James Grossman (#1: What was, what is, and what can be done?)

(University of Chicago)

In the United States, democracy is often rhetorically framed in terms of the opening words of the Constitution and the closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg during the Civil War. The Constitution begins, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” This is a reasonable list of some, even if not all, aspects of democracy— certainly enough to establish some goals and principles against which we can measure public policy, whether yesterday, today, or tomorrow. Lincoln not only affirmed these principles but also reminded us—and continues to remind us—that only a certain kind of government can maintain and implement these principles. He laments that we have veered away from them, and prays for redemption. “These dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

This preamble to the Constitution should not be placed on a pedestal to represent a world that we would seek to recover or emulate. Many of its authors owned, bought, and sold other humans. But it does articulate a set of democratic principles that embody what some people could and should be thinking about again with all of their imperfections and the document’s imperfections. As a historian, I’m wary about making generalizations about “what is,” especially in a time of turmoil, which was the context of Lincoln’s famous speech and our context today. But Lincoln does perhaps help us understand “what should be done,” whether it is a matter of restoration, as some more conservative Americans would argue, or a matter of vision, a notion of “what can be done.”

This was our assignment, but because I’m never good at completely following the rules, I want to add one more element: the obstacles to maintaining the democratic institutions that we cherish and to building new ones. There are many, but I want to identify two, which we can discuss if my colleagues want to do so, and one of them Christina has already articulated: fear and the power of fear, the utility of fear in a political context. Most students of politics agree that fear is substantially more powerful than love or desire. Roosevelt’s famous “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” was in some ways banal, perhaps even ridiculous. In 1933 we had a hell of a lot to fear, and it wasn’t just fear itself, and we would have had more to fear if more Americans had understood what was happening in Germany at the time. So we have to realize that, yes, fear itself is something that’s a problem, because fear itself is something that demagogues can mobilize against in ways that Christina has discussed.

A second issue is the hostility towards or even mere skepticism of institutions. Ute mentioned expertise which is related to institutions; if we’re going to talk about \ the obstacles and challenges to thinking about and implementing democratic principles, we must consider the role of institutions and their norms and procedures. Democracy cannot exist without institutions. We must consider the extent to which in the United States the left/right dichotomy and political spectrum has perhaps been overshadowed or at least is in competition with a dichotomy that has to do with faith in institutions and skepticism of and downright hostility to institutions and expertise. In 2024, there were polls that showed that many voters favored Trump and Sanders. That issue of institutions helps us to understand that, and it helps us to understand, perhaps, why many people either didn’t vote or voted, quite frankly, against their interests.

So, these are the two things that I would put on the table. Fear and institutions. And then, one might add, as Christina mentioned, pluralism, which I consider essential to democracy.

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