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The Field of Blood

Field of Blood

Field of Blood

A Democracy Reader: Part 1: Polarization and Violence


Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

Excerpted from: The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, by Joanne Freeman ’84 – Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, 480 pages, $28.


Part 2: The Authoritarian Pandemic

Part 3: The Oath and the Office (Excerpt)

Part 4: The First Amendment in Action

Part 5: How Democracies Die (Excerpt)

Part 6: Policing the Police

Part 7: Teaching Politics in the Age of COVID-19

Writing this book was an emotional process. Immersing myself in extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness at a time of extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness was no easy thing. At various points, I had to walk away and get some distance. At other points, unfolding events sent me scurrying to my keyboard to hash things out. Of course, there are worlds of difference between the pre–Civil War Congress and the Congress of today. But the similarities have much to tell us about the many ways in which the People’s Branch can help or hurt the nation.

Many years ago, when I began researching this book, it was far less timely and far more puzzling. There seemed to be so much violence in the House and Senate chambers in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Shoving. Punching. Pistols. Bowie knives. Congressmen brawling in bunches while colleagues stood on chairs to get a good look. At least once, a gun was fired on the House floor. Why hadn’t this story been told?

That question is answered in the pages that follow, which reveal for the first time the full scope and scale of physical violence in Congress between 1830 and the Civil War. Yet even knowing that answer, I didn’t fully grasp how such congressional fireworks could remain undercover until last year. In a long and intimate Politico interview, former House Speaker John Boehner revealed that some time ago, during a contentious debate over earmarks (items tacked onto bills to benefit a member of Congress’s home state), Alaska Republican Don Young pushed him up against a wall in the House chamber and threatened him with a knife. According to Boehner, he stared Young down, tossed off a few cusswords, and the matter ended. According to Young, they later became friends; Boehner was best man at Young’s wedding. And according to the press reports that addressed the incident, it wasn’t the first time that Young pulled a knife in the halls of Congress. In 1988, he reportedly waved one at a supporter of a bill that would have restricted logging in Alaska. (He also angrily shook an oosik—the penis bone of a walrus—at an Interior Department official who wanted to restrict walrus hunting in 1994, but that’s an entirely different matter.) Two of these confrontations made the papers when they happened, but only recently has the Boehner showdown come to light. Remarkably, even in an age of round-the-clock multimedia press coverage, what happens in Congress sometimes stays in Congress.

From a modern vantage point, it’s tempting to laugh—or gasp—at such outbursts and move on, and sometimes that’s merited. (The oosik incident is definitely worth a chuckle.) As alarming as Young’s knifeplay seems, it says less about a dangerous trend than it does about a somewhat flamboyant congressman.

And yet congressional combat has meant much more than that— especially in the fraught final years before the Civil War. In those times, as this book will show, armed groups of Northern and Southern congressmen engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the House w ­ floor. Angry about rights violated and needs denied, and worried about the degradation of their section of the Union, they defended their interests with threats, fists, and weapons.

When that fighting became endemic and congressmen strapped on knives and guns before heading to the Capitol every morning—when they didn’t trust the institution of Congress or even their colleagues to protect their persons—it meant something. It meant extreme polarization and the breakdown of debate. It meant the scorning of parliamentary rules and political norms to the point of abandonment. It meant that structures of government and the bonds of Union were eroding in real time. In short, it meant the collapse of our national civic structure to the point of crisis. The nation didn’t slip into disunion; it fought its way into it, even in Congress.

The fighting wasn’t new in the late 1850s; it had been happening for decades. Like the Civil War, the roots of congressional combat ran deep. So did its sectional tone and tempo; Southern congressmen had long been bullying their way to power with threats, insults, and violence in the House and Senate chambers, deploying the power of public humiliation to get their way, antislavery advocates suffering worst of all. This isn’t to say that Congress was in a constant state of chaos; it was a working institution that got things done. But the fighting was common enough to seem routine, and it mattered. By affecting what Congress did, it shaped the nation.

It also shaped public opinion of Congress. Americans generally like their representatives far more than they like the institution of Congress. They like them all the more if they are aggressive, defending the rights and interests of the folks back home with gusto; there’s a reason why Don Young’s constituents have reelected him twenty-three times. The same held true in antebellum America; Americans wanted their congressmen to fight for their rights, sometimes with more than words.

This was direct representation of a powerful kind, however damaging it proved to be. The escalation of such fighting in the late 1850s was a clear indication that the American people no longer trusted the institution of Congress to address their rights and needs. The impact of this growing distrust was severe. Unable to turn to the government for resolution, Americans North and South turned on one another. The same held true for congressmen; despite the tempering influence of cross-sectional friendships, they, too, lost faith in their sectional other. In time, the growing fear and distrust tore the nation apart.

Toward the start of my research, I discovered poignant testimony to the power of congressional threats and violence. It took the form of a confidential memorandum with three signatures on the bottom: Benjamin Franklin Wade (R-OH), Zachariah Chandler (R-MI), and Simon Cameron (R-PA). And it told a striking story.

One night in 1858, Wade, Chandler, and Cameron—all antislavery—decided that they’d had enough of Southern insults and bullying. Outraged by the onslaught of abuse, they made a difficult decision. Swearing loyalty to one another, they vowed to challenge future offenders to duels and fight “to the coffin.” There seemed to be no other way to stem the flow of Southern insults than to fight back, Southern-style. This was no easy choice. They fully expected to be ostracized back home; in the North, dueling was condemned as a barbaric Southern custom. But that punishment seemed no worse than the humiliation they faced every day in Congress. So they made their plans known, and— according to their statement—they had an impact. “[W]hen it became known that some northern senators were ready to fight, for sufficient cause,” the tone of Southern insults softened, though the abuse went on. The story is dramatic, but what affected me most when I first read it was the way the three men told it; even years later, they could barely contain themselves. “Gross personal abuse” had an impact on these men, and it was mighty. Not only did it threaten “their very manhood” on a daily basis, but by silencing Northern congressmen, it deprived their constituents of their representative rights, an “unendurable outrage” that made them “frantic with rage and shame.” To Wade, Chandler, and Cameron, sustained Southern bullying wasn’t a mere matter of egos and parliamentary power plays. It struck at the heart of who they were as men and threatened the very essence of representative government.

They had to do something. And they did.

These men were doing their best to champion their cause and their constituents in trying times, and they said so in their statement. They had written it “for those who come after us to study, as an example of what it once cost to be in favor of liberty, and to express such sentiments in the highest places of official life in the United States.” They were pleading with posterity—with us—to understand how threatened they had felt, how frightened they had been, how much it had taken for them to fight back, and thus how valuable was their cause. In a handful of paragraphs, they bore witness to the presence and power of congressional violence.

When I first read their plea, it brought tears to my eyes. It was so immediate and yet so far away. It was also stunningly human, expressing anger and outrage and shame and fear and pride all in one. Not only did it bring the subject of this book to living, breathing life, but it showed how it felt to be part of it. By offering a glimpse of the emotional reality of their struggle, Wade, Chandler, and Cameron opened a window onto the lost world of congressional violence.

The lessons of their time ring true today: when trust in the People’s Branch shatters, part of the national “we” falls away. Nothing better testifies to the importance of Congress in preserving and defining the American nation than witnessing the impact of its systemic breakdown.­­

Joanne Freeman ’84 is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and of American Studies at Yale University.

“Author’s Note” from THE FIELD OF BLOOD: VIOLENCE IN CONGRESS AND THE ROAD TO CIVIL WAR by Joanne B. Freeman. Copyright © 2018 by Joanne B. Freeman.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

The Authoritarian Pandemic

The Authoritarian Pandemic

A Democracy Reader: Part 2: Emergencies and Power

Part 1: The Field of Blood (Excerpt)

Part 3: The Oath and the Office (Excerpt)

Part 4: The First Amendment in Action

Part 5: How Democracies Die (Excerpt)

Part 6: Policing the Police

Part 7: Teaching Politics in the Age of COVID-19

The world was already in an authoritarian moment even before COVID-19 overwhelmed our lives in the spring of 2020. After a surge of democratization following the end of the Cold War, in the late 2000s democratic gains began to reverse. Since 2006, more countries have declined in freedom than gained it. At the same time, democratic openings in diverse parts of the world have failed to produce democracy. Neither the Arab Spring of 2011 (with the notable exception of Tunisia) nor electoral challenges to autocracy in countries such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe succeeded in reversing the slide toward authoritarianism. Only six of the world’s 15 most populous countries (India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan and Mexico) can now be classified as democracies. And yet even in these countries, the trend has been toward growing executive power and illiberal populism.

The novel coronavirus has already exacerbated these trends, for reasons both internal and external to the countries experiencing democratic decline.

I begin with the internal. Coronavirus has led people to fear for their lives. History teaches us that when people fear for their lives, they tend to be willing to trade freedom for security. Measures like border closures are immensely popular because it shows people that the state is doing something. In this w sense, a pandemic resembles war, which also tends to produce a “rally-around-the-flag” effect in which people are willing to stand behind their leaders, often in an uncritical way. We saw this with the Patriot Act after 9/11 in the United States, but even way back in the Middle Ages, European monarchs increased their power as a result of the plague that devastated the continent at the time.

Democracy may be sufficiently robust to withstand a temporary strengthening of executive power and a weakening of independent institutions to respond to a crisis in well-developed democracies. However, in new or fragile democracies, autocrats looking to maintain their power and patronage under the cover of coronavirus can deal a fatal blow to democratic institutions. They can harness a sense of fear or disruption to solidify their own power or that of their ruling clique or to expand it further. They can also use disinformation as a tactic—as a way of distracting, dividing and discrediting legitimate, factual sources of information while disparaging experts. In the end, disinformation, too, undermines democracy. This tactic, sadly, has also been deployed here in the United States more recently, but it has a long history in the autocratic toolbox.

The legitimacy of elections—the most basic ingredient of democracy—can also be undermined by leaders under the cover of the coronavirus threat. This can entail suggesting that alternate voting methods are inherently corrupted or delaying elections in the name of the pandemic.

Consider the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region I teach and write about at Pomona. MENA leaders are using COVID-19 as an opportunity to expand their political and security authorities. These changes are likely to be permanent and will lay the groundwork for stronger authoritarianism across the region. Egypt has cracked down on journalists, including detaining prominent Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah and summoning foreign correspondents to complain about their critical coverage of the country’s coronavirus response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a deal to form an “emergency government” that would allow him to remain in office after three failed attempts to form a ruling coalition. Jordan and Morocco have similarly used emergency powers to arrest journalists and citizens for “spreading rumors” about the virus.

But there is an external autocracy-strengthening dimension to the pandemic as well, and also one that bolsters trends that had emerged before COVID-19. In recent years, the democracy and human rights promoting role of the United States has diminished greatly. Part of this is a function of declining U.S. power, but it is also about the Trump administration’s relinquishing of America’s traditional democracy-promoting role. The administration has not only turned a blind eye to repression around the world, but in some cases the president himself has openly praised autocrats like Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi while disparaging allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This has created a permissive international environment for the spread of autocracy around the world. While in the past the threat of U.S. censure (though that was hardly consistent even before Trump) moderated the authoritarian excesses of regimes from Eastern Europe to Latin America. Now they feel they have the acquiescence of a White House only interested in a transactional foreign policy.

The coronavirus has distracted Washington, giving autocrats even more room to ramp up repression. On top of that, the Trump administration’s “America First” approach means that it has yielded the diplomatic prerogative to competitors such as China, Russia and Iran, who have cleverly exploited the void by offering assistance and spreading disinformation. China’s influence was growing even before COVID-19, but with growing economic hardship, countries are pursuing new forms of economic cooperation with Beijing. Ironically, despite its own coronavirus failures and despite being the source of the pandemic, China’s reputation is improving. China, of course, is not interested in democracy and human rights and, if anything, prefers to deal with other autocratic states. Meanwhile, the perceived shortcomings of the U.S. response to the pandemic coupled with domestic failures—think the brutal killing of George Floyd and the resulting protests—have lowered American credibility as a promoter of democracy and human rights. “I can’t breathe,” the Chinese foreign ministry recently tweeted in response to U.S. criticism of its policies in Hong Kong.

Thus, the pandemic has strengthened the fortunes of the world’s “autocracy promoters”—countries such as China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and others. In part this is because the Trump administration (with the possible exception of the Chinese power grab in Hong Kong), which has already proven that democracy promotion plays a minor role in its foreign policy, is even less willing to stand up to them.

In sum, both internal and external counter-democratic trends—many of which were already evident before coronavirus spread across the globe—have only been strengthened by the pandemic. In the short and medium term, the effect on democracy around the world is thus grim.

What about the longer term? The answer will depend in part on how ordinary citizens react to the expansion of state power in both democracies and dictatorships. After all, when a vaccine is made available and the threat of the virus dissipates, governments will have less room for maneuver. Corruption and overreach will be exposed. Will people rebel, or will they be complacent?

We might see evidence of both, depending on the country. In Hong Kong, we have seen protests against Beijing already. In Iraq, Algeria, Iran and Lebanon—all places in which there were ongoing mass protests before COVID-19 and where services are poor and corruption is rampant—protests could quickly re-emerge. On the other hand, major protests could also contribute to a second wave of infections, providing a pretext for further government crackdowns.

Yet, in another scenario, protests might not erupt at all, given the fear of past violent government repression and the fact that anti-protest measures are likely to be more brutal than ever. And also because the measures deployed in response to the pandemic could give civil society, opposition groups and other vestiges of democracy a decisive death blow in countries where democratic institutions were already weak.

The Oath and the Office

The Oath and the Office

The Oath and the Office

A Democracy Reader: Part 3: Responsibilities of Office


The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents

Excerpted from: The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents, by Corey Brettschneider ’95 – W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, 224 pages, $22.95.


Part 1: The Field of Blood (Excerpt)

Part 2: The Authoritarian Pandemic

Part 4: The First Amendment in Action

Part 5: How Democracies Die (Excerpt)

Part 6: Policing the Police

Part 7: Teaching Politics in the Age of COVID-19

You want to serve your country. You aspire to run for office—and not just any office. You want to be president of the United States. If you succeed, you will control the most advanced technology ever conceived, much of it secret. You will be able to authorize missile strikes, negotiate treaties, and spy on people around the world. And with a vast payroll, you will now run the largest employer in the country—the federal government.

For a moment, say that you win. You might hope to use this power to achieve great things such as ending poverty, providing affordable health care, or eliminating violent crime. You will have the ability to influence legislation and shape decisions about how to use the enormous federal budget. Lives, jobs, and trillions of dollars hang in the balance—and you have the ability to tip it. As you wave to your inauguration crowd through a blizzard of confetti, nothing seems out of reach.

Be careful: History might judge your presidency harshly. You don’t want to be lumped in with Andrew Johnson, a president who opposed and undermined the core values of the country. Surveys of historians from 2002 and 2010 each ranked Johnson as one of the worst presidents in American history. He was impeached by the House of Representatives (but not removed from office by the Senate) for firing his secretary of war Edwin Stanton, an ally of many in Congress at the time. Far worse, he fiercely opposed the Fourteenth Amendment—the monumental civil rights achievement of Congress after the Civil War. The amendment guaranteed equal protection of the law and extended citizenship to African Americans and all people born or naturalized in the United States. That amendment was necessary in part because Johnson essentially refused to execute the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery—a violation of his sworn duty to carry out the law of the land.

On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln, who directly preceded Johnson, is seen as one of our greatest presidents. Among his many achievements, he kept the country together by winning the Civil War and shepherded the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Why was Lincoln able to be so great? He had a diligent fascination with the Constitution, the core principles that upheld the nation and the presidency, and the history of the Framers (the collective term we use for the storied people who crafted the Constitution, such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). As the political theorist George Kateb writes, “Lincoln revered the principle of human equality and believed that he therefore should revere the US Constitution, the system of government created under it … making real the abstract principle of human equality.” For Lincoln, that meant standing up for the fundamental values of the oath and the Constitution while working within the constraints that limited his office. To end the evil of slavery nationwide, he didn’t rule by dictate; instead, he used the Constitution’s legal procedure to pass an amendment accomplishing his goal. Lincoln was a great president because he understood how the office of the presidency—used as the Framers had created it—could preserve, protect, and defend constitutional values.

As we shall see, the oath requires that the president uphold the Constitution—even parts with which he or she disagrees. If you fail to do so, you’ll end up with Johnson on the list of worst presidents. If you succeed, you can be remembered with Lincoln among the greats.

All presidents, from George Washington to Donald Trump, began their terms with dreams of accomplishing great things. But whether your presidency is monumental or disastrous will hinge largely on a simple thing: that you, a future president, understand how the responsibilities of the Constitution apply to your job.

***

What do you need to know to be president? Most of all, you need to know the U.S. Constitution. As president, your first task is to recite the oath of office. You’ll stand in front of your inauguration crowd, guided by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and recite the following words: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

This oath is your public contract with the American people, and reciting it is your first constitutional responsibility. Before you recite it, you must know what it means and where it comes from. The oath is found in Article II of the Constitution, which established the presidency and defined its powers and limits. Ratified in 1788 and amended three years later in 1791 with a Bill of Rights, the Constitution contains a series of principles that limit the power of all federal officials, including the president, and defines the powers that those officials do have. The Constitution will serve as your blueprint for how to do the president’s job, helping you to anticipate the pitfalls that all presidents should avoid.

The oath itself is a reminder that your powers are conditionally granted and come with limits. The Constitution, in literally dictating your first instant in office, signals clearly that you are not free to act however you wish. Article II goes on to provide directions for what you must do and avoid. The oath is thus not merely a ritual—it is a recognition that you temporarily occupy an immensely powerful office, and that you must internalize the demands and responsibilities that come with it. Notice that you are promising to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution—not just to avoid violating it. In pledging to “faithfully execute” the office of the president, you promise to put aside your private interests to occupy a public and limited role on behalf of the American people. If you are not willing to work within these limits and take initiative to promote the document, the Oval Office isn’t for you.

It was George Washington’s second inaugural address—which at 135 words remains the shortest in history—that gave voice to the ideas underlying the oath and the office. Today, we tend to think of inaugurations as grand affairs, with modern presidents using them to draw widespread attention to their agendas. But Washington’s 1793 inauguration was much more subdued—fitting, since his address emphasized the limits of the presidential office. He held the inaugural ceremony in the relatively modest Senate Chamber of Congress Hall, located just steps from Independence Hall, where he had presided over the Constitutional Convention six years earlier. This choice of venue signified his respect for the legislative branch as a coequal to his own executive branch. In his speech, Washington challenged Americans to stop him should he fail to live up to his duties:

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President, the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.

In emphasizing the solemnity of the oath, Washington here was speaking to future presidents and the future Americans charged with holding them accountable. Washington is asking you, a future president, to respect the obligations and the limits of your new office. And to those of us who won’t be president, Washington is reminding us that we, too, must ensure that a president carries out the duties of the office.

Washington’s words here provide the impetus for our focus on what the Constitution demands of a president. This guide will detail what you need to know—how to take the oath seriously, and how to understand both the obligations and the limits that it places on you. It is not enough merely to avoid constitutional punishment, although that punishment—in the form of impeachment, censure, or losing an election—is still something you should worry about. You should go beyond this bare minimum requirement of the office, and defend the values that the Constitution enshrines. Unlike President Johnson, and like President Lincoln, you must recognize what the Constitution requires: read it, study it, and through your speech and actions, promote it.

It’s crucial that you see the Constitution’s rules as legitimate constraints, not obstacles to get around. But the Constitution is more than just these rules: it stands for a wider morality of limited government and respect for people’s rights. You must find a way for your actions and words to honor and expound those values, while abiding by the limits that your office places upon you. You might be tempted to see the Supreme Court as the sole authority to tell you when you’ve strayed from constitutional values. Sometimes, it does play this role: courts have often limited the president by declaring his actions unconstitutional. But as you will see, the court’s role in American history has often been limited. The Supreme Court has sometimes protected civil liberties that presidents have put under threat, but at other times it has failed to do so. As president, you have an obligation to go beyond what courts require of you, taking it upon yourself to defend the principles and rules of the Constitution. In order to do that, you must first understand what those principles and rules are.

***

As a professor of constitutional law, my job is to introduce students to the core tenets of the Constitution. My students are often amazed by the scope and foresight of this document. It does more than create our entire system of government. It also provides tools that can limit those who try to abuse that system to violate the rights of the people.

The Constitution creates and defines the duties of the three branches of government: legislative, judicial, and executive—the last of which contains the office of the presidency. The Constitution strictly limits the president’s powers in Article II, but it also limits the president in other creative ways: by granting certain powers to the other two branches, letting states retain certain privileges, and enshrining the rights of the people. Each of the three branches interprets the Constitution and encourages the others to act in ways that are consistent with its requirements.

This includes you, no matter where you live or what you do. The Constitution is not magically self-enforcing, and there is no “Constitution police.” Not even the Supreme Court will always succeed in defending the Constitution’s values and enforcing the proper limits it places on you. Fortunately, you will not be alone in defending the Constitution. In the end, it is essential for all citizens to recognize that there is no guarantee that presidents or courts respect the Constitution. By demanding that elected representatives—whether senators or town council members—read, understand, and comply with the Constitution, the people can make sure that the requirements of the Constitution do not become, as Madison worried, mere “parchment barriers.” Ultimately, the president is checked not by the Constitution itself, but by the American people demanding that it be respected.

To uphold this duty, though, you need to understand the principles of the Constitution for yourself. Together, we’ll be taking a deep dive into our country’s founding document.

***

The Constitution isn’t the first thing most people think about when they vote for a presidential candidate. My own interest in politics certainly didn’t start with the Constitution.

When I was growing up in Queens, my father worked for a local politician. I sometimes tagged along for political events. And in Queens, the political event of the year was the Queens Day Celebration—a parade that transformed Flushing Meadows Park, a faded gem that had twice held the World’s Fair, into the center of the world—in my young eyes, at least. It was the sort of grand event that all the major figures from Queens would attend—and perhaps among them, a certain future president. It was there, at age nine, that I first saw my boyhood hero at the front of the parade: Edward Koch, the mayor of New York City.

At the time, Koch was larger than life. Some even mused that he might become the first Jewish president. Now I was walking directly behind him, right under Koch’s enormous arms, which he threw open every few seconds as he bellowed to the crowd, “How am I doin’?” The crowd of onlookers screamed their approval.

Just then, Koch whispered to a local politician next to him, “I’d love some ice cream. Vanilla.” The politician turned behind, pointed to a man next to me, and snapped, “Get the mayor some ice cream. Vanilla!” The aide turned and sprinted across the field next to the parade route, and returned about ten minutes later with a vanilla ice cream cone.

That was the day I decided I wanted to be mayor. To the mind of a nine-year-old boy, being mayor meant having the power to seemingly get anything—even ice cream—and get it on demand. w

What can a nine-year-old boy intuit about politics? A lot, actually. For many adults, it’s moments just like these that draw them to politics in the first place. For them, the presidency is shorthand for fame and power. They want to live in the White House. They want access to the staff. The helicopters. Air Force One.

When they wrote the Constitution, the Framers were well aware of the trappings of power. That is why the Constitution’s oath is meant to take a private citizen, whose focus lies with his or her own beliefs and desires—whether ice cream or the nuclear football—and transform that person into a public “officeholder,” whose job is to safeguard the Constitution and the country it governs. Presidents, of course, are required to recite the oath. But reciting it is not enough; they should read the oath carefully, internalizing its fundamental principles and the constraints it creates on the office. When you’ve just been elected by millions of people, you might feel as if you’re authorized to do as you wish—or whatever your supporters want you to do. But the constraints on your office are critically important. In fact, they are a defining feature of our system of government.

***

In this guide, we will examine the difficult balance between respecting the wishes of the people who elected you and respecting the limits the Constitution places on your power. These limits constrain presidents who cater to the worst prejudices of the people who elected them. But such safeguards, which operate by slowing down the pace of government, can also contribute to government gridlock.

President Harry Truman observed this conundrum firsthand. In 1952, as he was preparing to leave office, Truman turned to an aide and predicted what would happen to his successor, former general Dwight Eisenhower, who was accustomed to the military’s famous efficiency. “He’ll sit here and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen,” Truman mused. “Poor Ike.”

Truman’s words indicate a central irony of the American presidency: yes, the office is immensely powerful. Yet it is so often constrained and thwarted—by Congress, the courts, the press, the states, ordinary citizens, and even by its own executive bureaucracy. This limited role in the constitutional system is no doubt frustrating for presidents, but it serves the wider goal of the Framers: respecting individual rights and the rule of law—the notion that we are not governed by individuals’ whims but by standards common to all. The constraints are a feature, not a bug. They ensure that the oath is not a set of mere words, but that there are mechanisms for constraining a president.

The “Poor Ike” story is often told by scholars of the presidency. It was reported in Richard Neustadt’s influential book Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents. Neustadt’s book taught future presidents and their aides how to use the power of persuasion to lead the country. With its focus on power, the book was so popular in the 1960s that President Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, made it required reading for all staffers in the White House. Later, as we’ll see, after Nixon was impeached for his role in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel and the subsequent cover-up of the event, one Nixon staffer told Neustadt that “you have to share the responsibility” for the illegal actions because of the ideas in his book.

Neustadt took this accusation seriously. He had learned to understand the Constitution when he was a student in civics class and assumed that his readers had done the same. But during Watergate, he realized that the decline of civics education meant that Nixon’s staffers had not developed an appreciation for the limits of the Constitution, instead focusing more on presidential power. Our guide makes clear what Neustadt’s book did not: that the Constitution is not a mere obstacle to get around, and trying to do so would be a disservice to the Framers’ ideas. To understand the Constitution, you need to see that the powers it grants are of a particular kind—loaded with tripwires, trapdoors, and springboards that protect the rights of the people and the rule of law. Presidents should celebrate, not bemoan, this complex design.

The best guide we have to the Constitution is the Federalist Papers. Written anonymously during the course of a single year between 1787 and 1788, the Federalist Papers were the project of three Framers—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—and were an effort to persuade New York and other states to ratify the Constitution. Like many of their fellow Framers, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were concerned about the tyranny of Great Britain, against which they had just revolted. As a result, the Federalist Papers focused a great deal on how the governmental structure outlined in the Constitution would protect citizens from a flawed government—including a despotic president. They emphasized what it meant to be a legitimate leader.

James Madison, an author of the Federalist Papers and a primary writer of the Constitution, will serve as our guide throughout this book. Madison is a good guide in large part because he was the Framer who most consistently stressed the limits on the president, writing, “the ultimate authority … resides in the people alone.” He was also the most influential proponent of a Bill of Rights. And as president, Madison went beyond what he believed he was required to do by the courts, using his own veto power to strike down laws he viewed as violations against the Constitution. This guide may not always agree with Madison: for instance, in matters concerning hiring and firing, where he wrongly ascribed too much power to a president. But overall, it is Madison’s vision of a limited presidency that inspires the ideas of this book.

Madison’s vision of the presidency was just one of many debated at the time. Another Framer, Alexander Hamilton, stood for a markedly different vision. These days, Hamilton, a famous delegate to the Constitutional Convention from New York who later became secretary of the treasury, receives a good deal more popular attention than his fellow Framers. (Let’s just say there is no Madison: The Musical.) At times, Hamilton was Madison’s ally—recall that they wrote the Federalist Papers together. But they often clashed, especially on where presidential limits ought to lie.

Hamilton referred to the need for “energy in the executive,” by which he meant the president’s ability to make great things happen quickly. In a Hamiltonian view, the president is not a king—but does retain some kinglike powers. He argued that the president should have broad powers in war and foreign policy, even though the Constitution didn’t say so explicitly. Madison disagreed. These debates still resonate long after the Founding. For example, some legal precedent has suggested that the president is not required to uphold the equal protection of the laws in certain areas, such as immigration. Other thinkers have suggested the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” may not prevent the president from using or sanctioning torture. President Nixon even famously claimed the president couldn’t be indicted while in office. However, with Madison as our guide, we will push back against this strain of Hamiltonian constitutional thinking that emphasizes the powers of the president over the constraints on the office.

A president who takes the oath seriously needs to consider these Framers’ competing visions. But the Framers aren’t the only thing that needs to be considered: the president also needs to consider the text of the document, case law, and the meaning of later amendments such as the Fourteenth Amendment and its Equal Protection Clause. The Framers’ ideas should be honored—particularly Madison’s vision of a limited presidency—but only as a guide, not as the final word on what the Constitution means.

Madison designed the Constitution to ensure that those of us who will not be president—“the people”—could protect the office from a president who failed to carry out the oath. He and the Framers gave us a Bill of Rights and institutions such as the judiciary, the Congress, and state governments to protect those rights if a president failed to do so.

In modern-day politics, we often try to understand what “We the People” want through polls and policy preferences. But the Constitution means something different by “We the People.” These words don’t just refer to voters and their preferences of the moment. And they don’t mean that a populist president who claims that his personality reflects the desires of the people has a mandate to ignore the requirements of the law. Rather, “We the People” is an ideal of a “constitutional” people—citizens not only versed in the Constitution, but who demand that public officials, especially the president, comply with it.

Lincoln explained this constitutional ideal when he distinguished between people’s base instincts and their “better angels.” Later, eulogizing the war dead at Gettysburg, Lincoln explained that ours was a government “of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” That phrase best explains the Constitution’s meaning and how it treats the ideal of a constitutional people. We are a government “of” the people, because ultimately all government officials work for and are accountable to “We the People”—an idea expressed in the Constitution’s first three words. We are a government “by” the people, in that we participate in elections and in lawmaking. Finally, we are a government “for” the people, because we recognize in our founding document that each of our fellow citizens is a rights holder. Without the right to free speech, we could not conceive of the ideas necessary to make democratic decisions. If we were denied religious freedom, we could not truly develop our own beliefs.

The Constitution protects this higher ideal of “the people” most obviously through the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution. But the structure of the original Constitution itself also protects the rights of the people. Madison gave the best early explanation of the Constitution’s ideal of “the people.” To him, the Constitution protected not just against kingly domination, but also against the “tyranny of the majority.” A president might become a tyrant by catering to the worst prejudices of the populace, but Madison argued that the people could never be stripped of their rights—even if a large majority of people favored such a move. Those rights allow the people to be the Constitution’s best protector. Sometimes, the people can exact punishment on an errant president indirectly, by working through the other branches: for example, by demanding vigilance from Congress. But the people can also take action directly, using rights like the First Amendment’s free speech protection to criticize a president.

As president, you will be constrained by these legal dynamics of the Constitution. But far more integral to your presidency is something else: the Constitution’s political morality. By this, I mean the values of freedom and equality that inform the document beyond its judicially enforceable requirements. We can tell whether presidents embrace the Constitution’s values not just by their executive orders or official appointments, but by how they speak to the American people. No court can tell you what to say. But you still must be guided by the Constitution in this crucial endeavor. As president, you should speak for all of us—and more, you should speak for what our country stands for, and aspires to be. …

Some people may tell you that you have to choose between the words and the principles of the Constitution when interpreting the document, or that you should just listen to the Supreme Court. None of these approaches is complete. Looking to the Constitution’s text, the history of Supreme Court rulings, and the broader values underlying the Constitution gives us the best method to resolve constitutional disputes and discover the document’s meaning. I refer to this approach as value-based reading.

So what are constitutional values? They are best understood as principles of constitutional self-government—principles that realize the ideal of an American populace with all citizens regarded as equal, always retaining their right to rule and influence public life. Although the text of the Constitution is the first place to look for signs of these values, they have also been argued over and worked out through Supreme Court cases throughout American history. We will look to these cases as an important guide to the Constitution, sometimes invoking the conclusions of the court’s justices and, where necessary, pointing to how the case law should evolve to better reflect the Constitution’s deeper values. And throughout, we will come back to the architect of the Constitution itself: James Madison. In the Federalist Papers, his public speeches, and other writings, Madison is essentially speaking to us across the ages.

We should listen.

Corey Brettschneider ’95 is professor of political science at Brown University.

Excerpted from The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents. Copyright © 2018 by Corey Brettschneider. Excerpted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The First Amendment in Action

Marybel Gonzalez ’09 of Telemundo Chicago

A Democracy Reader: Part 4: Freedom of the Press

Part 1: The Field of Blood (Excerpt)

Part 2: The Authoritarian Pandemic

Part 3: The Oath and the Office (Excerpt)

Part 5: How Democracies Die (Excerpt)

Part 6: Policing the Police

Part 7: Teaching Politics in the Age of COVID-19

As multiple crises converged on the nation in May, reporters Marybel Gonzalez ’09 of Telemundo Chicago and Sam Kelly ’18 of the Chicago Sun-Times were sent into the Chicago streets to cover the protests and confrontations with police that followed the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. Amid a global pandemic, a national reckoning with racism and police brutality and deep political divisions, Gonzalez and Kelly reflected on working in journalism in a time of crisis amid cries of “fake news” from the President of the United States.

PCM: What was your role in covering the recent protests in Chicago?

Gonzalez: I’ve been covering the protests since they first started here in Chicago. The first large-scale George Floyd protests were held May 30 in downtown Chicago. Since then, our entire news team has been diligently covering all angles of the current events. In conjunction with our NBC 5 sister station, we’ve covered every major neighborhood in Chicago and its suburbs. Telemundo has specifically focused on the largely Hispanic communities, including Pilsen, Little Village, Belmont Cragin, Brighton Park and West Chicago, to name a few.

Kelly: I’m a breaking news reporter, so I work on the 24-hour breaking desk. I work the night shift. The protests were the news, and so that’s what I was covering. I got sent out into downtown Chicago on Saturday night and I put my bike on the bike rack of my car. I parked outside of downtown and then I biked in. I think the worst of the confrontations between police and protesters was in the afternoon that day. But it was still certainly pretty hectic late that evening as well. The cops were frantically just driving all over the place, in some cases. In other cases, there were large congregations of police just trying to hold lines to make sure people weren’t passing beyond a certain point in town. Things escalated on and off throughout the evening as far as confrontations between police and protestors.

PCM: Tell us what you’ve witnessed.

Gonzalez: From peaceful demonstrations and civil resistance to looting and acts of violence between police officers and residents, I’ve witnessed firsthand how the George Floyd protests and riots have unfolded across our city and surrounding areas. I’ve reported on a crowd of thousands who took to the streets of downtown Chicago chanting while they marched, while others knelt and took a moment of silence to call for an end to racial violence. On the other hand, we’ve also witnessed looting of commercial retail stores and small mom-and-pop shops. We’ve interviewed business owners on the aftermath of these acts, some of them denouncing the vandalism, while others saying they understand the anger behind them. In areas like Brighton Park, Pilsen and Cicero we’ve done stories about how local gang members guarded their neighborhood stores against looting.

We’ve also reported on how some have used their own resources, platforms and creativity as a way of protest. In Little Village, for example, a group of people performed an Aztec dance to show the Latino community’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement. In the city of Aurora, business owners commissioned local artists to paint murals on their boarded-up storefronts to show solidarity for the protests. Outside of Chicago Police headquarters, Black female clergy leaders read prayers and poems out loud demanding police reform.

The manner and platforms in which activists, residents and protestors have expressed their solidarity varies. However, based on interviews we’ve conducted, the call to action of many of them is the same: people are demanding justice for George Floyd and for all others who have died while in police custody.

As a journalist, it’s been important to cover all angles of how these events, as they add context as to why these protests are taking place.

PCM: Sam, you saw one officer spit at a protestor and others tackle a protestor and hit him with a baton. How surprising was it to see that kind of reaction from police?

Kelly: Not very surprising, to be honest. I understand the history of police in this country and Chicago especially. I’ve lived here my whole life. I understand that tensions are really high among protestors and among police. I work with police every day in my job, as far as my usual reporting, so I wasn’t surprised to see them responding that way.

I have a lot of personal feelings about the police relationship with Black communities and communities of color and impoverished communities, but I have to put those aside as a journalist and just report what I see as accurately as possible and try to let justification or lack of justification for any actions make themselves clear without inserting myself into the situation. But that can be hard sometimes because I’m also just a person, and I have my own feelings about the situation.

In that instance, I wasn’t filming when the cop spat at the protestor’s feet because up until that point, it had just been a guy walking by with his fist raised, shouting slogans, shouting “Black Lives Matter,” “No justice, no peace.” He purposefully walked very near the officers but never threatened violence or anything. I wasn’t filming every single thing I saw because there was so much happening, but once I saw the cop spit at the guy’s feet, I pulled my phone out. But you know there were a lot of moments like that, but I wasn’t really processing them emotionally as much as just trying to do my job.

PCM: Have you covered protests in the past? If so, how are these protests different?

Gonzalez: While working as an investigative reporter along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, I covered protests calling attention to family separations due to enforcement of the Zero Tolerance Policy, rallies against and in favor of border wall construction along that region, and protests related to the detention of migrant children in the area. However, the George Floyd protests are vastly different from ones I’ve covered in the past. For one, the scale of these protests is notable. People across the globe have taken to the streets to protest in the name of George Floyd. Social media platforms have also played a large role in this. People have used those streams to coordinate virtual protests. These avenues have allowed people to upload images and videos of the protests as they are happening. While this has led to a plethora of valuable information being shared, it’s also caused a lot of misinformation to spread as well.

It’s also worth noting that these protests are happening in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of that, we’ve had to be mindful of how we can cover these protests up close, while also ensuring the safety of our news team and our interviewees. Now more than ever, newsrooms require we have all hands on deck to cover the fast-changing events. However, due to the pandemic, many newsrooms across the nation have had to cut staff and therefore also resources that are needed in times like these.

PCM: There have been instances of reporters being injured or arrested. Have you felt unsafe?

Kelly: The only times I ever felt unsafe were when I got caught in the middle of skirmishes or potential skirmishes. There were a lot of times when protestors would start to congregate near cops and maybe a few rocks would be thrown. Obviously the police’s plan for diffusing the situation—and it worked pretty well for them—was just to run in a line at the protestors. Every time that happened, the protestors would turn around and sprint back down the street. I was on my bike, like I said, so a few times I felt nervous about getting caught up in that. I also knew in those moments the police wouldn’t distinguish me from anyone else, so I had to run with them.

Gonzalez: Across the country, we’ve learning of incidents of violence against media. We’ve heard reports and seen videos of photographers and reporters allegedly being assaulted by law enforcement and residents. We’ve even heard of reports of journalists arrested while covering a protest.

Our company has been very good at providing security for us if we are covering any large-scale protest or rally. We’ve also been instructed to drop our assignment if we feel our safety is in jeopardy.

However, it is concerning that members of the media are facing violent acts and arrests.  Now more than ever, we need journalists on the ground covering what is happening in real time. We are committed to informing our viewers of these historic moments. Incidents like these only interfere with our duty to ensure public transparency and our responsibility to tell the stories of those involved in these current events.

Can you speak to the commitment of being a journalist covering this issue at a time when the media is facing such challenges?

Kelly: It bothers me to see the way Trump talks about the press and the attitudes that people have developed about the press. Because I think when journalism is done correctly, it’s a valuable resource to our community, to our society.

That being said, I understand the frustration that a lot of communities have with the press, communities that may have been misrepresented historically. I don’t necessarily hold it against anyone who has those convictions in good faith. I have seen a lot of things on social media about journalists who are coming under attack at protests. And it is infuriating, absolutely, and it makes me upset. But I also think a lot of the journalism community is making this about themselves, and that bothers me as well, because the communities that are protesting have been dealing with that violence forever, for generations. So if anything the recent events have encouraged me to try be mindful of my role in the situation as best as I can. The last thing I want to do is make things worse. Within my power, my main goal has been to put an accurate description out there that includes the voices and perspectives that maybe haven’t been heard from as much in the situation that’s going on.

Gonzalez: I believe journalism is critical in shaping our democracy. Journalism ensures transparency at all levels. Through fact-checking, it holds those in power accountable; through storytelling, it gives a voice to those at the center of a given event. Journalism ensures the public is well-informed so that they can make their own decisions about the issues that make a difference in their communities. I would say that democracy cannot exist without freedom of the press.

How Democracies Die

How Democracies Die

How Democracies Die

A Democracy Reader: Part 5: Democratic Breakdown


How Democracies Die

Excerpted from : How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt ’95 – Crown, 2018 320 pages, $16.


Part 1: The Field of Blood (Excerpt)

Part 2: The Authoritarian Pandemic

Part 3: The Oath and the Office (Excerpt)

Part 4: The First Amendment in Action

Part 6: Policing the Police

Part 7: Teaching Politics in the Age of COVID-19

Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. We have been colleagues for fifteen years, thinking, writing, and teaching students about failures of democracy in other places and times— Europe’s dark 1930s, Latin America’s repressive 1970s. We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession.

But now we find ourselves turning to our own country. Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States—but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here. After all, even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity. Our Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically robust middle class, our high levels of wealth and education, and our large, diversified private sector—all these should inoculate us from the kind of democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere.

Yet, we worry. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.

What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies?

At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country.

Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his many supporters would take to the streets in defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy.

This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies w in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion.

But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.

In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt governing elite, promising to build a more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.”

When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new constituent assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed the chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his allies won those, too. Chávez’s populism triggered intense opposition, and in April 2002, he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed, allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic legitimacy.

It wasn’t until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps toward authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later, when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In 2004, the government blacklisted those who had signed the recall petition and packed the supreme court, but Chávez’s landslide reelection in 2006 allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The chavista regime grew more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges, and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in power indefinitely. When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in 2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the media and deployed the vast machinery of the government in its favor. After Chávez’s death a year later, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, won another questionable reelection, and in 2014, his government imprisoned a major opposition leader. Still, the opposition’s landslide victory in the 2015 legislative elections seemed to belie critics’ claims that Venezuela was no longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy.

This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.

The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.

Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.

Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 (“not at all democratic”) to 10 (“completely democratic”), 51 percent of respondents gave their country a score of 8 or higher.

Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of backsliding? The foundations of our democracy are certainly stronger than those in Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary. But are they strong enough?

Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history. For the sake of clarity, we are defining a democracy as a system of government with regular, free and fair elections, in which all adult citizens have the right to vote and possess basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and association. Studying other democracies in crisis allows us to better understand the challenges facing our own. For example, based on the historical experiences of other nations, we have developed a litmus test to help identify would–be autocrats before they come to power. We can learn from the mistakes that past democratic leaders have made in opening the door to would–be authoritarians—and, conversely, from the ways that other democracies have kept extremists out of power. A comparative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous—and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists ­into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Once a would–be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms. Donald Trump’s surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican Party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own ranks from gaining the nomination.

How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Donald Trump. Our Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate. Surely, then, it will be able to survive Trump.

We are less certain. Historically, our system of checks and balances has worked pretty well—but not, or not entirely, because of the constitutional system designed by the founders. Democracies work best—and survive longer—where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms. Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. These two norms undergirded American democracy for most of the twentieth century. Leaders of the two major parties accepted one another as legitimate and resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage. Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening. The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president, many Republicans, in particular, questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary. Donald Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn’t cause it. The challenges facing American democracy run deeper. The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

There are, therefore, reasons for alarm. Not only did Americans elect a demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when the norms that once protected our democracy were already coming unmoored. But if other countries’ experiences teach us that polarization can kill democracies, they also teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Drawing lessons from other democracies in crisis, this book suggests strategies that citizens should, and should not, follow to defend our democracy.

Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is happening to our country. But protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries to see the warning signs—and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert b­­reakdown. History doesn’t repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history, and the hope of this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.

Daniel Ziblatt ’95 and Steven Levitsky are colleagues at Harvard University, where Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Levitsky is professor of government.

Excerpted from How Democracies Die. Copyright © 2019 by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Excerpted by permission of Broadway Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Policing the Police

Joyce Hicks ’74

Joyce Hicks ’74

Sheriff Paul Pastor ’71

Sheriff Paul Pastor ’71

A Democracy Reader: Part 6: Equal Justice

Part 1: The Field of Blood (Excerpt)

Part 2: The Authoritarian Pandemic

Part 3: The Oath and the Office (Excerpt)

Part 4: The First Amendment in Action

Part 5: How Democracies Die (Excerpt)

Part 7: Teaching Politics in the Age of COVID-19

A confident, no-nonsense person, Joyce Hicks ’74 spent most of her career in city government, fixing and managing agencies by making data-driven decisions. A UC Berkeley-educated lawyer, she was recruited to lead several departments in Oakland, including its Citizens Police Review Board (CPRB). Toward the end of her professional career, she led for almost a decade one of the most powerful civilian police oversight bodies in the country, San Francisco’s Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC), now the Department of Police Accountability.

But on May 25, Hicks did something uncharacteristic. She rushed to judgment, certain that she had just witnessed a murder.

The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer overcame her with so much emotion that she wept. “In my career I had never seen such a sustained and callous disregard for life and plea for mercy,” says Hicks, who is African American. “George was just a bit older than my own son.”

For his part, Sheriff Paul Pastor ’71 thought he had pretty much seen it all during more than 40 years in law enforcement, but on May 25, he, too, was taken aback. “What happened in Minneapolis took place in the midst of America’s long-standing unresolved racial divide,” the longtime sheriff of Pierce County says. “Police officers encounter this divide on a regular basis, and their decisions have the potential to perpetuate it or to help resolve it. In Minneapolis, we saw an instance of perpetuation.”

Both Hicks and Pastor pointed out that policing involves hard ethical and legal decisions that frequently have to be made in difficult and chaotic situations.

One of the first things that Hicks did as executive director of Oakland’s CPRB in the mid-2000s was to take an 10-hour ride along with a police sergeant. One of the things she quickly learned was the inadequacies of the practice of hiring young officers, some even straight out of high school. “They don’t have enough life experience and knowledge necessary yet to process some of the situations they will be in,” she says about young cadets.

In George Floyd’s case, three officers involved were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. Two of those officers were novices. “When you’re a rookie cop and your field training officer is doing something wrong, it takes a lot of courage to say stop. There has to be a culture shift. You have to have your own moral code.”

Pastor agrees. He advises law enforcement agencies to reexamine their cultures because “culture is more pervasive and powerful than rules and procedures. This does not mean that all agency cultures are hopelessly tainted. It means that we need to refine and rededicate to key ethical values. Where we find that we fall short, we need to own up and make changes.”

He argues that the men and women who carry badges make millions of good, ethical decisions every day. “But there are also instances in which we let the community down,” he says. “Instances in which our people do the wrong thing. Instances in which we hurt community members and undermine what we claim to stand for.”

Pierce County is more than 1,500 miles from Minneapolis, but Pastor says people in his community have experienced the same profound anger, frustration and disappointment felt in communities across the country. He saw those same feelings among his personnel in the Sheriff’s Office.

“I believe that it is necessary for us to ‘call out our own’ when mistakes are made or when conduct is just plain wrong,” he says. “The actions in Minneapolis reflect on the credibility of my deputies. I tell my new recruits that, whether fair or unfair, the conduct of any of us reflects on all of us. Especially in the age of hand-held video and body cameras, our conduct is on display and subject to review.”

He adds that incidents involving the use of force against Black men by police officers stand as markers of America’s racial divide. “Those who peacefully protested earlier incidents as well as those who protest the death of Mr. Floyd have a simple but important message. Namely, that ‘equal justice under the law’ is the very essence of what America is supposed to stand for.

“I’ve seen things get better in our profession. Hopefully, I’ve contributed to that a bit. But things still need to get better than this. And the recent incident in Minneapolis sure feels like a setback.”

Unfortunately, Hicks believes, for Blacks in America, setbacks have become the norm. She recalls that her father, who was a pilot with the original Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, protested the mistreatment of Black officers by white commanders. “We’re still protesting some of the things my late father once protested,” she says. “As a society, we’re going backwards in terms of race baiting and inciting violence based on race.”

But in terms of civilian oversight of police, she believes the country is moving forward. “The work in San Francisco and the progress these agencies are making around the country is hard work, but it is forward-thinking,” she says. “But until this country can come to grips with racism, the job of police officers will continue to be treacherous and also be a microcosm of our society.”

At a time when there is a public outcry for police reform, Hicks believes a civilian agency overseeing a police department can make a difference. While in San Francisco, she had to build relationships with community groups, police administrators and union officials. She carefully examined police department patterns through data collection, and she also had to improve the caliber of investigations focusing on complaints that raised policy issues, such as vehicle pursuits and use of force.

Under her leadership, San Francisco civilian investigators looked into citizen accusations of misconduct or neglect of duty, interviewing the complainant, the officer and witnesses and gathering internal and external documentary evidence. The office’s decisions were based on relevant evidence. If the investigators sustained a complaint, Hicks would send a report to the police chief, who could hold a disciplinary hearing. Hicks also had the discretion to forward a complaint to the police commission if the chief did not agree that misconduct had occurred. For more serious misconduct, Hicks filed charges directly with the police commission, with or without the concurrence of the police chief. “Civilians can hold the police accountable in ways that extend far beyond individual complaints, potentially covering broad areas of police practice and policy,” she notes. “It is important to effect change on police department policies. Only a small number of officers will be impacted with disciplinary matters, but policy change is department-wide.”

One of the programs Hicks is most proud of is the mediation program created at the OCC. The voluntary program meant that both the complainant and the police officer had to agree to mediate. In San Francisco over 90% of the eligible officers and 55% of complainants agreed to participate in mediation. “We had the highest voluntary per-capita officer participation rate in our mediation program in the nation. We had skilled mediators who conducted these mediations. The conversation wasn’t always about an apology, but it was about both the officer and the complainant having an opportunity to explain their position.”

Currently there are more than 200 civilian oversight boards in the U.S. and 18,000 law enforcement agencies, according to the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, an association where Hicks was a board member. There’s no strict definition for these boards, and their latitude could encompass responsibilities ranging from investigation to review and audit. In addition to Oakland and San Francisco, where Hicks served, other major cities with civilian oversight agencies include New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

Beyond their outrage, both Hicks and Pastor believe policing can be done right and that change must come.

“I have hope,” says Hicks. “I have worked in environments where police chiefs and commissioners want to create change, but we need civilians on the front lines always reminding them that you must have civilians keeping you accountable.”

In his upcoming retirement, Pastor hopes to make a further contribution at a national level. “I’ve been doing things with the Major Sheriffs­ Association of America and the National Executive Institute at the FBI. I’d like to spend more time on that,” he says. “I would also hope that new graduates would consider a career in policing. I have found it to be both morally and intellectually engaging. We are not a perfect profession, nor are we perfect people. Like America, we have a long way to go. But we regularly make a positive moral difference in the communities we serve. Few other professions do this as often or as intensely as does policing.”

Teaching Politics in the United States in the Age of COVID-19

Teaching Politics in the United States in the Age of COVID-19

Ballot box with person casting vote on blank voting slip

A Democracy Reader: Part 7: Freedom and Education

Part 1: The Field of Blood (Excerpt)

Part 2: The Authoritarian Pandemic

Part 3: The Oath and the Office (Excerpt)

Part 4: The First Amendment in Action

Part 5: How Democracies Die (Excerpt)

Part 6: Policing the Police

COVID-19 arrived smack in the middle of the semester I first started teaching Politics 142, Anti-Democracy in America. The pandemic shut down our class meetings, disrupting our normal ways of working together, but it fit disturbingly well into the content that we were studying.

The pandemic has laid bare the United States in 2020, as we encounter the public health consequences of deep social and political inequality, widespread economic precariousness, white supremacy, polarized and dysfunctional politics, hollowed-out government, and a scandalously inadequate health care system.

First, a little background. I’ve long meant to teach a course like this as a counterpoint to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the 1830s study famous for its generous portrayal of American civil society. (“Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.”) A bunch of events finally gave me the push: Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Danielle Allen’s Pomona commencement speech in 2018, and Daniel Ziblatt ’95 publishing How Democracies Die with his colleague Steven Levitsky that same year.

The Anti-Democracy course took on some hard topics, including the challenge of defining democracy in the first place, the building of the United States on slavery and settler colonialism, deep and polarized disagreements about who is an American and what the United States should be, historical and contemporary white supremacy, economic oligarchy, punitive economic and social policy, and corrupted and dysfunctional elections. The 14 amazing Claremont Colleges students in the seminar were up to the challenge, though. They did the readings, formed their own views, discussed their agreements and disagreements in our bi-weekly seminars and wrote ambitious papers.

Again and again, COVID-19 connected with the readings. In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt showed how anti-democratic political leaders all over the world commonly attack the institutions of government and challenge the legitimacy of professionals and experts. As the pandemic emerged in March, we learned the Trump administration had gutted pandemic preparation in 2018, and we watched as the President and other Republican leaders dismissed the warnings of public health officials and researchers around the world as a “hoax.”

We read several studies on polarization and the “culture wars” in the United States. The pandemic offered an immediate case study, as many conservatives politicized the quarantine and the wearing of protective face masks. In April, Vice President Mike Pence refused to cover his face even at the Mayo Clinic.

In The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, Eric Foner showed how the framers of the 14th Amendment struggled to defend elected governments from armed terrorists in the South in the 1860s. This seemed a part of America’s distant past until April, when armed “protesters” tried to storm the Michigan capitol as the legislature deliberated closing public facilities across the state to slow the spread of the virus.

The racial dimensions of the pandemic became obvious within weeks, as public health researchers published data showing higher infection and mortality rates among people of color in the United States. Students in the seminar had already read a variety of materials on white supremacy in the United States, and they couldn’t help but notice that virtually all of the anti-quarantine “protesters” in the news were white.

Rick Hasen’s newly published Election Meltdown seemed alarmist to some of us, as he warned about the fragility of U.S. voting systems. Then we watched the Republican state legislature and the Wisconsin Supreme Court overrule Democratic Governor Tony Evers’ plea to delay the state’s primary election, forcing residents to risk exposure to the coronavirus if they wanted to cast their votes.

Students read about the chaotic state of public health insurance and access to medical care in Jamila Michener’s Fragmented Democracy. This prepared them to understand reports about disparities in access to health care during the pandemic, particularly the research showing larger numbers of uninsured and untreated people resided in states whose governments had refused to enact the Medicaid expansion available under the 2010 Affordable Care Act (commonly called Obamacare).

In 2019, Jacob Hacker published an updated version of The Great Risk Shift, which focused in part on the dismantling of job security, unemployment insurance and pension guarantees in the United States since the 1980s. This book in particular struck a chord for the students in the seminar, who are about to enter the labor force in an economy devastated by the pandemic. As the semester ended, unemployment neared 15 percent, and bipartisan majorities in Congress targeted their first recovery legislation primarily at businesses and investors.

In short, the pandemic became part of our curriculum this semester. Again and again, COVID-19 taught us hard truths. In 2020, as the election nears, democracy in the United States is at best more aspiration than reality. At best.

Let me close on a personal note. After teaching about U.S. politics at Pomona College for more than half my life, I struggled with giving students such dark material during such dark times. But I was deeply grateful for the opportunity to work through this syllabus with those 14 young people twice a week this spring. In the face of everything, the students in the seminar remained engaged and committed, more than willing to face, consider, discuss and write about the implications of these readings (and the pandemic­­) for their own futures, and the future of the United States and the world.

We face daunting challenges, but those students give me hope.

David Menefee-Libey is professor of politics and coordinator of the Public Policy Analysis Program. He has been a member of the Pomona College faculty since 1989.

Holocaust Insight: An Interview with John K. Roth ’62

Holocaust Insight: An Interview with John K. Roth ’62

Holocaust Insight: An Interview with John K. Roth ’62

Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide

Sources of Holocaust Insight By John K. Roth ’62 Cascade Books 2020 304 pages | $35

“More than 50,” describes both the years of academic inquiry about the Holocaust and the number of books by John K. Roth ’62, Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Undoubtedly one of the preeminent scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, he recently added a new book to his collection. Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide reflects on the people, the texts, the events and places that have informed and influenced his understanding of that atrocity.

Roth is founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights) at Claremont McKenna. He was named the U.S. National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1988. Roth is also the recipient of the Holocaust Educational Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Holocaust Studies and Research.

Pomona College Magazine’s Sneha Abraham, a former student of Roth’s, talked to him about his academic formation, his new book, questions of the human condition, God, and what the Holocaust requires of us.

This interview has been condensed and edited for space and clarity.

PCM: How was your Pomona experience formative for you as a philosopher? What was that experience like?

Roth: When I came to Pomona College in the autumn of 1958, I didn’t know what philosophy was. I had some experience with religion, and my father was a Presbyterian minister, so I grew up in a home where the Bible and ideas about God were important. I was aware that there was something called philosophy, but I really didn’t know very much about it. I didn’t take a course in philosophy at Pomona until I was a sophomore. When I got into it, I thought, “This is interesting. Maybe I’ll get some answers to my questions by studying philosophy.”

But I rather quickly found out that that wasn’t going to happen because philosophy is much more about questions than it is about answers. Philosophers always come up with answers, and philosophers are salespeople in some ways. They want you to accept what they say. But the power of the discipline goes back to Socrates and the use of questions to produce dialogue and develop the wonder about things that Plato and Aristotle thought was the origin of philosophy. Philosophy begins in wonder.

Over time, I grew to love that part of philosophy. Philosophy is the discipline that persists in asking questions. That can be very frustrating if your goal is to get answers. Philosophy tries to do that, but unavoidably, the questions keep coming back.

By the time I had finished my sophomore year, I was committed to majoring in philosophy. And then something else happened. And this is a tribute to Pomona College. I just loved being in college. Pomona accounts for that. I fell in love with college because of Pomona. My experience there made a huge impact on me. I’ve spent most of my life in the culture of small liberal arts colleges, which I just think are national treasures, and as I think about the condition of our country right now, I think the contributions that small liberal arts colleges make are increasingly important. And probably endangered a bit too.

PCM: You’ve been working in this field of Holocaust studies for more than 50 years.

Roth: Yes. It’s added up to be that long. And it wasn’t where I planned to work. I didn’t go to the counseling center and say, “How do you become a Holocaust scholar?” I like to say that the Holocaust found me. It did so partly through [the late Philosophy Professor] Frederick Sontag, who is a legend at Pomona and became a close, close friend of mine—we taught and wrote together. When I was his student, he was very interested in what philosophers call “the problem of evil.”

Several of the courses that I took from Fred Sontag took me into that problem—that is, how and why does massive destruction of human life take place? And what sense, if any, can be made of it? How do we deal with those questions?

But the Holocaust was not yet where I was. Getting my attention focused on that took a while. It wasn’t until I was on the faculty of Claremont McKenna, which I joined in 1966, that the Holocaust found me and changed my life.

In the early 1970s, I followed the lead of my teacher, Fred Sontag, who said one day, “I think you might be interested in reading some of Elie Wiesel’s writings.” I read Wiesel and was captivated and compelled to find out more about what I was reading. This is why I say that the Holocaust found me more than I found it. And it changed my life. I became a different person, professionally and existentially. My life reoriented because as I found out more about what had happened to people like Elie Wiesel and his family. I discovered that a host of important questions were embedded in that experience and history. I had to follow where they led.

PCM: Why did you write this book? What was the impetus?

Roth: I was inspired to write the book because of another book that has meant a lot to me over the years. It is called Sources of Holocaust Research and was written early in the current century by a very important Holocaust scholar named Raul Hilberg. I used that book in teaching because it provides a good way for students to see how a scholar goes about studying that massive event.

Hilberg’s book made me realize that I have Holocaust sources too, and that led to seeing the book that I might write. My sources are documents sometimes, but more often, my sources are people, texts, testimonies, places, experiences. So, I thought to myself, “Well, what if I write about sources of my understanding of the Holocaust?” Or as I like to phrase it, my sources of Holocaust insight.

PCM: You mentioned that you’re the son of a Presbyterian minister. How does being an American and a Christian affect your study of the Holocaust?

Roth: When I read Elie Wiesel and I began to feel the need to learn more about what had happened to him and why it happened to his family, my study made me realize that my own tradition, Christianity, was deeply implicated in the genocide. This led me to grapple with the dark underside of Christianity. It created a personal dilemma I still wrestle with.

I put the dilemma this way. For me, Christianity has been something good, but as some of my Jewish friends would remind me from time to time, and I knew this from study too, “Well, Christianity hasn’t been so good for us.” The Holocaust remains a big, big problem for Christians. You have a good example of that right now because, after many, many years, the Vatican archives have been opened to allow scholars—once we get the COVID-19 pandemic under control—to explore the controversial history of Pope Pius XII, who reigned during the Nazi period. He’s been a controversial figure. Did he do what he should have done during that period with regard to the plight of the Jewish people?

So debate about the Holocaust and Christianity is ongoing. For me, it’s existential, because Christianity is my tradition. What do I do as I keep learning that my tradition has a dark and destructive side? My study and teaching about the Holocaust is a continuing way to cope with that. And maybe in some ways, to try to make some amends, if I can, for that terrible shortcoming.

On the American side, the role of the United States during the Holocaust also raises questions. It does so about immigration; it raises questions about action that was taken or not taken. And it certainly involves issues about racism. Black Americans fought against Nazi racism but experienced American racism nonetheless. I’ve found that my identity as an American, as well as a Christian and a philosopher, continues to have points of contact with the Holocaust, which was primarily European in its geography but had international dimensions and implications too. Some of those connections and reverberations are reflected in the fact that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has become such an important place in our national capital. There’s a long story about that: Why do we have a museum about the Holocaust situated close by the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.? That’s an intriguing and significant question.

What I’ve found is that all of these identity questions drove me further and deeper in understanding that it was important to spend time teaching, learning and writing about the Holocaust.

PCM: You write about Richard Rubenstein, Elie Wiesel and Franklin Littell and how they encourage you to tell the story in your own way and to carry on the dialogue as best you can in your prayers and quarrels with God. I really liked the way you put that. What does that mean for you?

Roth: Unlike some people who confront the Holocaust, my encounters with that catastrophe have not turned me into an atheist. I resonated much more with the approach that Wiesel took in his writings. People who really fall in love with Elie Wiesel’s writings are probably people who have some deep interest in things religious because it’s hard to read Wiesel without finding, over and over again, that he’s writing about questions that have to do with God and religious practices and traditions. In particular, Wiesel is constantly carrying on a quarrel with God.

One of the things I learned as a Christian that was very helpful to me is that, in the Jewish tradition, quarreling and arguing with God and protesting against God are part of the spirituality of that tradition. Christianity tends to play down such themes because of the strong emphasis that Christianity puts on the idea of God as love. But if God is more ambiguous and mixed than that, then the Jewish tradition of carrying on arguments and protest as part of a relationship with God has a bigger role. I found I really liked that about the approach that I was discovering as I studied Wiesel, Rubenstein and other post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers.

So, I have a quarrelsome relationship with God. For me, that’s valuable just to the extent that it underscores the insight that God isn’t going to fix everything. Whether it’s fair or not, it’s up to us to try to do that as much as we can. But I hold onto a relationship with God because it helps me to maintain my conviction that history is not all that is. Reality is more than history. And I’m hopeful that, in some way, that means that what the Nazis did to the Jews doesn’t have the last word. That’s my hope. I don’t want injustice and suffering and murder to have the last word. They may have it. I don’t know for sure that they won’t, but my hope is that they don’t. My teaching and writing about the Holocaust seek to encourage and support that hope.

PCM: What is your take on the human condition? Are we basically good?

Roth: I wax and wane between hope and pessimism. I often say that my study of the Holocaust, overall, has made me more melancholy than I was as a young person. That mood isn’t the same as despair, but it includes aspects of that darkness. Melancholy isn’t paralyzing. It can combine with and even produce resistance against destructive powers.

PCM: Do you believe in moral progress?

Roth: Not in any simple way. No, I don’t. I think Albert Camus was insightful in his book The Rebel when he said that human beings can only arithmetically reduce the amount of suffering in the world. What he meant by that, I think, is that we can and must do everything we can to reduce suffering and injustice, but, unfortunately, we aren’t capable of doing away with those things. So, according to Camus, you resist, you try your best to thwart and curb and reduce these things, but if your sensibility is that you’re going to continue to make progress until such time as suffering and injustice are inconsequential, you’re misguided.

I think that the ongoing struggle against anti-semitism fits what Camus saw. Many of us who began a long time ago to teach about the Holocaust hoped that such work would curb if not eliminate anti-semitism. But we learned that this plague is more endemic and virulent than we wanted to believe.

So, I don’t believe in moral progress in any simple kind of way, but I do hope that Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. That will happen, though, only if people make it happen. [During this time of pandemic,] we keep talking about the “curve” and flattening it. That curve isn’t going to bend or flatten unless people act in ways that serve the common good. Even then, as we’re learning, we’re probably not going to eradicate the novel coronavirus or the disease of racism and injustice, at least not completely.

PCM: Does the Holocaust call moral relativism on the carpet?

Roth: Yes. I have a friend, Michael Berenbaum, who wisely refers to the Holocaust as a negative absolute. We may disagree about moral values, but probably, we can come closer to agreement if we look at what we think is absolutely wrong. Even there, drastic differences may persist. The Nazis did not think that destroying Jewish life and tradition was wrong. For the Nazis, that was right and good. So it’s complicated, but as I like to say, the Holocaust was wrong, or nothing could be. If we don’t say that, then we really do open the door to the pernicious view that might makes right. Earlier this year, Attorney General William Barr emphasized that the victors write history. Even if he wasn’t incorrect factually, that proposition is morally wrong because it is the ally of might makes right, a view that cannot withstand scrutiny.

The Holocaust and events like it had better be the end of moral relativism, or we’re in more trouble than we need to be. But the dilemma is that this case of one of those where argument may not settle the matter. This is a place where my concept of insight comes in. We have to recognize that there may always be people, powerful people, who act as if might makes right and who think they will win and get to write history their way. Study of the Holocaust alerts us to have our eyes open about what to do in that case.

PCM: You say that through writer and Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo you understand the importance of taking nothing good for granted. That’s the title of your epilogue as well. So, what good do you not take for granted?

Roth: The Holocaust destroyed so much that was good. So, of all my Holocaust insights, none is more important than take nothing good for granted. Over and over again, especially privileged Americans like me do take good things for granted, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Study of the Holocaust helps to drive that point home, but nowadays the COVID-19 pandemic and the renewed awareness of systemic racism in American life lift up that awareness too.

PCM: Delbo essentially says, I’m paraphrasing, but: “Do something useful with your life. Don’t let everything be useless knowledge or senseless.”

Roth: Delbo’s moving writing about Auschwitz emphasizes how her experience there was full of what she called useless knowledge. She saw torture, and she knew about murder. None of this was edifying, let alone helpful. Such knowledge was destructive and degrading. So as she works to show her readers such things, she hopes that they won’t end up saying, “So what? You know, I’ll just put this on the shelf and go on about my life.” She was looking for somebody who would read her writing and maybe, in some good way, be changed by it. Writings that come out of Holocaust experiences are sometimes so powerful that if you let them into your life, they have a way of reorienting you and changing you. Charlotte Delbo’s writings have been that way for me

PCM: I’m not sure if this was your comment in the book or if you were quoting someone, but you wrote that “Our calling is not to be perfect, but to do what we can to make room for caring help and compassionate respect in a world that is often cruelly cold and indifferent.”

Roth: When I wrote those words, I saw them—and still do see them—as a way of putting one of the most insightful teachings from the Jewish tradition—that it is not our task to complete the work of justice, but neither is it our right to refuse to take up that work. We can’t complete the work of justice, but it’s our task to do what we can, to the best of our abilities. More than 50 years of learning and teaching about the Holocaust make that insight imperative and inescapable.

Bookmarks Spring/Summer 2020

The Browning of the New SouthThe Browning of the New South

Jennifer A. Jones ’03 takes an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in an evolving­ Southern city.


The Sweeney SistersThe Sweeney Sisters

Lian Dolan ’87 returns with her biggest, boldest, most entertaining novel yet—a hilarious, heartfelt story about books, love, sisterhood and the surprises we discover in our DNA.


The Eye That Never SleepsThe Eye That Never Sleeps

Clifford Browder ’50 offers a classically told detective novel that creates a web of intrigue while giving the reader a tour of a bygone era of America through the filter of New York City.


Nontechnical Guide to Petroleum Geo­logy, Exploration, Drilling & ProductionNontechnical Guide to Petroleum Geo­logy, Exploration, Drilling & Production

Norman J. Hyne ’61, in the new fourth edition of his widely used textbook, provides broad insight into the nature of gas and oil production today.


The Religion of PhysicsThe Religion of Physics

Philip C. Groce ’62 melds science and religion into a conceptual framework that God can be defined as energy.


Aphrodite’s PenAphrodite’s Pen

Jody Savage ’75, writing as Stella Fosse, seeks to empower older women writing about erotic experiences in life, the bedroom and beyond.


Devotional Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper, Offering and PrayerDevotional Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper, Offering and Prayer

Ronald Johnson ’71 compiles 64 talks given prior to the Lord’s Supper, 14 talks for the offering and two talks on prayer.

Bookmarks Spring/Summer 2019

Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make RaceCollisions at the Crossroads:
How Place and Mobility Make Race

Genevieve Carpio ’05, assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UCLA, examines policies and forces restricting free movement—from bicycle ordinances to incarceration—and how they constructed racial hierarchies in Los Angeles and the Inland Empire.


Luxury, Blue LaceLuxury, Blue Lace

S. Brook Corfman ’13 offers poetry exploring the overlapping personalities that can be found in one person. His poems earned him a starred Publishers Weekly review, praising it as “a work of rare beauty and thoughtfulness.”


More Than Birding: Observations from Antarctica, Madagascar, and BhutanMore Than Birding:
Observations from Antarctica, Madagascar, and Bhutan

In this travel memoir, Harriet Denison ’65 shares her adventures in birding, animal encounters and cultural experiences in breathtaking locations on three continents.


Learning to Be a Foreigner: Field Notes from SichuanLearning to Be a Foreigner:
Field Notes from Sichuan

In this novel, Nancy E. Dollahite ’64 tells a love story between a woman and a country and a woman and a man, based on her experience living in China in the 980s.


Buzz Stories at Thirty Thousand FeetBuzz Stories at Thirty Thousand Feet

David Price ’71, son of the late Harrison “Buzz” Price, writes about his father, best known for determining by mathema­tical formulas where to build Disneyland and Walt Disney World.


The Also-Rans: One Step Short of the PresidencyThe Also-Rans:
One Step Short of the Presidency

David P. Green ’58 profiles and examines the candidates who didn’t make it to the White House, from Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940 to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.


The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic ModernitiesThe Philosophical Baroque:
On Autopoietic Modernities

Erik S. Roraback ’89, who teaches critical theory, international cinema and U.S. literature at Charles University, reframes modernity as a multicentury baroque, as part of the Literary Modernism book series.


The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environ­mental Justice, and Political ChangeThe Nature of Hope:
Grassroots Organizing, Environ­mental Justice, and Political Change

Professor of Environmental Analysis Char Miller is the co-editor of this collection of essays exploring how ordinary citizens have come together to organize action for environmental justice.