Waiting at Gettysburg

Waiting at Gettysburg

by Robert M. Herzog

A century, two score and seventeen years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on a makeshift podium on a field where a battle had just been fought for the soul of a nation. There he addressed the fundamental question of whether that nation could survive and stay true to its founding principles as a democracy. The outcome was not a foregone conclusion then. Nor is it now.

When we grew up our textbooks and teachers often spoke of the United States as “an experiment” in a form of government of, by, and for the people. But we never really took the “experiment” notion that seriously, nor acknowledged, then or until recently, that as in any experiment, it could fail. We now are on the precipice of that failure, and should not take anything for granted as to what will survive.

We took for granted the core assumptions that underlay that experiment, that those elected to represent us in government would be generally of good will and oriented toward the common weal, the common good for most of the nation. There would of course be disagreements, but there was confidence that the system of separate governing branches would apply checks and balances to each other.

For a couple of centuries the genius of that system, its capacity to correct itself, worked pretty well. Whenever there was a far tilt in one direction, the keel of the ship of state — its Constitution, its institutions, and those who served in them — would ultimately bring the ship back upright. It inspired confidence not only that we would come back to a solid central position, but also that we were in no danger of becoming a shipwreck, tilting so far over that we could sink. That the experiment could fail. Our original framework with modifications was reaffirmed even after the potent challenge of a Civil War.

When Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, it was during one of those storms, with the ship heeled way over. He and those who heard him had no guarantee it would right itself in the midst of that storm, those battles, and so he asked a genuine question, whether a nation so conceived and so dedicated to equality for all and government of, by, and for the people, could endure. It did then.

Will it now?

I grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood where I and most of my friends were first generation American born. Its diversity was exemplified by the Scandinavian, Italian, Syrian, Russian, Greek, Jewish, irish, Polish, and other ethnic names that dotted our classroom roll call. Its public schools worked pretty well for us, and propelled a generation that often would get to a college (more affordable and accessible for all then), and lead lives that successfully grew their economic and social status in a state of well-being, in a nation that wrapped its egalitarian arms around us and provided opportunity, fairness, and decency.

There was much to overlook — that perspective is certainly more a white person’s vision of America than that of a person of color, a profound flaw in the experiment — but there was not just in our Brooklyn neighborhood but across America a social, political and economic system that presented a vision of the chance to both do well and live well, individually and in community.

These visions have been shattered. Over the past three decades the notion of elected officials and their parties, once in office, representing the nation as a whole has been decimated by the rapacious pursuit of money and power that has characterized the Republican Party, seeking, as is now often noted, to ensure that even as the nation turns more than half non-white in the now foreseeable future, power will remain entrenched in the hands of those who have it now.

As for checks and balances, that too has become endangered. We can no longer view our system of government as having three independent branches. Congress, the purported legislative branch, is now split, with the Senate no longer acting as a check on the executive but an extension of it, rendering the House impotent even as it better reflects the will of the population. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the vast differences in size between small and large states have undercut any semblance of equal representation as the driving force of checks and balances, of the equivalence of one person, one vote transcending internal boundaries, in parallel to the electoral college subverting the will of the majority.

And the Supreme Court, viewed in my youth as the great bastion protecting democracy, has been corrupted, with the current majority appointed by presidents who did not win a popular majority selecting justices who have become predictable extensions of Republican ideology, a vehicle that supports Republican self-interested agendas, be they political, cultural, or moral, extending so far as to overrule in 2000 a state’s process to install a President of their party’s choosing.

Our earlier, and my youthful, ideals may have been imperfect, but they were worthy nonetheless. But they are disappearing under a concerted onslaught.

In effect all three branches of government, given the impotence of the House as evidenced by the pile of its bills often representing popular majorities that languish in the Senate’s trash bin, are controlled by the same party, with no check on its self-servicing agenda.

We now have at best two and a half branches of government. We have such discrepancies in voting power that the will of the majority is no longer the governing will. The electoral college and the Senate were put in place to try to check raw power of larger states with the authority of counter-balancing processes. That was ok when the population ratio of large to small states was 13:1, at the time of the founding. It is no longer valid when that ratio is 65:1, with such disproportionate power residing with so few.

Twice in the last twenty years presidents have lost the popular vote but won through an outdated electoral college, and there’s a good chance that aberation of democracy will happen again.. Twice such presidents, not surprisingly, ran roughshod over the will of the majority, engaging us in wars based not on laws but good for profits. They installed justices who have enabled money to dominate politics, while their party methodically appropriated local governances, bolstered by a mutually supporting systemic multi-media assault on common sense and values, from the Internet to Fox News and beyond, using the elements of government to further their own interests.

The percentage of the population represented by senators who voted for convicting the president in the impeachment trial was around 55%; the percentage voting to acquit, 45%. What kind of democratic system is that, what message are we conveying to the next generations, where the majority has no currency, and truth and decency no traction. The residue of this tyranny of the minority controlling the purported leaders our times will be a planet tipped towards self-destruction through climate change while the Republican/corporate bands played on. The sustenance of power is power. The rapacious pursuit of power fueled by vast sums of money.

The biggest push we need now is to change the electoral college. Since any party in power will have won through that system, it’s unlikely, especially in the days when noblesse oblige must look like a naive joke to those in power, that the overall system can be changed. But if states representing a majority of the electoral college agree that their electors will be cast for the winner of the popular vote, then change is possible, and under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact we are just 74 electroal votes short of that goal. And if petty despots like Mitch McConnell can be held to task, by voting them out, then some more change may be possible.

We stand again on the field of Gettysburg, pondering what our future holds, whether a government of, by, and for the people, and not one for the few and powerful, for the authoritarian and the indifferent, can survive. We are confronted with what true measure of devotion is required to protect the principles that once guided the American experiment, to restore its viability before it crashes irrevocably.

You can see more of my work in my new book, Views from the Side Mirror, Essaying America, reflecting on the America that is, and the one that could be, over the past twenty years: https://www.amazon.com/Views-Side-Mirror-Essaying-America/dp/0578572427/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1583679016&sr=8-2