My grandfather filled his books with newspaper and magazine clippings, interleaved throughout the pages as cross-references, adding to what the authors wrote or replacing what they left out. I’ve inherited this habit and built on it by clipping, copying, and compiling notes, quotes, excerpts and essays into an Evernote account that’s now stuffed with more than 15,000 notes.
His life took him through two World Wars and one Great Depression, from the age of the Wright Brothers through Apollo and beyond. I wonder if he ever went back to his books and clippings to see if they’d help him understand the Civil Rights movement, a president’s resignation or “morning in America”.
My life is taking me through a national campaign to hide records of the past and rewrite our collective memory. When I flip through my notes, I keep encountering voices that reach across time, voices as disparate as those of Abraham Lincoln, Rod Serling and James Baldwin, that seem to speak directly to our moment.
I’ve never thought about it until now – but in an era where history is erased, preserving these voices is resistance. There’s a chorus of ancestors in our past, demanding we recognize that the oldest threat to democracy is our own complacency.
Internal Threats to Democracy
My history obsession started with the US Civil War and so much of what’s happening now brings me back to that time so it’s not surprising that I found a young Lincoln first, warning us that our country’s greatest threats are found within it.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts . . .
Abraham Lincoln Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield (1838)
Today, federal judges receive death threats for rulings on elections or rights— which sounds like the “disregard for law,” Lincoln feared. When impeachment becomes a weapon against unfavorable verdicts, passion replaces the “sober judgment of courts”.
Lincoln was only 28 years old when he spoke these words to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. He was 51 and running for president when he spoke at Cooper Union in New York, addressing a national audience. Rejecting accusations that he and the Republicans were radicals, he posed a question about conservatism, a question that could be asked to those who flagrantly disregard the balance of powers and rule of law today under the banner of “conservatism”
But you say you are conservative – eminently conservative – while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;” while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.
Despite Lincoln’s own Executive Order of the Emancipation Proclamation, which he ensured be codified through a Constitutional Amendment, it’s likely that he’d be shocked by the substitution of Executive Orders for the balance of powers adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.”
Lincoln spoke directly to his “dissatisfied countrymen” in the seceding states in his first inaugural address, asking them to stop and think about what they fear before they destroy our “national fabric”. Those who support the destruction of our national government now could be asked that very same question.
Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?
How would the current administration balance the hazards they see facing our country against the hazards of dismissing thousands of employees, scientists, researchers, accountants and lawyers from the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.
What if the “ills you fly from have no real existence?” What if the speed and magnitude of the dismantling of the federal government through these cuts are “certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from?
Defending Democracy Abroad
It’s easy to see the connections between us and the Americans who wrestled with the destiny of the United States on the cliff of the Civil War. It’s also easy to see the connections between us and those who feared the destiny of democracies globally in the Cold War.
President Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech of January 1941 is just as on point today.
I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world–assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.
His views on the defense of Ukraine would be just as unequivocal
We have learned that God-fearing democracies of the world which observe the sanctity of treaties and good faith in their dealings with other nations cannot safely be indifferent to international lawlessness anywhere. They cannot forever let pass, without effective protest, acts of aggression against sister nations-acts which automatically undermine all of us.
We are facing the same turning point that President Truman saw in the world’s history in 1947.
. . At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
Franklin D Roosevelt State of the Union Address “the Four Freedoms” (1941)
Likewise, Kennedy’s words for Berlin in 1961 could just as easily be directed at Ukraine in 2025.
We must meet our oft-stated pledge to the free peoples of West Berlin–and maintain our rights and their safety, even in the face of force–in order to maintain the confidence of other free peoples in our word and our resolve. The strength of the alliance on which our security depends is dependent in turn on our willingness to meet our commitments to them.
If we do not meet our commitments to Berlin, where will we later stand? If we are not true to our word there, all that we have achieved in collective security, which relies on these words, will mean nothing. And if there is one path above all others to war, it is the path of weakness and disunity.
John F Kennedy Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Berlin Crisis (1961)
Lincoln’s message to those advocating secession to leave the government of the United States can be directed to those supporting the dismantling of the United States government through the Executive branch’s mass firings of federal employees and shuttering of agencies created by Congress. Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy’s clarion call for the defense of democracies around the world can likewise be directed at those who are actively destroying our alliances with democracies while weakening democracy domestically.
As much as these words of the past can be directed to people today, historians and pop culture prophets of the past can help explain how we got here. The historian Richard Hofstadter’s description of the paranoid style of American politics in 1964 is hard to ignore.
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style of American Politics (1964)
Would he find “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” in the President’s assertion that “schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight”? How about his assertion that “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth?”
Calls to Action
These words of the past help us understand ourselves and the present, and we can draw from them inspiration for the future.
Rod Serling saw democracy’s need for opposition
We have a need for an enlightened, watchful articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions that must be held sacrosanct.
Martin Luther King’s first speech in Montgomery at the start of the bus boycott that would catapult him to national fame said that the glory of our democracy is “the right to protest for right”. He knew to tap into the Cold War also, observing that “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation we couldn’t do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime we couldn’t do this.” When college students are snatched off the streets for their opinions we’re quickly losing that right to protest.
John Brown’s complaint, quoted at a meeting of New England Anti-Slavery Society, could find home in dorm discussions about these campus kidnappings, “Talk! Talk! Talk! That will never free the slaves. What is needed is action – action”.
Mario Savio called college students to action, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”
These calls to action are framed in strong, poetic and lofty words, but how do they speak to overtasked and overburdened public-school history teachers, trundling their banned books into school every morning and trying to decide how to transform the quiet of their morning classroom into energetic and engaged learning spaces to listen to these voices that speak to their students’ future. James Baldwin knew that “living in dangerous times”, teachers “face the most brutal, and most determined resistance”. But there’s solace, fortitude, and inspiration in these echoes of the past, reminding us that democracy’s collapse isn’t inevitable. The choice, then and now, is ours.