In the fight to preserve the integrity of our democracy we focus on politics. That makes sense, and it’s necessary because the machinery of democracy- free and fair elections, independent courts, and a representative legislature are all political creations. But it’s not enough.
This week I did a little thought experiment. I tried to imagine a democracy where the voters were governed by a foreign power. Not an external power. A foreign power. The voters vote. They decide who wins and who loses. But the outcome is foreign. The voters recognize it as alien and inauthentic.
They vote again, and again the result is an inauthentic and alien power. What would happen in a situation like that? Well, for one, people would try to change the rules around voting to be sure the results were real.
In places, they succeed in making those changes. But after the next election it is not just the big offices that seem foreign. The sense that elections produce results that are somehow alien is now felt throughout the system – impacting school boards and state legislatures. People try again, but the more they change the rules the more they distrust the results and the more their democracy feels like someone else’s.
That’s a pretty good fit for where we are right now. No matter who is in office, much of the country feels despondent. These results cannot be the outcome of a democratic process, we think, because they feel so foreign and inauthentic.
There must have been fraud. Or Russian meddling.
I blame the Supreme Court for allowing dark money, and gerrymandering, and for rolling back voter protections. I am frightened by our United States’ Senate’s failure to enact election protections despite the growing and obvious need. And I’m outraged by the lies and the deception practiced by the GOP election deniers.
But we cannot reasonably demand that the political system fix itself when the larger society is ill. Whatever the prophet Isaiah meant when he said a house divided against itself cannot stand, Mr. Lincoln understood that piece of scripture to be relevant to our national fate.
All of this left me thinking about an early 20th century obsession. Do nations have a soul? A national soul is not a divine thing that lives amongst the angels after the corporal entity is gone. Rather the idea refers to the set of animating principles that give direction to individuals and shape to the collective. It is the unheard music of the whole. Every member of society contributes to its composition. All hear it as a soundtrack, however faint, to their civic lives.
The idea of a national soul gave rise to nationalism and an unfathomable sorrow in the first half of that bloody century. But I wonder whether ignoring the idea might prove disastrous for our own.
Our politics did not descend into their current animus in a vacuum. Our society lost its way in the midst of greed, consumerism, culture wars, celebrity worship, changing demography, and the kaleidoscopic fracturing of attention that came with social media.
After the Civil War, two powerful intellectual memes became a new American animating principle. One was a deep pragmatism- William James and others led this school of thought. The other was a deep sense of universal kinship. Emerson and the poet Walt Whitman spoke to this. These ideas helped America move past slavery and civil war. But that healing was incomplete, and after a moment of hope we had a century of Jim Crow.
What is in our national soul? What animates us as a nation? I think it is time we ask this question. I even think the effort to find an answer- more than any clear answer itself- will help us mend our wounded democracy.