whom you don’t fully agree but do agree on something important
right now. Part is judging people by their words and actions today and not by
their past behavior or that of their culture or ethnicity. The future can’t be
the future without replacing the past.
Like the member of a dysfunctional
family who walks away from the anger and misery it has created in order to find
and/or build a new life, so all of us can walk away from the American past that
is strangling us, and find new friends and ideas that help us move forward,
even if differences remain between us. We can grant these allies reciprocal
liberty, the same allowance for mistakes that we grant ourselves, and the
warmth that that comes on common ground.
We must, in short, become like more
like what we want to be than what we and others have been in the past. An image of possibility rather than merely
more evidence of dysfunction.
