A House Divided Can Stand, If …

A House Divided Can Stand, If …

Like all politically engaged Americans, I am eager to know the results of today’s presidential and congressional elections. The stakes for the election are high, we have been repeatedly told by all of our political parties (Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Independents) and what’s left of our compromised and enfeebled Fourth Estate, and it is an assessment with which I agree. What exactly those stakes are that our political representatives are playing to win on our behalf today is something else about which we, tacitly even if not explicitly, also agree: the rule of law and the political norms and practices we abide by to administer law’s rule. Which is to say that this election is fundamentally about how our national government will order and execute our domestic and foreign priorities, pursue and implement public policies, and interact with its citizens, especially those in the political minority who may find themselves in disagreement. By fiat or by democratic processes? The river card is on the table. It’s time to reveal our hand.

Poker might seem an inapt metaphor for portraying the seriousness of this election. But democracies, ours perhaps more than any other in history, since it is not rooted in blood and soil but in ideals and principles, have always been a gamble. Riskiness, though we seem to be in denial of this fact, is a constitutive feature of our decision to govern ourselves as a constitutional Republic.

This is not to say that I am indifferent to how the issues over which we are so deeply divided are resolved. I am not. And that is why I have cast my vote for Vice President Harris over former President Trump. But whether or not her administration resolves these issues by making policy decisions that comport with my sense of what is satisfactory is not as important to me, in this election at least, as is my belief that she will attempt to resolve them by governing in a way that is consistent with the norms, practices, and processes that animate our constitutional arrangements.

Former President Trump, on the other hand, has displayed, chronically, a dispositional commitment to violating and discarding these same norms, practices, and processes that have held our, often flawed but once in a while grand, experiment in democracy together. Not that there are too many willing these days to admit the whole truth about our tragic inheritance—often flawed, but once in a while grand—that continues to define what it means to be an American.

Division is our default. And very much, also, a portion of our inheritance. Any honest accounting of our history could (and should) lead one to ask: when in our country’s brief history have we ever not been divided?

Add to this that democracies are, in practice, if not by definition, messy, quarrelsome arrangements. And add to that the fact that only recently have the political mechanisms through which we wrestle with and resolve our peculiar divisions become broadly democratic, notwithstanding the inspiring and revolutionary origins of our declarations of independence or the constitutional means by which we codified those aspirations. This is why protecting how we choose to resolve our differences is of paramount importance to me. A country, such as ours, always rife with divisions of one sort or another, must vigilantly protect the very processes through which we have agreed to resolve our disagreements.

From our founding, and throughout most of our history, equal political, economic, social, and cultural participation, read power, has been withheld from all but whoever has been defined, mostly by birth and custom, as being members of the favored majority. It has only been in the last sixty years of our existence as a nation that we have made significant gains in becoming a de jure democracy, even as we strive to ensure that these hard-fought legal victories are also the de facto case. Voting to elect, or by not voting hoping to elect as president someone who emits not even a whiff of care about the means—again often flawed, sometimes grand, always tragic, always striving—through which so much has been fought for and won is, at best, befuddling to me.

The view from here is that it is precisely the promising, exciting and, for many, far too many, unnerving implications of full citizenship and equal participation in the conduct of our affairs at home and abroad that is causing our nation’s heart to beat, now, with so much rapidity as we confront the latest versions of our national vexations. It is also my view that failure to elect Vice President Harris to the presidency will only quicken the national palpitations. A second term for former President Trump would likely spiral into a series of constitutional events, or is it arrests, and seems to me to be a disastrous risk to take.

Ours is in the commitment to perfecting the bonds of our Union, even though perfection is not a destination at which we will ever, finally arrive. But without broad, principled tending to the norms, practices, and processes by which we can and should go about achieving our individual and combined political interests, then our fragile gamble on democracy will eventually lead to us going bust.

Even a house divided can stand if its inhabitants all agree to support and fortify its foundations.