The Land of Flickering Lights

If we imagine someone whose political awareness began in 2010, the stories told here illustrate the only political conditions they know. For someone in their twenties who may have missed out on a serious American history class, Washington politics look like those of a nation slouching toward despair, dysfunction, maybe even despotism. With every month that goes by, it becomes more difficult to remember an American government that functions in any other way. As a people, we deserve to know that in the United States there once were, and can still be, better courses. It is easy for the burden of present circumstance to convince us that we are in a dark hour. But we must also be honest enough to admit that as a nation we have faced challenges greater than this. We are not at our radio on the morning of December 7, hoping that President Roosevelt can help us see our way from an unprovoked attack through to the conclusion of yet another World War. We are not enslaved as human beings or enslaving other human beings. We are not in the throes of civil war or torn apart by armed partisans and lynch mobs trying to roll back the progress of Reconstruction. Rather we are, as we have been many times before, at political loggerheads and wondering, rightly, what we can do to emerge as a stronger union. I think often about the words of James Baldwin, written deep in the crisis years of the American civil-rights movement: “And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.” ' Yes, everything now is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.