Americans aren’t known for their sense of history, but Delegate Stacey Plaskett made the past present during the trial of Trump when she invoked UA Flight 93. Plaskett recalled how she’d been working as a staffer in the Capitol twenty years ago on 9/11 when passengers on UA 93 sacrificed themselves to stop a terrorist attack on the building. Her memory let her roll with those patriots’ “love of country, duty, honor, all the things that America means” as she linked Trump and MAGA mobsters at the Capitol with mass murderers who saw our country as the Great Satan. After Plaskett wrapped up, MSNBC’s Chuck Rosenberg pushed the feeling on, remembering an encounter with Heather Penny, the first female F-16 pilot in the U.S. Air Force, who took off on 9/11 prepared to commit suicide by ramming UA 93. At that time, no F-16s were armed to shoot down planes. Penny was willing to go through with her suicide mission though she was aware her father, who was a United Airlines pilot, might have been flying UA 93. Rosenberg was cut off before he could compare her example of fidelity to Trump’s derelictions or those of his bogus Oath Keepers.
Plaskett’s look back to 9/11 might’ve been in Jake Tapper’s mind when he noted on his Sunday Show that Plaskett was once a Republican—she switched parties in 2008—and asked if other Impeachment Managers had consulted her about how-to win over GOP jurors. Plaskett allowed she’d given advice to her colleagues (and taken pointers too), but she was careful not to make their approach seem merely tactical. Managers hadn’t been out to “talk Republican”; they meant to “speak to 100 hundred senators.”
I don’t know if Plaskett’s 9/11 back story to the storming of the Capitol came through to senators, but it gave me a new angle on Trump’s apologies for (and to) his supporters on February 6th: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” As I re-read that line (and took in Trump’s admonishment of the House Minority Leader: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”), I flashed on post-9/11 expounders who claimed America had it coming. Like Trump, they cosseted killer-nihilists. Back in that day, First’s Charles O’Brien dubbed them the Vichy Left.
Jamie Raskin, the House’s Lead Impeachment Manager, comes from a truer vine. His father Marcus Raskin—co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies—was a resource for the New Left who stayed engaged after the 60s faded out. His son’s brief against Trump was in the tradition of this country’s mindful left. It invoked heroes of the Civil Rights Movement and founders of American radicalism like Tom Paine (along with their books, from Paine’s Common Sense to Bob Moses’s Radical Equations). Raskin even nodded to Thomas Jefferson. (Though that Master of the Mountain’s “created equal” vision should never blind us to the sight lines at Monticello where his black slaves lived below grade.) Raskin’s choice to stick with Jefferson chimed with his refusal of Cancel Culture. He not only distanced Impeachment from censoriousness but also placed Republican House Members in Camp Cancel due to their vengeful campaign against Lynn Cheney after she took her stalwart stand against Trump.[1]
Raskin wasn’t beamish about this country’s founding, but he grasped what Gordon Wood once termed the “radicalism of the American revolution”—that common sense of common people who refused rule by gentleman. Raskin acknowledged we “started as a slave republic,” but, leaning on Lincoln who “knew that well,” he insisted…
However flawed the Founders were as men in their times, they inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution all the beautiful principles that we needed to open America up to successive waves of political struggle and constitutional change and transformation in the country so we really would become something much more like Lincoln’s beautiful vision of government of the people, by the people and for the people—the world’s greatest multiracial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic constitutional democracy, the envy of the world.
Raskin’s Yes! to the beauty of American exceptionalism risked a prideful note (“envy of the world”). But that was more than justified since he sang to shame America First egotists. His patriotism was self-transcending—perfect (of the people, by the people, for the people) talkback to the cult of “Only I Can Fix It.”
No doubt Raskin was aware the Framers might not have ID’ed entirely with “the People,” but he was sure they’d’ve been on his side when it came Trumpism:
Our Framers were so fearful of presidents becoming tyrants and wanting to become kings that they put the Oath of Office into The Constitution. They inscribed it into the Constitution to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States.
Raskin’s bows to “our precious beloved Constitution” came back to me when I found in my inbox on Presidents’ Day a link to a speech by Eugene Debs excoriating the Constitution. Not that the late great Debs was to blame! The transcript of his 1919 talk was posted by editors of Jacobin, America’s socialist magazine. (The odd title of their mag—it is an American enterprise, after all—bespeaks a persistent tendency among wannabe cosmopolitan leftists to treat the American Revolution as an “event of little more than local importance.”) [2] Debs’ dis of the Constitution as a testament to class rule didn’t make him an intellectual outlier in his own time. His was the correct line on the left for decades in the wake of Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), though Debs cited another historian in his speech—one J. Allan Smith.
Debs tilted his case against the “musty” class-bound Constitution by leaving out its most vital and popular add-on—the Bill of Rights. (Not that Debs deserves much blame here since he was jailed for trying to exercise his First Amendment rights after he protested against America’s entry into World War I.) The Framers’ checks and balances on power were lost on him too. He might have had more of a clue there if he’d lived long enough to see Communist Parties become totalitarian forces in the 20 C. (Not that Debs—a truly saintly sort—should have been forced to fathom Leninism, much less Stalinism.)
Jacobin’s 21 C. editors don’t have his excuses. Please don’t understand me too quickly. Histories of America’s founding shouldn’t come down to hagiography. There’s nothing unpatriotic about unillusioned analyses of how the Constitution was shaped by slavery and money. Historians on the left, by the way, aren’t the only ones pushing the program here. Just this week conservative commentator David Frum pointed out “The Founders Were Wrong About Democracy”: “The authors of the Constitution feared mass participation would unsettle government, but it’s the privileged minority that has proved destabilizing.” Frum took on G.O.P. apologists for minority rule (like Senator Mike Lee who has expressed disdain for “rank democracy”):
The system of government in the United States has evolved in many important ways since 1787. But the mistrust of unpropertied majorities—especially urban unpropertied majorities—persists. In no other comparably developed society is voting as difficult; in no peer society are votes weighted as unequally; in no peer society is there a legislative chamber where 41 percent of the lawmakers can routinely outvote 59 percent, as happens in the U.S. Senate.
Frum was arguing American democracy needs to get up to code. Jacobin’s editors would probably agree with him about the need to get rid of the filibuster, end gerrymandering, enhance access to the franchise etc., but their devolution to Debs wasn’t driven by a majoritarian policy agenda. In the aftermath of last week’s trial, it amounted to a gesture of contempt for the Impeachment Managers’ defense of the Constitution. After all (per Debs), Raskin et al. were talking up an “outdated, obsolete, dead” instrument of class power.
Jacobinites long to be in the vanguard of a countervailing power. They wish to choose the working class over “all the things that America means.” But that’s a false opposition. Consider what one union man did last year while Jacobin’s labor-lovers dreamed on. Facing the reality Trump would probably seek to delegitimize the coming election, a senior advisor to the president of the AFL-CIO, Mike Podhorzer, sparked a broad-scale campaign to defend democracy. Podhorzer oversaw “a loosely organized coalition of operatives that…
scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.[3]
That coalition pressed Social Media platforms to take more responsibility for content before and after the election, which led to more tagging of disinformation and more takedowns of false tweets/posts. Their shadow campaign raised serious money—they prompted Zuckerberg’s foundation to donate 300 million dollars—that went to state officials to cover costs of infrastructure required to administer free and fair elections during a pandemic. The private-public alliance, which Time Magazine reporter Molly Ball calls a “conspiracy,” was more of a top-down deal than a grassroots operation. And Ball may have overstated its effects on the ground. Still, the range of players who got involved in efforts to protect the vote seems remarkable. Take the National Council on Election Integrity where 22 Democrats and 22 Republicans (“including rabid Trump supporters”) “met on Zoom at least once a week”: “They ran ads in six states, made statements, wrote articles and alerted local officials to potential problems.”
Podhorzer himself became a vector for what might have been the most telling statement. About a week before the election, someone from the Chamber of Commerce reached out to him, proposing the Chamber and the AFL-CIO—institutions that represent the opposing class interests of business and labor—issue a joint declaration in defense of the franchise. It was released on Election Day, under the names of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, along with the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network.
“It is imperative that election officials be given the space and time to count every vote in accordance with applicable laws,” it stated. “We call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise patience with the process and trust in our system, even if it requires more time than usual.” The groups added, “Although we may not always agree on desired outcomes up and down the ballot, we are united in our call for the American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any other tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.”
Did this statement matter? Maybe it was just sentimental hygiene, but on Election Day, according to polls, close to seventy percent of American voters understood the winner was not likely to be determined before they went to bed that night. Notwithstanding Trump’s many attempts to sponsor paranoia about voter fraud, the people seemed to have been prepped to trust the country’s democratic process.
Podhorzer’s campaign to defend that process didn’t end on the week of Nov. 3rd. Time probably gives the man its reporter dubs “the architect” too much credit for his post-election interventions. (Biden’s lawyers were definitely on the case during that stretch.) But you don’t have to believe the hype to appreciate how Podhorzer’s instincts have been spot on throughout the saga. He fostered vigilance without amping up fears about Trump’s capacity to trash the system. He tried to steer his side away from clashes with Trump’s bullies that might’ve given the inciter-in-chief further excuses to resist the peaceful transfer of power. Podhorzer’s clarity about the need to avoid disfigurements of rage is a reminder democracy rests on canons of cool as well as the foundational virtue of courage. No-one should conflate Zoom calls with do-or-die behavior. Podhorzer’s patient organizing wasn’t the moral equivalent of Heather Penny’s take-off on 9/11 or actions taken by passengers on UA 93, but he kept faith too. Americans of all kinds and conditions (and both parties) owe him for helping us hang on to our republic.
Notes
1 Raskin’s refusal of cancel culture didn’t make the cut in Bill McKibben’s New Yorker tribute to The Beauty of Jamie Raskin’s America. Perhaps that’s a sign of McKibben’s own ambivalence about all that. He teaches at Middlebury College which seems to grow cancel people. I googled to see if he had taken any positions on this score. Came up empty. Of course McKibben is a busy guy and he may have good reasons to avoid academic dustups.
2 Per Hannah Arendt in On Revolution.
3 The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election | Time