Why This Democracy
Transcriber: Giulia Sgarbossa
Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
Thank you very much for the warm welcome.
Listen, I’m worried about our democracy.
Nowadays, we have leaders who use
division itself as a political tool.
They downplay
or even encourage, in some cases,
a deadly assault to overturn an election.
And a bunch of them
are working really hard
to make it harder to vote.
The retreat from these
processes of democracy -
you know, ballot access
or legislative debate,
judicial review -
they are worrisome enough.
But what’s even more concerning to me
is the retreat from
the purposes of democracy:
these old-fashioned notions
of government of, by and for the people,
the rule of law as superior
to the rule of any one personality,
liberty and justice for all.
COVID made it harder
to overlook deep disparities among us
in health and wealth and education
and deep unfairness
in too much of our policing,
leaving a lot of Americans questioning
whether our national commitment
to social and economic justice is real.
For some time now,
in the words of one friend of mine,
the self-evident truth
that all people deserve life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness
seems a long way from settled
in the American mind.
So to me, American democracy,
the supposed model of the form,
is up for grabs.
I’m worried, not just as a lawyer
or a former public official,
but also and mainly as a patriot.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago,
in a crowded two-bedroom tenement
with my mother, my sister, my grandparents
and various relatives who came and went.
I went to big, overcrowded,
under-resourced,
sometimes violent public schools.
And yet my grandmother
would never permit us to say we were poor.
“Just broke,” she’d say,
because broke is temporary.
Now, think about it, here is this refugee
from the Jim Crow South,
who still believed in an America
where with hard work,
preparation and faith -
both religious and civic -
you could lift yourself
from your circumstances of birth.
I am, for her, the result and the symbol
of her faith in America,
so you’d better believe I’m a patriot.
But patriotism for Black Americans
is tricky.
It’s tricky to love a country
that doesn’t always love you back.
I think of the Black men who set off
to fight for freedom in the World Wars
and then came home to be denied
those very freedoms,
some of them lynched
while wearing their military uniforms.
I think of the the Black laborers
who built great public universities
whose doors were closed to them,
the Black voters who elected
great public leaders
whose policies, like the GI Bill,
were closed to them.
For a lot of our history,
American democracy itself
has been closed to Black people.
Lots of grandmothers, like mine,
have grandsons and granddaughters
who never had their chance.
Still don’t.
I remember in college,
a white classmate asked me,
“Why on earth would you want to be Black?”
When I told her I hadn’t
considered the alternative
(Laughter)
and never would,
she seemed startled and confused.
I attribute this, in part, to the fact
that I spoke and dressed like a preppy,
I get that part.
But mostly, I think she was confused
because she couldn’t imagine
why any Black person,
in his or her right mind,
wouldn’t trade places with her.
I think it would blow her mind,
as it may some of yours,
when I say I am also proud
to be a patriot.
Given our history,
being Black and patriotic
will certainly strike some people
as strange, if not absurd.
I don’t know when patriotism
turned into, you know,
lapel pins and flyovers
and silly arguments about
pro football players taking a knee.
My love of country
is about national aspiration.
America is the only nation
in human history
organized not by geography
or a common culture
or language or religion or even race
but by a handful of civic ideals.
And we’ve come to define those ideals,
over time and through struggle,
as equality, opportunity and fair play.
Why?
Because that’s what makes
freedom possible.
That’s the America
my grandmother believed in.
That’s the America
that has made us a magnet
to talent from all over the world.
That’s the America that makes me
and countless other men and women,
from every race and background,
a patriot.
In a way, the founders,
for all their flaws,
designed America to be a nation of values,
a sort of a country with a conscience,
and we’ve struggled with and against
that conscience from the start.
But true patriots understand,
given that context,
that America cannot be great
without also being good.
So when we cage refugee children
to discourage their parents
from seeking sanctuary here,
true patriots know we cannot be great
without being good.
When bullets fly in houses of worship
or in schools or in nightclubs
or in grocery stores
and our leaders choose
the slogans of the gun lobby
over the lives of innocents,
patriots know we cannot be great
without being good.
When unarmed Black and brown citizens
are shot down by unaccountable police,
when our justice system
is not yet consistently just,
patriots know we cannot be great
without being good.
When the economy moves on
and leaves broken lives
and broken expectations behind
and our leaders just shrug,
or when the public schools
continue to fail poor children,
and when we can always find the money
for a weapons system
the military doesn’t want
but not the money for the health care
a young family or senior needs,
patriots know or must ask themselves,
“Can we be great without being good?”
And when we choose a power grab
over a fair vote,
every true patriot knows
we cannot be great without being good.
Patriotism demands more
than ceremony and sanctimony.
It’s about more
than what you say you believe.
It’s about living the values
of equality, opportunity and fair play,
even when it’s inconvenient,
even when it gets in the way
of partisan advantage,
even when it compels us to be mindful of
and compassionate towards the lowly,
the vulnerable, the different
and the despised.
Because that’s what
American democracy is for.
Of course, we have policies to fix,
whether in job growth or education,
in immigration or the justice system
or in these processes of democracy itself.
But before we can fix our policies,
we have to fix our politics.
And by that, I am not just talking
about better tone
or hyper partisanship
or a willingness to compromise.
As important as all of that is,
I’m talking about our purpose.
Sure, we should debate -
and we always do -
what role government
should play in any of this,
in meeting our civic obligations.
But let’s try for once not to forget,
in the heat of the debate,
that social and economic justice
was the point from the start.
These are challenging times,
but I will tell you I am encouraged.
I’m encouraged by the many polls
and other reporting,
as well as a number
of recent articles and books
that suggest we are a lot less divided
on the fundamentals
than we sometimes seem.
But I think saving our democracy
will take more,
not just from elected officials
or civic leaders or the media,
but more from each one of us.
And we’re going to have to start, I think,
by putting our cynicism down.
I’m going to give you
an example of what I mean.
Near the end of my time in office,
America faced a crisis,
not unlike today’s,
when there were all these
unaccompanied children,
some as young as three and four years old,
who were flooding
across the southern border,
having fled over thousands of miles
from violence in Central America,
and then, just like now,
the federal authorities were overwhelmed.
So President Obama,
who was in office at the time,
called on a number of states
to temporarily shelter
and care for some of these children
while they were being
processed under our laws.
Feelings around immigration
ran hot then, just like now.
Even so, I agree that our
commonwealth would help,
because sheltering poor children
fleeing unspeakable violence
was, to me, an act of patriotism
America has given sanctuary
to desperate children
for more than a century.
We’ve rescued Irish children from famine,
Russian and Ukrainian children
from religious persecution,
Cambodian children from genocide,
Haitian children from earthquakes,
Sudanese children from civil war,
our own New Orleans children
from Hurricane Katrina.
Once, in 1939, we turned our backs
on Jewish children fleeing the Nazis.
And it remains a blight
on our national reputation
as I fear the separation of children
in the last administration
will be remembered.
The point is that our esteem and our power
is enhanced when we rescue the desperate
and diminished when we don’t.
Still, I’m not naive.
I knew my decision would be controversial,
and indeed, for that decision,
I was called, on hate radio
and in social media,
everything but a child of God.
A couple of days
after I announced my decision,
on an unusually quiet Saturday morning,
my wife Diane gave me a list of stuff
to go get at the Home Depot,
proving for some of you who know her
that there is no office high enough
that excuses you
from one of her honey-do lists.
(Laughter)
It was early in the day,
and I thought I’d just slip out quickly,
you know, on my own
without bothering my security detail.
What harm could come of that, right?
I knew exactly where I was going
and where to find everything on my list.
So I set off in the truck in a T-shirt
and jeans and flip flops,
dark glasses and a baseball cap,
and it didn’t matter.
I was outed by the manager
in the very first aisle:
“Good morning, Governor.
Welcome to the Home Depot.
How can I help you?”
I encountered a man in the checkout line
who was red-hot mad,
you know, not hostile or threatening,
just really angry and loud.
And he let me have it.
“Governor,” he said,
“I couldn’t disagree with you more
about your decision.”
He said, “My own wife is an immigrant.
She came here legally.
That’s the way it ought to be.
And I just want you to know
I think you’re wrong.”
Now, in that circumstance,
there was no point
in trying to engage with him
about how being a refugee
is legal under American law.
I just thanked him for his feedback.
But everybody in the checkout line
and in that area of the store
knew who was mad at whom
and what he was mad about.
Now, I had six other encounters
in the store on the same subject.
And in every one of those,
someone came up and whispered,
“Governor, you’re doing the right thing.”
“Governor,
thanks for looking out for those kids.”
“Governor, I’m with you.”
The calls to the office
were two and three to one
in favor of sheltering those children.
And when I reflect on that,
I think to myself,
when did we learn to shout our anger
and to whisper our kindness?
It’s completely upside down.
I don’t know if that’s the reality
TV culture we live in or what,
but it’s totally backwards.
It’s time we learned again
to shout kindness,
to shout compassion,
to shout justice.
That’s the purpose of American democracy
and the source of our greatness.
Blessedly, we’re starting to see
more and more expressions
of this kind of thing across this country:
more and more people
coming off the sidelines,
overcoming their cynicism and fatalism
and standing up for America
at her generous and optimistic best,
from women who are demanding to be treated
with the respect and decency
everyone deserves,
from survivors of domestic
violence and abuse
demanding to be seen
and heard and believed,
from Black and brown people
who are demanding
consistent professionalism
and the presumption of innocence
from police,
from students who are demanding
we choose their lives and safety
over the proliferation
of military weapons in civilian hands,
from all those lawyers who showed up
at polling places in 2020 or at airports
after the so-called Muslim ban
demanding respect for the rule of law.
Black Lives Matter,
Time’s Up,
Black Girl Magic,
Occupy Wall Street,
Families Belong Together -
at any given time on any given issue,
they may make any one of us uncomfortable.
But they have taken to the legislatures,
to the ballot boxes, to the courtrooms
and peacefully to the streets
to lay claim to their democracy -
its purpose as well as its processes -
and ultimately, to affirm
the American conscience.
They are shouting kindness.
If American-style democracy
is to have a chance,
more of us had better
put our own cynicism down,
summon up our own patriotism
and join them.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)