Perishable
I am sitting here on election night, 2021 and it just so happens that Kim and I watched a documentary on Gettysburg. We were just looking for something to fill in after a movie (Cast Away) that ended about an hour before we generally like to head off to bed. We did not choose it for any politically-motivated reason. And yet, the last part of the documentary focused entirely on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was quite a revelation to be reminded that this 272–word, 10-sentence piece of prose may never have more meaning to America than it does right now.
I am watching the disappointing result that Glenn Youngkin has won the gubernatorial race in Virginia and that Murphy is still struggling in a neck-and-neck race for retaining the governorship of New Jersey. While the Democratic cause can ill afford any losses, either in congressional seats or governorships, it is not really the impact of what those elections in and of themselves mean that has so much impact, but rather what they may and many will surely suggest that they portend for the 2022 push to shift the governance of our nation back to the right and, based on the way the Republican Party is comporting itself, into the hands of Donald J. Trump in 2024. I know that’s still a long time from now and much can and may happen to derail his prospects in that election year, it is disconcerting nonetheless. In the wake of the 2016 election I was less distraught than Kim and many of my liberal friends because I suspected that Trump would move centrist and not be as bad a President as everyone feared. I was amazingly wrong. He was much worse than anyone predicted and worse yet, he pushed the country and is still pushing the country to the brink of a demise in democratic process. He and his followers have undermined the electoral process by telling the Big Lie and now by legislating a strongly tilted and undemocratic playing field.
In his address at Gettysburg, I have learned that Lincoln specifically began his national history at the signing of the Declaration of Independence rather than the penning of the U.S. Constitution. That is meaningful because the Declaration was founded broadly on the concept that all men are created equal and the Constitution had imbedded in it the vein of inequality that gave rise to the Civil War and required the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, not to mention the ongoing Civil Rights movement and Amendments that we have collectively worked to shape so carefully for the past 160 years. That was a revelation that Lincoln had a clear vision for what was fundamentally wrong in the Constitution and right in the Declaration of Independence, and he used his most famous piece of prose to state it all quite clearly. I have spent the time reading and rereading these 272 words and need to repeat them here:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that 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.
What could be more clearly stated by this first Republican president than this proposition? He has laid the gauntlet down for all succeeding generations, not because he failed, but because he understood that his impending success was not worthy of rejoice (note that this lacks all the normal elements of a victory speech and is far more humble), but would require ongoing devotion to maintain the principles of freedom and equality. Remembering the importance that the consent of the governed means that the government is of ALL the people, by ALL the people and for ALL the people. He understood that it was fundamentally fragile or else he would not have used such a soulful word as perish. Perish means a death that is violent, sudden and untimely with the result of complete ruin and destruction. That is the fate that Lincoln could not countenance for America and this important human experiment in true equality.
I am sure that Glenn Youngkin and Jack Ciattarelli are fine men who are worthy of being governors. They certainly need not be considered inferior to Terry MaAuliffe or Phil Murphy. And I have no way of knowing or necessarily believing that they will do bad things for their states. If they become sycophants to the mob the way Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have been, or radicals like Kristi Noem, I might change my mind. But what really worries me is that Republicans seem ready to pull out all the stops at both a state and federal level to unhinge our democratic process and insure their control at all costs, even the at the price of the very proposition immortalized in the Gettysburg Address by their Party Progenitor. If they help advance the cause of unraveling a government of the people, by the people and for the people and do so by improperly defining the people to include anything less than all citizens, then we may be on the cusp of realizing the full nightmare that Abraham Lincoln warned us about seven score and eighteen years ago. We may be heading toward our moment of becoming perishable.