As in every presidential election cycle we search for the narrative, the story, that will unite citizens behind one candidate or the other. I wish we listened only to policy proposals, but it is the story a candidate tells that most often excites us first — the story they tell not only of themselves, but of US.
Yet if often seems every time there is an election, politicians search yet again for that story — like public relations firms looking for the next jingle that’ll go viral. Why? Why do we need to reinvent an almost personal-savior story each time we elect a president?
Especially as we have the perfect story to retell each other each election cycle. It is the story of U.S. The only nation founded on the (still) revolutionary idea that all human beings are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Yet it seems both the left and right misprize, even despise this very heritage.
For the Trumpers, our founding ideal that all people are created equal must be dumped, like a sack full of mewling kittens into the Connecticut River, because you cannot hold those ideals dear and still speak of “shithole countries.” Or people. They see Trump’s “invasion” of brown-skinned people and fear it because they never had faith in our founding ideals.
They merely see the other, the poor, the non-English speaker, and they neither accept nor understand that these immigrants will become America, and carry on the legacy of “America” precisely because they subsume those ideals into their very souls. And so the legacy of America will go on despite the skin tone of Americans.
Hence the white nationalists like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on Fox News spin tales of white genocide — they and their ilk see America only in racial terms, and so the loss of a Caucasian majority is the end of America. That’s why they blew a gasket, morally and psychologically, when a “skinny kid with a funny name” got himself elected in 2008 (and worse, reelected.)
But the left can also undervalue and misuse our historical legacy. To many liberals and progressives, America’s history is an endless litany of homicide, genocide and slavery. To them, because Thomas Jefferson betrayed those very ideals while writing the Declaration of Independence, its revolutionary ideals must be abandoned as tainted — fruit of the poisoned tree.
But does that make sense, even tactical sense, in an election? Our revolutionary beginnings should not be rejected because they were betrayed in the breach. Rather, we should double our commitment to them. Each generation should aspire to be the generation that brings the United States closer to that ideal.
And we have. Generation after generation since 1776 has struggled to broaden those ideals to all. “We The People” did that when we ran away from slavery, or fought a war to end it; when we waged war on those who tried to steal our ancestral land; when women filled the jails to get their right to vote; when workers and union organizers died so they could have “bread and roses” — also known as the Pursuit of Happiness. And we are still doing so. The civil rights movement began among the African-American community, but spread to Chicanos, American Indians, women and the LGBTQ community. And on to today — we still seek to expand life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to more and more people.
And all those rebels, runaways, soldiers, “uppity women” and broad shouldered workers are America. Are US.
You can see our history as a litany of high crimes and misdemeanors, or you can see it as a battle to make real the revolutionary ideals gifted us by men who could not themselves fulfill the promises made at our birth. (And yes, we stumble two steps forward, one back, but all-in-all, forward we have gone for two centuries or more.)
The right can take the name Tea Party and the slogan “Don’t Tread On Me,” but they cannot take up the mantle of its challenges and promises, it’s language, other than for public relations purposes. It is time for us to start telling the Trumpers that if they are not all in for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they can go live in Russia!
The left abandons the same riches, while actually wanting the nation to fully adopt those ideals as our compact for governing — the pulp that would make the paper our social contract is written on. Yet we mostly discard it, as if we are too proud or too embarrassed to stop and pick up the pennies at our feet.
What the left needs to learn in this election cycle, is the lesson given to us by Derek Walcott, the Afro-Caribbean poet and Nobel Prize winner, who once wrote, “The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of history.”
How glorious the day when we can say, “The fate of politics is to remain in love the world, in spite of history.”
Joe Gannon lives in Northampton. He can be reached at columists@gazettenet.com.