When I want to believe that America is a democracy -- indeed, to feel so deeply this is so that my soul trembles -- I turn to Martin Luther King, who gave his life for it.
He cried out for something so much more than a process: a game of winners and losers. He reached for humanity's deepest yearning, for the connectedness of all people, for the transcendence of hatred and the demonization of "the other." He spoke -- half a century ago -- the words that those in power couldn't bear to hear, because his truths cut too deep and disrupted too much business as usual.
But what else is a democracy than that?
"Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. . . ."
Uh oh. This ain't politics as usual. This is King standing in the oval office, staring directly into the eyes of LBJ, declaring that civil rights legislation isn't a political favor but merely the beginning of a nation's moral atonement.
"If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam."
These words were part of the stunning address King delivered -- on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination -- at Riverside Church in New York City. To read these words today, in the context of the 2016 presidential race and the mainstream media's inevitable focus on stats and trivia rather than big issues, is to realize how utterly relevant this man and the movement he helped awaken remain today. To read King's words in 2016 is to rip this man out of a sentimentalized sainthood and to bring him back to living relevance.
What he had to say to the political leaders of the time must not be reduced to a few phrases carved in granite; they must be heard anew, in all their disturbing fullness. I say this not because his "day" recently passed and I'm somewhat tardily "remembering" him, but because the 2016 presidential race needs King's presence -- his uncompromised wisdom -- standing tough against the media and political status quo that is now trying desperately to mute the unapproved voices spurting forth in this campaign and pulling the electorate's attention away from the approved, mainstream candidates they're supposed to choose between.
Paul Krugman, for instance, representing the liberal wing of the status quo, came out for compromise and Hillary the other day, dismissing Bernie Sanders not out of a specific disagreement with any of his positions but because of a contempt for the "contingent of idealistic voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up the better angels of America's nature and persuade the broad public to support a radical overhaul of our institutions."
This is how to make sure that a self-proclaimed democracy is really a faux-democracy, flawed, perhaps, but plugging along in the right direction and basically healthy, with its biggest threat not unrestrained militarism or unregulated corporate capitalism but . . . oh, universal health care. See, that's radical.
I have yet to hear the status-quo media call the poisoning of the Flint, Mich., water supply, or the daily police shootings of young men or women of color -- or the multi-trillion-dollar failure known as the war on terror -- "radical," but a candidate who wants to give a serious push for policies of social betterment (and calls himself a socialist) is radical. He's purveying false hope, disrespecting the sacred act of political compromise and dangerously trying to establish, or re-establish, the precedent that the public should get what it needs, even if those needs override the quietly laid plans of the nation's military-industrial consensus.
Indeed, that consensus is never asked to compromise or, good God, subjected to public scrutiny -- except, of course, by radicals.
This brings me back to King's Riverside Church speech, which had the audacity to be visionary, to challenge the United States at its deepest levels of being -- which is something that ought to happen during a presidential race. King looked directly at the hell we were inflicting on Vietnam and called not simply for an end to that war but an examination of the national soul.
"This," he said, "I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers."
The war King was crying out against ended eight years after that 1967 speech, but the poison did not disappear from the country's soul. There was no atonement, no real change, only, ultimately, a retrenching and regrouping of the military-industrial consensus. Thus, King's words remain as urgent and prescient today as when he first uttered them.
"The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. . . .
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."
Would that Bernie Sanders spoke with such radicalism -- or drew such a clear connection between social deprivation and militarism.
Beyond that, however, I must ask, in light of the words of Martin Luther King, what kind of democracy is too terrified, and too cowardly, to examine its own soul and reach toward values that are bigger than its short-term interests? And why do we not have a media rooted in these values and committed to holding politicians accountable to them?
