The approach of the midterm elections — just 14 weeks to go! — is revealing an unexpected problem: Because many of us who long for deliverance from the endless slop of the Trump presidency don’t seem to realize how close we are to winning, we are not prepared to turn opportunity into achievement.

I know it seems unwise to predict victory. People rightly worry about the desperate anti-constitutional actions that President Donald Trump is already attempting to use to bend the election his way. And people are understandably beaten down by a daily barrage of awful headlines. Plus, overconfidence brings with it the risk of undercutting the hard electoral work necessary to successfully check this presidency.

But at the same time, we must not allow either learned despondency or misplaced humility to prevent us from getting ready to act on what could be a historic wave in support of constitutional democracy.

Imagine the following: In January, Democrats and pro-democracy Republicans have secured a modest majority in the Senate and a crushing margin in the House. Despite efforts by Trump to use the Justice Department to block some new members of Congress from being seated, those majorities are duly sworn in and begin serving. Within months, virtually every House committee has launched an investigation into malfeasance and corruption in U.S. departments and agencies. With each passing week, new information about White House abuses of power, threats to our national security and personal graft explodes into public view.

In that world, the tide of stunning headlines will have reversed direction, and the wide revulsion that produced the anti-Trump wave will only grow stronger. And at that point, Americans longing both for a restoration of democracy and for progress on all of the major challenges of the day — housing, health care, employment, climate change, campaign finance reform and scores of others — will have the greatest window of opportunity to make real progress since the post-Watergate period a half-century ago.

It does not matter whether this scenario is likely. (Though I think it is.) What matters is that it is possible, and whether, if it occurs, the forces for reform will be ready to offer the country carefully designed, politically vetted and legislatively effective solutions.

In my field — sustainable finance — the answer is: not yet. In many ways this is understandable, because so many arms of the federal government — particularly the Securities and Exchange Commission — have been deployed to roll back critical shareholder rights that have given investors the ability to hold corporate boards accountable. The leaders of the most prominent organizations have been relentlessly investigated by congressional committees, forced to respond to harassing lawsuits, and preoccupied with rebuffing Trump administration attacks on investor freedom. Their focus on beating back those attacks has been understandable and exemplary.

With a new Congress only months away, however, it’s time to break free of the despondency that can come from always playing defense. Reform does not just occur with victory in an election. It comes, as the Republicans showed with Project 2025, when people have spent time developing ideas that are ready when a political opening arrives.

If we want to move our immense capital markets toward better alignment with 21^st century democracy and with future economic, ecological, and human prosperity, Congress could pass a series of ambitious reforms. A Protecting Retirement from Catastrophic Risk Act would direct retirement fund trustees to identify and manage systemic risks that threaten long-term portfolio returns. A National Sustainability Accounting and Measurement Act could create standardized, auditable systems for measuring environmental, social, and governance performance. A Public Benefit Corporation and Stakeholder Governance Act could create stronger legal frameworks for corporations pursuing long-term value creation across multiple stakeholders.

Additionally, in the same spirit of creativity that led New Deal reformers to establish the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Social Security, a new generation of lawmakers could create institutions designed for an era of systemic risk and AI-enabled transparency.

A Federal Sustainability Accounting Board could establish and oversee nationally recognized standards for measuring environmental, social, and governance performance. A Systemic Risk and Fiduciary Commission could monitor threats to the long-term stability of retirement systems, capital markets, and the broader economy, helping fiduciaries identify and manage risks that cannot be diversified away. Finally, a National Transparency and Systems Intelligence Agency could harness advances in data collection, measurement, and artificial intelligence to provide real-time visibility into the health of critical economic, environmental, and social systems. Together, these institutions would help equip democratic capitalism with the information infrastructure needed to navigate the vast, interconnected, planetary challenges confronting the American people.

These are examples of my priorities, in my area of expertise. We can safely predict that after years of reckless regulatory and legal destruction, there are thousands of creative ideas waiting to be unleashed, debated, and introduced into our legislative process. What about in the areas you care most about? What’s your agenda for the post-Trump moment?

And yes, President Trump will still have veto power in 2027. Fine, make him use it. Because after 2026 comes 2028, and the chance to put a renovator in the White House. Starting now, let’s get a package of problem-solving, pro-Constitution bills ready to put on his or her desk. There’s a sunrise on the horizon. Let’s shake off the gloom and get busy designing the future.

The Words that Changed History

One of the most daring acts in human history took place when a thirty-three-year-old man sitting in a rented bedroom pulled a piece of paper out of his specially designed portable desk, dipped his quill into the ink pot, and began drafting a detailed explanation of why he and his friends were going to challenge the British Empire at the peak of its cultural, economic and military power.

From every angle, the act was insane. The young man, Thomas Jefferson, had been chosen as scribe by the other four men on his committee, was committing an act of treason against the King of England. George III was an absolute monarch who commanded 165,000 men under arms at a time when the largest city in America, Philadelphia, had only 30,000 residents. Jefferson was undeterred. Line by line, Jefferson wrote out this defiant renunciation, which was punishable by hanging, even though he knew that the weak colonies he was representing had no army, no navy, no national government, and no funds.

These circumstances alone would have made his words shocking. But he went farther. After consulting with Benjamin Franklin, the two penned a second sentence so radical that it has defined much of politics for the next two hundred and fifty years. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they wrote, “that all men are created equal.”

Self-evident!? When something is self-evident it means that it is so plainly true, obvious, or apparent that it requires no further proof and explanation. In Jefferson’s time, the near universal view was exactly the opposite. Human beings were seen as fundamentally and unalterably different and therefore not manifestly equal. Centuries of laws, titles, scripture, and practice backed up this view. The authors of the Declaration swept them all away – kings, established aristocracy, inherited privilege – with a scratch of the pen.

The principles articulated by the signatories to the Declaration of Independence proved much larger than he and his compatriots understood and over time they revealed the inconsistencies of the signers themselves. Once spoken, however, the words became unstoppable. Over time they became the relentless engine that propelled the missions of Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others.

They are once again under attack, not by some foreign power but by the president and his administration. At the heart of today’s celebration of the 250^th anniversary is whether and how we will continue to uphold them today.

Looking Down on Fireworks

In July 1975 I was nineteen years old and filled with restless idealism. I was impatient for America to find its way back to the values that had been so severely damaged by the Vietnam War. I was relieved that this country had put an end to the presidential abuses of power revealed by Watergate. And I was still mostly proud of the American experiment. Having grown up in France where I was harangued about America’s failures, I retained my core optimism and believed that the country would continue to move forward to fulfill its principles.

The parties planned for the Bicentennial across the country were huge, so I was delighted when I was invited to a large party in a recently opened restaurant, Windows on the World, on the 107^th floor of the World Trade Center. New York City was staging one of the largest celebrations in the country and had gathered more than 200 tall ships and rare vessels from around the world in its harbor. On the 4^th of July, President Gerald Ford landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forestal anchored not far from the Statue of Liberty and gave a speech extolling the virtues of immigrants. “The sea has been the passageway for millions and millions of people from all over the world,” he said, “to come to America, to share its bounty and its opportunity, and to enrich our future in return.”

The people of New York City had been promised the largest fireworks display in the history of the city and so, riding up the elevator in one of the twin towers, I exulted that I was going to be in what seemed like the ideal place from which to witness the extravaganza.

But the truth turned out to be very different. The fireworks shot skyward from the barges and then exploded – far below me. I was standing 1,300 feet above the river, and the fireworks peaked at just 800 feet. And the inch-thick windows of the skyscraper blocked out the chest-thumping blasts. So my experience of the 200^th anniversary was of watching lovely silent blooms opening up at my feet more than two football fields away.

A Greater Threat than George III

Looking back, I realize that this was a strangely apt symbol of some of the upside-down progress over the following decades, in which we swung wildly from opposing visions of America as a nation worshiping unfettered greed to one building the “bridge to the twenty-first century.”

The normal impulse of all Americans at the 4^th of July is to take a break from political division and celebrate the over-arching history of commitment to our democratic values. I wish I could do the same. But the more I looked back into our history, the more I considered the legacy of every American who longed and fought and sometimes died for these principles, the more I realized that on this day the defense of America ‘s principles requires a clear denunciation of the leader who is attempting to gut them.

Indeed, fifty years from now, if the United States still exists, Donald Trump will be remembered as a far greater threat to democracy than George III. Why? Because George III inherited his political ideals and, by seeking to crush democracy, he was trying to maintain what was, at the time, a nearly universal system of government. Donald Trump is doing precisely the reverse: through his fundamentally paranoid and false allegations that he was denied the presidency through fraud, he is now relentlessly, obsessively, repulsively seeking to destroy democratic elections in order to elevate himself.

Contrast Trump’s self-aggrandizement to that of the Founders. Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, and the others were pursuing what they knew might be an impossible goal. The stories of Athenian democracy were 23 centuries old. The French Revolution was still thirteen years in the future. Their declaration was more than a dissolution of ties between two countries; it was a repudiation of what, until that time, had been the fundamental laws of human politics.

The Struggle to Build a Republic

When today we look back on the signing of the Declaration from the present, we strip it of its true drama because we know about its eventual triumph. But the signers committed themselves without any knowledge of the difficulties or the outcome ahead. The exuberance of the declaration turned into a merciless grind of battles over eight long years, in which more than 25,000 Americans died in battle, in camps, and on board Britain’s prison ships, which were floating concentration camps anchored in New York harbor. Even after the war ended in 1783, it took another 6 years of ferocious debate among the states to decide on a system of government and then to elect a president under the new system.

When George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, he had no idea how a leader of a Republic should behave. His colleagues admired him greatly but they were also familiar with the Roman accounts of generals being elevated to power as saviors and then seizing absolute power. They had laboriously worked out a constitutional government with complex checks and balances to foil any such attempt, but in the end they knew that the success of the republic would depend on two factors: the values of the American president and the commitment of American citizens.

Should the next chief executive of a republic be treated like a king? George Washington thought no. When Congress furiously debated how to refer to the new chief executive and came up with “His Mightiness,” “His Exalted Highness,” “His Majesty the President,” Washington chose the simplest: “Mr. President.” Under his guidance, presidential gatherings were modest receptions to which any well-dressed person could (in theory) be admitted, Refusing the suggestion that he sit on a throne and require visitors to kneel before him, the new president stood at the center of the room in plain clothes.

Washington’s personal caution, his careful policies, and his unprecedented decision to give up power voluntarily created a powerful precedent for his successors. Presidents, he taught, should exhibit integrity, prudence, temperance, dignity, and humility. They should exemplify self-restraint, magnanimity, dignity, and impartiality. Because he believed that they should avoid even the tiniest appearance of corruption he agonized over whether to accept a pair of shoe buckles from one of his oldest aides. After decades of personal sacrifice, after watching hundreds of earnest young farmers and laborers leave their families only to die under his command, Washington believed that public service required honesty, courage, and an absolute commitment to the duty of serving the people of the land.

Though many presidents have fallen short of this standard, every single one expressed a commitment to such ideals.

Until now.

So despite the understandable desire to paper over the painful realities of our moment in order to find a moment of aspirational unity, true fealty to the Declaration of Independence requires that today we be blunt.

Trump is a Danger and a Disgrace

It is a hideous trick of history that on this day we find ourselves living under the rule of a malignant narcissist who exhibits not a single one of the virtues that ten generations of Americans have believed were essential for the position. In the mumbling drivel of a speech on Teddy Roosevelt that he delivered today in North Dakota, our current president ominously conjured up the dangers of “communism” as the greatest internal threat to democracy. This is false. The greatest internal threat to democracy is Donald Trump.

For a decade we have tried to dance away from the mounting evidence of his gross unfitness, hoping that something or someone would restrain him. We will continue to make the attempt. But we should start by naming what is clear to the world and what will be clear to the incredulous historians who will in future decades try to make sense of the brazen lunacy of his behavior.

By electing Donald Trump we installed a president who bends everything towards himself, meaning that in every public and private action he is self-centered, self-important, self- interested, self-pitying, and self-serving, and self-indulgent. Though psychiatrists are understandably reluctant to diagnose mental illness from afar, almost every mental health professional – including his niece – has suggested that he is a classic sociopath. Sociopaths are controlled by their unrelenting, all-consuming neediness; they view other human beings as objects to be exploited, manipulated, and used for personal gain. Lacking the capacity for empathy or remorse, they view interpersonal relationships as power struggles to achieve dominance towards the fulfillment of their desires.

For ten years we have seen this every time he speaks in public. For him the White House podium has become a “bully pulpit” from which he actually bullies. Whenever he speaks, he sprays his audience with execrable rhetoric, leaving us angry, demoralized, and polarized. His example has encouraged millions of ugly imitators. He is endlessly insulting, openly contemptuous, vengeful, egotistical, racist, and cruel. His pathetic lust for gaudy self-worship is in evidence everywhere. At some level the intensity and desperation of his actions suggest that deep down he knows that he is fighting a losing battle. The tarted-up Oval Office will be restored to modesty; the pathetically scornful “Presidential Walk of Fame” will be stripped off on the day the next occupant is sworn in; and every other of his architectural attempts to anchor himself in American history will either be torn down or will be allowed to remain as stand as cautionary testimonies to his folly. In the months ahead, as he senses time and history closing in, he will only get worse. Like a petulant toddler with nearly unlimited power, he will throw ever more aggressive tantrums as the end of his reign draws near.

As odious as Trump is as a human being, the perversion goes far beyond one of personality. He also has committed crimes. And here is where we must draw guidance and strength the Declaration of Independence. Faced with a raging tyrant, the Declaration of Independence did not try to sugarcoat the situation. They did not evade the question of who was responsible. The answer was the King.

Echoes of Past Abuses

For a few years when my children were young, we chose to honor the 4^th of July be reading the Declaration of Independence aloud. The lengthy recitation of George III’s offenses seemed tediously irrelevant. Today, however, the accusations seem disturbingly contemporary. “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” they wrote.

What did they mean by that? Let’s see if any of these accusations echo in our time. They said that George III had “refused to pass laws that were necessary for the pubic good”; that he had held key measures hostage to his attempts to amass power, that he had disrupted, contested, and sought to dissolve bodies of elected representatives; that he had refused to fill key appointments, tried to block immigration, and “obstructed the laws for the naturalization of foreigners”. They objected that he had created many new offices and “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people,” that he had established new military forces and sent them into the cities; that he had sought immunity for those soldiers when they killed someone; that he had “sent us overseas to be tried on pretended offenses”, and he had tried to “enlarge the boundaries” of other provinces in order to render them “a fit instrument for introducing absolute rule.” We could match every one of these 18^th century accusations to a 21^st century counterpart.

One reason that Trump rejects the principles of the Declaration is that he is utterly ignorant of them. In one of his routine displays of mind-numbing ignorance, he recently proved that had no idea what it contains. After his second inauguration, he asked the National Archives to hang a copy of it on the wall next to his desk, and in 2025 he was asked about it by reporter Terry Moran while he was sitting at the Resolute desk.

“What does it mean to you?” asked Moran.

“Well it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration.” said the 47^th president of the United States. “It’s declaration of unity and love and respect. It means a lot, and it’s something very special to our country.”

In other words he had absolutely no idea.

The Reckoning Ahead

There is every chance, even a likelihood, that just six months from now, his accumulated outrages will be collected and categorized into an encyclopedia of high crimes and misdemeanors. His relentless efforts to subvert our democracy into a monarchy will be adjudicated. The House of Representatives will almost certainly pass articles of impeachment for the third time, and the Senate will be forced to hold a trial.

During those proceedings, we will hear once again in painstaking detail how Trump has cheated every American, including his supporters. It will be shown how he has betrayed everything – his oath of office, the legacy of his predecessors, the inclusive values of democratic life, the basic principles of justice, and the mandates of simple human decency. Perhaps he has dragged and submerged our values so deeply in the mud that we have begun to believe that this is where they must remain. We will need to endure his trial with the knowledge that it must take place if we are to have a hope of restoring our values to the center of civic life.

But in truth final question on this 250^th anniversary is not about Trump. It’s about the rest of us. Because even as we attempt to hold our leaders accountable to our values, we must hold ourselves to them as well.

This was the poignant and majestic truth that Abraham Lincoln affirmed at Gettysburg. We can hardly imagine how he felt standing in front of the sweeping fields on which 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers had been killed or wounded – a number higher than all the casualties of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 combined. In just two minutes and with just 269 words he gave the most important speech in American history. He started by invoking the very same words of the Declaration, declaring that America had been “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The men lying buried in front of him, he said, had already done everything to protect those principles. The real questions was what the living would now do. To honor those who died, all living Americans had to rededicate themselves to the “great task ahead: that America would have a “new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, for the people and by the people should not perish from the earth.”

Embracing Our Duty

The Fourth of July – especially this Fourth of July – should never be reduced to patriotic nostalgia. Instead, it is an annual summons to remember that the American republic has never sustained itself automatically. Every generation has inherited it as an unfinished promise. Every generation must embrace its defense. If we would truly honor Jefferson’s courage, Washington’s restraint, and Lincoln’s sacrifice, then today must become more than a commemoration. It must be, over and over and over again, also be moment of rededication.

Fifty years from now future Americans – if our nation still exists – will look back to see if those of us alive today had learned the lessons of our past well enough to take hold of the present and secure the future. Just as the people of 1776 and every generation since have been called to protect democratic freedom, we must now do so again.

/\/\ END /\/\

American democracy is held together by the reverence we hold for the symbols of our national story -- our Constitution, our flag, our heroes, and our venerated places. One of the most prominent is the White House, a symbol and venue that Donald Trump is once again attempting to seize and pervert.

The White House is not solely a residence or an office. While every president after George Washington has come and gone from its hallways, the building has endured, symbolizing the strength and stability of our republic. The mandatory change of occupants of “the People’s House” on Inauguration Day emphasizes the priority of democracy over personality, stewardship over ownership, and service to, rather than dominance over, the citizens of the United States.

To the innumerable ways in which Donald Trump has sought to overturn those core values, we now must add the appalling defilement of the White House on Sunday, June 14. Our imperial overlord has commanded the construction on the South Lawn of a monstrous octagonal arena designed to fetishize violence, wring profits for its corporate sponsors, and, above all, glorify him. His decision to hold this event on his 80^th birthday, which is also Flag Day, and then to locate the event on one of our most hallowed civic spaces is yet another vile attempt to establish himself as our Dear Leader, worthy of unquestioning and unending veneration.

Picture the scene: on Sunday night, with the White House as backdrop, seven pairs of fighters will be ocked into a specially fabricated octagonal cage, and goaded to beat each other savagely , risking their health and even their lives, in exchange for the promise of financial and personal gain. In a form of “entertainment” reminiscent of both the Roman coliseum and Hunger Games, the cage fighters will punch, kick, knee, smash, and hammer their opponents as aggressively as they can to force them to the floor in submission.

Despite the insistence by promoters that this is a “sport”, the goal is to create as much violence as possible short of gladiatorial death. Senator John McCain was so horrified by what he called “human cockfighting” that he led an unsuccessful national effort in 1996 to have it banned. “Mixed martial arts fighters” are trained in savage assault. They are, for example, permitted to strangle opponents in headlocks so tight that unless the opponent “taps out” they will lose consciousness in less than nine seconds. Inflicting blows to the head and to the chin, wrenching and twisting ankles and elbows past their range, choking and punching key abdominal organs, and drawing blood are all permitted. More than 20 fighters have died, though none so far in matches by United Fighting Championship, the corporate sponsor who paid more than $60,000,000 to hold the event.

These brutal conflicts will take place under the slashing and raking glare of spotlights of a hideous 92 foot tall structure called “The Claw.” The guttural screams of encouragement by more than 4,000 United States soldiers specially chosen for their warrior physiques will echo through the West Wing.

At the start of the event, United States Air Force fight jets will streak over head. And seated in the place of honor, accepting the adulation of his cabinet and of the crowd, will be the President of the United States.

This is a man standing in historical lineage with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan, all leaders with differing views but comparable dignity. Because he has specifically identified this event as the beginning of the 250^th anniversary celebrations of our national founding, he is declaring to the world his vision of America’s values and America’s future.

According to the late Robert Jay Lifton, the historian famous for exploring the psychological distortions in tyrants, the eagerness of dictators to seize control of national images is a form of “symbolic possession” intended to blur the distinction between individuals and the state. Trump’s second term is filled with his endless egomaniacal efforts to put his name on everything – the Kennedy Center (now being reversed), the Institute of Peace, Dulles Airport, our passports, our admission cards to national parks, our government checks, our coins and dollar bills, as well as the Trump prescription plan and the corrupt Trump Gold Card that buys admission to the US – are all efforts to install himself as the embodiment of the United States.

With his recent words and deeds, Donald Trump is actually exposing a heightened sense of desperation. The rest of us know what he cannot admit – that his public antics are vain attempts (in both senses of the word) to stave off his insecurity and his terror at the inevitability and eradication of death. As Donald Trump’s physical, mental, and moral decline more rapidly, our inner and outer resistance must increase.

We cannot passively accept it when our most precious civic symbols are being transformed into self-aggrandizing spectacle. Indeed, lurid spectacle was one of the main weapons in Rome’s transformation from republic to empire. One of the most nakedly perverse practitioners was Nero, who became emperor at age 16 and who, over the next 14 years, caused the deaths of his mother, wife, tutor, leading Senators, hundreds of Christians, and countless others.

In the midst of all this carnage, Nero organized numerous theatrical, musical, and athletic competitions. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Nero did not merely compete; he arranged the festivals, selected the judges, commanded the audience, collected the prizes, and then celebrated his victories. He “won” the Olympic chariot race even though his chariot with ten horses overturned, on the grounds that he would have been victorious if he had finished the face. If Nero had had social media at his disposal, we can imagine him writing some very similar to Trump’s recent self-assessment on Truth Social:

So I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”

In the future, we must remember this betrayal of a hallowed national space and, through legislation, forbid its recurrence. The White House is not and never has been simply the residence of a president. It belongs to no individual, no political party, and no administration. Over more than two centuries it has served as the workplace and temporary home of presidents who came and went while the institution endured. It symbolizes continuity rather than personality, stewardship rather than ownership.

As he sits in his imperial chair on Sunday night, Donald Trump may entertain the idea that he has succeeded in establishing himself as the central figure of American life and history. But he will only have done so in the negative, by reminding us of the perversion of his values. Democratic societies, no less than religious traditions, depend upon places invested with shared meaning. Arlington National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Independence Hall, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, and the White House derive their significance from the sacrifices and aspirations of generations of Americans who believed in something greater than themselves.

As Donald Trump’s public words and deeds have proven, tragically for him and for us, this is a virtue about which he knows nothing.

I returned last month from 11 days in France and Switzerland which provided an urgently needed reprieve from the bombardment of heinous moral and political offenses being committed by Trump and his minions in the name of the United States of America. We love returning there because both Anne and I spent important parts of our youths separately walking those intoxicating streets, I from the ages of 12 to 16 when I attended a French high school and she when she was 19 on her junior year abroad. We stayed within a block of her old apartment in the Place Maubert in the Latin Quarter and ate twice in our favorite restaurant, La Petite Perigourdine, which is so resolutely committed to its local clientele that it has wall-mounted cubbyholes in which their regulars keep their napkins.

When I was a restless young teenager I took advantage of my parents’ light oversight to wander to as many distant corners of the city as I could find. On weekends I would regularly pick a random Metro line and travel to the very end in order to pop up, gopher-like, to see what kind of world existed in those peripheries. It turns out that Anne and her roommate, barely five years later, did exactly the same thing. On many occasions at the time I burrowed into the back pages of old guidebooks and deliberately sought out the most obscure museums where I happily wandered through their dingy, empty halls. I discovered innumerable dusty exhibits of old furniture, rigidly embroidered costumes, poofy hats, steel weapons, and meticulously constructed miniature models of 100 gun vaisseaux de ligne with such finely threaded rigging that it snared small bugs. On every such visit I felt the same perverse fascination that one has looking through the crammed contents of hundred year old attics, which, in some cases, is exactly what they were.

On our first trip to Paris I had discovered to my surprise that Anne knew her way around far better than me, despite having lived in the city for less than a quarter of the time. I knew my neighborhood; she seemed to have memorized all of the little red book of maps known as the “Plan de Paris” (sadly now extinct because of cell phones)

Anne, as an architect, has never lost her love of exploring cities for hours on foot, something I enjoyed doing with her until I lost the ability to walk about seven years ago. Now when we travel to new cities I have happily urged her to go ahead anyway, to embrace that love, and to venture out for long pedestrian explorations, returning with a harvest of photographs. But sitting in Paris in a wheelchair, I felt a twinge of sadness. Again I must let her go, I thought, this is her passion; I will free her to pursue her pedestrian explorations without me. (Dramatic sigh)

Anne refused to accept my noble sacrifice. On this trip

she invariably detected my anxiety that she saw me as an embarrassment. I had allowed myself to imagine that the Parisians we encountered would wonder with sorrow how this beautiful woman had ended up doomed to pushing around this aged lump of a man.

When I mumbled such self-pitying comments she listened to me for a full minute and then told me to shut the fuck up. She was not, she explained, going to let me deny her the chance to do what she loves with the man that she loves.

So off we went with her pushing me for miles and miles … and it was wonderful. And I was the one who learned, again, that when joy has shown up at one’s entrance, it is perverse and selfish to slam the door in its face.

On a previous trip she had pushed me for so many miles that we blew out the tires on the wheelchair. This time we were granted four glorious days of blue sky and we travelled for miles from our hotel to the Musee d’Orsay for the Renoir exhibit, to the wonderfully restored sanctuary of Notre Dame, to our favorite restaurants, and to meet long-lost friends for additional meals (you eat a lot in Paris!). Over four days we only took a taxi once.

One day, on the advice of a beloved French friend with whom I had gone to high school fifty years ago, we visited what we thought would be another exhibit of old furniture in a palace, in this case the Hotel de la Marine. If you have ever seen a picture of the Place de la Concorde in Paris from the south, you have seen this building. It was built in the last decades of the Bourbon monarchy, when the city decided in 1748 to place a statue of King Louis XV. As the online description relates,

After much hesitation, King Louis XV gave a site that belonged to him in the west of the city, near the Tuileries garden. After five years of debate, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, First Architect of the King, who synthesized the various projects to create the final plans of the future Place Louis XV... The sculpture of the monarch [would] represent him in the Roman style, i.e. riding without a saddle and without stirrups.

It is charmingly defensive to present the King as a reluctant participant who agreed only “after much hesitation.” But perhaps it is true that even in the time of absolute monarchy in France it was considered tacky for a king to clamor personally for public statues, gaudy ballrooms, and laughably huge triumphal arches.

In 1765 the building opened (see below, on the right) and it quickly became the headquarters of the Garde Meuble de la Couronne, a kind of super warehouse (with twelve massive frontal columns) that collected and processed all of the furniture in the king’s many palaces. They had to procure (and when necessary repair) every table, chair, bed, mirror, dresser, and other royal piece of furniture, for every one of the 403 rooms in the Louvre just down the street. As well as the 2,300 rooms at Versailles. And the innumerable other rooms at all the other royal palaces at Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Marly, Choisy, Trianon, Rambouillet, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Montreuil.

The huge Hotel included “storage spots, workshops, places for the staff to live, galleries for showing things off, and even a living room with a chapel.” Hundreds of staff took charge of selecting, purchasing, storing, and maintaining the king’s furniture, as well as “making sure the royal collections of weapons and armor, fabrics and wall hangings, vases of hard stones, bronzes, and the Crown’s diamonds, kitchenware, and household linen were all in good shape.” The various aristocrats who ran this enterprise lived on the premises in lavishly decorated apartment decorated with gold, illuminated by huge crystal chandeliers, where they were attended by dozens of royal servants. All at public expense. This excess accumulated gradually, over centuries, as each successive monarch believed that it was his right and his duty to his country to exceed the glories of his father and grandfather.’

In 1789, the United States took a huge step in the establishment of democratic government when, in June, the New Hampshire legislature passed the final bill that ratified the new Constitution. By contrast, just three weeks later, the social structures of France exploded with the attack at the king’s prison, the Bastille.

Even here the Hotel de la Marine played a part. It is said that the first cannon shots fired at the Bastille on July 13 were mounted on silver damascene mounts given by the King of Siam to Louis the XIV in 1764 that were stolen the day before from the Garde Meuble. On July 14, the seizing of the Bastille unleashed centuries of murderous and uncontrollable rage.

Many died in 1789, but the full blood lust did not reach its peak until five years later. Executions had been taking place all over Paris, especially in the vast public square directly in front of the Hotel de la Marine where the statue of King of Louis XV had stood. In October 1792 a new device, the “guillotine” was installed in the square, named after Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who was horrified at this name since he opposed the death penalty and had only recommended the device as a more humane method than hanging.

The frenzy of executions reached a peak in the summer of 1794 with more than 1,100 people being put to death at an industrial pace – including Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Danton, and Robespierre. Eventually cattle on their way to nearby markets veered away in panic at the putrid stench of the vast puddles of blood and refused to cross the ground.

The columned balcony of the Garde Meuble provided a front row view of these public executions. Looking out over the enormous plaza, I kept thinking that one would have hoped that humanity would learn permanently from these horrors. Orgies of wealth can trigger orgies of rage and violence. We seem to retain this knowledge for a generation, maybe two. Then memories fade, and the dazzling lights return, and the systematic accumulation of extreme wealth moves from being odious to virtuous, and we learn to swallow all the justifications for the existence of today’s floating palaces - the world’s 6,000 superyachts, the largest of which are floating versions of Versailles that cost an average of $1 billion each. For a toy.

The greatest challenge of the 21^st century is whether the human species – each of us individually and all of us together – will grow in sufficient wisdom and moral strength to identify and resist the illusions that have destroyed so many of our ancestors. One of the greatest of such illusions is that the amassing of immense wealth -- in defiance of justice and fairness, in defiance of all human and planetary need -- can be pursued forever without conscience or consequence. Some of those who seek dominance over America and over the world still believe this. It is for this reason that we need new revolutionaries to block new tyrants, following not the model of the French, but of the American revolutionaries we will be remembering in just three months.

/\/\/\ END /\/\

Back in the ‘90s, when I was a lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, I had a senior colleague in the ethics department who taught primarily about social manners. Though I appreciated that he had been a gracious advocate for my hiring, I thought his focus was trivial. For me, the proper focus of ethics -- and particularly Christian ethics taught in a school of theology -- should be on society’s great moral questions: war and peace, slavery and freedom, love and hate – not tips on etiquette. How could the petty rules of politesse advance the cause of a just and sustainable society?

I doubted they could. They seemed stuffy, old-fashioned, and confining. My immigrant Swiss grandparents, who were warm and genial in so many ways, had also made sure that my sisters and I were schooled in their old country propriety. Children should be seen but not heard. When introduced to an adult, we were to shake their hand firmly and look them straight in the eyes. One should thank people in writing after receiving gifts. When having dinner at their modest home in Philadelphia, women were often served before men, (except for my grandmother, who was doing the serving) and then older family members before younger ones, which meant that as the youngest boy I was often served last. This did not bother me. It was a particular hierarchy of respect, and it seemed right.

I entered Princeton University as a freshman in 1974, in the backwash of the 1960s. My friends and classmates generally viewed etiquette as picky, fussy, and pointless. As a generation we were heavily soaked in the remnants of hippy culture. Clothing was ideally hand-crafted and unique. Language should be straightforward, emotions direct. We had been told not to trust anyone over 30, so why would we consider adopting their behaviors?

Many of my politically active peers condemned etiquette as an elaborate system through which the rich and powerful tried to instill deference, even subservience, in those of lower station. Differences of grooming, clothing, possessions, and diction could be exploited to reveal social superiority. Over the years many works of popular fiction – from Age of Innocence, to My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman, and eventually Titanic -- have centered on the exposure and humiliation that awaited those who betrayed their lower class origins through their inability to say or do something “correctly”

For many, the essence of American culture – of American freedom – could be found in the exhilaration felt by immigrants and working people when they realized that such structures of condemnation did not exist to the same degree as in their countries of origin. From the beginning of the Republic, informality of language and dress signaled liberation. American politicians adopted plain dress and plain speaking as signs of their commitment to egalitarian ideals. This is why Benjamin Franklin wore a fur hat at French parties and royal gatherings and why Thomas Jefferson wore rough corduroy and surprised visitors by answering the front door of the White House himself.

In the 20^th century many white American men signaled their strength, virility, and authenticity through defiance. Mid-century television shows offered a parade of rebellious heroes who challenged the hypocrisies of the wealthy, mocked the false propriety of institutions, and celebrated the idea that authenticity outranked courtesy. Cultural figures like Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Dennis Hopper, and Norman Mailer (to name a few among many) made being obnoxious seem strong, brave and sexy.

This is the world that Donald Trump grew up in and, like with everything else, he embraced its lessons in their most perverse form. As a malignant narcissist he translated the stoic independence of the old Hollywood heroes like Gary Cooper or Paul Newman or John Wayne into an image of maniacal dominance. Seeing any signs of politeness or respect as weakness, he has for his entire life exulted in the language of insult, degradation, racism, and humiliation. His opponents are “crooked,” “lying”, “sleepy”, “sloppy”. Those who oppose him “demented”, “retarded”, “mentally deranged”, “lunatics”, “haters”, “losers”, and “garbage.” He has taken special pleasure in insulting women, referring to them as “fat pigs,” “disgusting”, “horrible”, “mean”, “mentally impaired,” “lethargic”, “bums”, “pathetic”, “f***ing bad”, “nasty” , “third-rate”, “crazed”, a “lowlife”, “low IQ”, and “filthy, dirty, and disgusting”.

While we are being carried out to sea by a tide of such excrement, it can be hard to find and hold on to the anchor of decency. But because humans, as a species, are so relentlessly adaptable, we have ended up normalizing the unacceptable and the unthinkable even when we do not wish to. We can confirm this with a simple thought experiment: how would any American have reacted if any of the previous presidents of the last 50 years – Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, or Gerald Ford – had ever used a single one of these terms in public?

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A solitary incident would have been profoundly shocking, stirring indignation from across the political spectrum. Something as abstract as plagiarism could mean political death; Joe Biden was forced out of the 1988 race for president when he was accused of borrowing a few phrases from a British politician. If Trump’ s predecessors of either party had spoken this way during their candidacies, they would have lost their elections. A recurring use of such language would have been clear evidence of their mental illness and led to their exclusion from public life. Yet today we have a president who, in debasing himself, has debased all of us – in part because it has been so impossibly difficult to sustain our outrage.

At the beginning of his march to power, some found Trump’s rancid language thrilling and honest, because he seemed willing to say what others would not, fight back against critics who had attacked him, and break the shackles of convention that restrained him. Now what I find particularly horrifying is how many Americans continue – and mimic -- his behavior with such ugly glee. Like Trump, they have accelerated already perverted and stale gestures of male strength and authenticity into the blood sport of “owning the libs.”

So what should be our response? Every day I feel the temptation to react in kind – to sate my rage and hurl endless insults back at Trump and at all of those who are exuberantly gutting our deepest political and social values. Even in this piece, I am somewhat giving in. For ten years, I have had to control the nausea, fury, and despair that invade my body when I read the news. I want to scream into the sky in equally vile and repulsive terms.

But such a simplistic response is dangerous. It can drain our energy and destroy our effectiveness. Instead, we need to dig down and find the profound moral stamina and solidarity for what is still to come. As Donald Trump’s mental health continues to decline, and his desperation rises, there will be more terrible, destructive, even murderous events.. At this “time of testing”, we need to channel our energy into fortifying our inner resilience for the mid-term battles and beyond.

And this, surprisingly, brings us all the way back to my colleague’s courses at Harvard Divinity School more than 35 years ago. In addition to our grand goals, we also need to monitor and to cultivate our ability to convey respect, compassion, dignity, and generosity in our small daily interactions with each other. Even great cathedrals are built stone by stone. This is one meaning of the call to “be the change we want to see.”

I believe that while our lives must ultimately be guided by deep commitments that can lead over rocky paths for many years, the actual fabric of those years must be woven from tens of thousands of small acts of appreciation and humanity. By learning the customs of each other’s homes or communities, addressing people as they wish to be addressed, by noticing and complimenting other’s virtues and generosity, we acknowledge not just the effort made by others but their very existence. Every time we do that we strengthen who we are and what we can achieve – and endure – collectively.

The single most important thing we can say to each other is “thank you.” When we thank another person, we are acknowledging that their act was freely given – not owed or compelled, not demanded or extracted, but an action offered up as an expression of love and respect. The Northern European words “danke”, “tak”, and “thank you” are rooted in the idea of recognition, as in “we are thinking (thanking) of you.” But the Southern European words – “gracias”, “grazie” – come from “gratia” – the Latin word for “grace.” In my theology, grace, the act of freely giving, is the most powerful force in the universe, because it is linked to the very root of existence.

How we greet and treat each other thus is not trivial; it matters more than we imagine. It is revealing that the old-fashioned term for employing respect, kindness, and attentiveness in social situations was the “social graces.”

In this era we have been brought horribly close to the brink of civic and moral death by millions of malevolent attacks. But that’s not the end of the story. We can defend ourselves -- and even heal ourselves -- by eagerly participating in the galaxy of tiny, daily acts of grace that have the power to mend the world.

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Today American democracy is under potentially fatal attack. The hammer blows to our sense of rationality and decency from Donald Trump and his shameless minions now strike daily. His masked stormtroopers smashing in doors, his cruel indifference to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, his bullying threat to seize Greenland from a devoted ally by force, his pathetic obsession to name everything after himself, his filthy portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama, and his unconstitutional threat to “nationalize” elections in 15 Democratic states are revolting actions that have all been crammed into barely a month.

As someone who watched his mother descend slowly over five years into the misery and madness of vascular dementia, I see something similar – but much, much more frightening. As an old saying goes, “if you want to know where you are going, look where you are headed.” More deranged and dangerous actions with horrific consequences lie ahead.

We must thus become even stronger and more resolute to endure this “time of testing.” We now need to cultivate the resilient mindsets and practices that will allow us to prevail. If we do not, we risk exhaustion, cynicism, and moral collapse.

How can we build an inner strength that can be renewed daily and stiffen our spines for action? I propose that we adopt a “waltz of resistance” made of three steps – step up , step forward, and step back. This measured, elegant, and dignified dance, unfolding over and over and over, can serve as our guide. Following these three we can create rhythm without frenzy, grace without rage, and movement with magnificent endurance.

1) Step UP: The Moment of Decision

To step into a dance, we must first be willing to open our eyes and ears and minds to the music that beckons. When we then rise from our chairs to join the waltz of resistance, we are making a small but profound decision. ‘I am not withdrawing in despair, I am not embracing the false safety of detachment,” we are saying, “I am engaging. I am ready to join others. I am crossing the line from inaction to engagement.”

To Step UP is not to remain perpetually inflamed. It is about choosing to care—again and again. It is the moment when you let the music flood you with the moral seriousness of the moment, the stakes for real people, the fragility of democratic institutions that only function if enough citizens show up to honor and protect it.

When we Step UP, we resist the posture of ironic distance, the temptation to say “it’s all corrupt anyway,” or “nothing I do will matter.” Those responses may feel sophisticated, but they are crippling. But the decision to Step Up is only the beginning. It is ignition, not combustion. We Step Up in order to advance — not to remain permanently in a state of alarm.

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2) Step FORWARD: Entering the Swirl

Once standing, we must move. Not perfectly. Not heroically. Just forward.

This is the step that many people overcomplicate. We wait for an invitation, an optimal strategy, an ideal partner, a perfect moment. We think that because we are busy and tired or completely inadequate, others will “do it better.”

“Step Forward “rejects the myth that only large, visible actions count. It affirms a simpler truth: agency is a muscle, and it strengthens with use. You learn to do one thing and it leads to another. You do one and then teach one. You propose what you think is a foolish idea and it goes viral.

For more than a decade in the 1980s and ‘90s, while writing Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid, my history of the South African divestment movement, I gathered gathering evidence of hundreds of seemingly small and remote actions of protest. Though they were mocked at the time as hopelessly ineffectual, these actions – combined with the immense bravery and determination of South Africans themselves – led directly to the elections that elevated Nelson Mandela to serve as president in 1994. In my last chapter I wrote that

this narrative offers a word of hope. It demonstrates that acts of protest and conscience, so often dismissed as pointless, can gradually accumulate into an irresistible force for change. It suggests, in an era when people free overwhelmed by the power of elites, that social transformation can take place from below.

Just as 40 years ago millions fought to support democracy in South Africa, millions are now fighting to protect democracy in America. In Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Memphis, and dozens of other cities (including my hometown of Somerville, Massachusetts) thousands and thousands have stepped up and stepped forward, day after day, often in brutally cold weather.

There are an almost infinite number of ways to step forward into the dance. It might start small, when we make a call, write a letter, show up to a meeting, support a journalist, feed a neighbor, or back a local organizer. It might mean having a difficult but honest conversation, saying “this is wrong” out loud, when silence would be easier.

We step forward into the dance because action overcomes despair. Action gives a sense of direction and places us back inside the swirl history rather than allowing history to waltz by without us.

3) Step BACK: Catching You Breath

After we act, we must also remember to Step Back. Not in retreat, but in renewal. We can return to the sources of strength that are deeper than politics: spiritual practice, rest, beauty, friendship, reflection, and care of the body. Without this step, our engagement could into bitterness. Exhausted people lose generosity, humor, patience, and perspective.

To Step BACK we may turn to prayer or meditation. It may mean walking without headphones. It may mean reading history to regain temporal perspective, or philosophy to regain moral clarity. It may mean laughter, music, sleep, or simply doing something that reminds you that you are a valued being, a child of God, a unique and embodied soul gaining strength to protect others.

To Step BACK we can identify doom-scrolling as false vigilance. We can reject the illusion that constant attention equals commitment. We honor our physical and emotional limits by remembering that rest is not a luxury, but a responsibility — because burned-out citizens cannot sustain a democracy.

The Power Is in the Repetition of the Cycle

Each step – up, forward, back -- matters. But none of them stands alone. The strength of the practice lies in its repetition. Over time, as the rhythm steadies, our movements become more confident, less frantic. As we join together and learn from each other when to engage and when to rest, we see that hope comes from discipline. It is generated not by the certainty of victory, but by the refusal to surrender one’s agency or humanity.

Democracy has always depended on ordinary people – not saints or heroes -- who found ways to stay upright over long periods of stress. Many of you are already part of that honorable legion, people who learned how to step up, step forward, and step back—again and again. This is an invitation to you and to those to whom you pass it on to persist without failure and without fear.

In the very last two sentences of my 700 page book I tried to summarize the lessons of the South African story, both here and abroad. I believe they apply today even more than when I wrote them in 1997:

Action counters our sense of futility by reminding us that amazing changes can and do take place in history – and that they depend not only the evolution of impersonal forces but also on human imagination and commitment.

We have control over our ideas, our ideas have material consequences, and in the end, as a people, we become what we believe.

If we believe in democracy, and if we want to protect it for our children, now is the moment to rise and enter the dance.

/\/\ END /\/\

PLEASE SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS:

How are you stepping up, stepping forward, and stepping back?

What actions and experiences can you share as encouragement?

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MUSICAL CODA AND WORD OF ENCOURAGEMENT

This is Tim Grim performed his song “Broken Truth” on January 20 at the Pigpen Bar in San Antonio, Texas. Please watch it all the way to end to see what happens. It caused me, and my wife, and my sister, and many, many others to burst into tear. It has received more than 1,000,000 views online.

During his powerful, rebellious, but unsuccessful campaign for the 2004 Democratic nomination for president, Dr. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, ignited an unpredicted torrent of grassroots energy. This, in combination with the still-new technology of the Internet, utterly transformed political fundraising as Dean bypassed the traditional network of big donors and bundlers and instead raised hundreds of thousands and then millions of dollars in small donations online.

In February 2005, a month after George W. Bush’s inauguration to a second term Dean was elected chair of the national Democratic Party. Convinced that Democrats could find victories even in deep red communities, he immediately launched a “fifty-state strategy” whose objective was to build up party infrastructure and recruit strong Democratic candidates for every position at every level in every state. As part of that effort, Dean spent months sweeping across the country, stopping in traditional Democratic strongholds to meet with party leaders and major donors. Even though I did not really qualify as either one, I had been the nominee for lieutenant governor a decade earlier and so I was somehow invited to a meeting with him.

When I arrived with Anne, I found a room with a very long table surrounded by about two dozen chairs. I chose a spot in the middle of the table, figuring that Dean and the other genuine party bigwigs would sit at the end and I would be suitably lost in the crowd. When Dean arrived, however, he marched all the way around the end of the long table and placed himself on the side in a seat only a few feet directly across from me After the introductions he stood up and gave a powerful description of the 50-state strategy which he concluded by exhorting us to get on board with our time and money. The participants around the table seemed receptive. I thought it made sense.

Dean then took questions. People asked him practical details about the implementation of the strategy – how much it would cost, how it would unfold, what the challenges were, and how they could best help. My mind, however, was on a different track. I was still furious about the disgusting strategy that the Republicans had used to smear John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president who had lost to Bush.

Kerry’s distinguished combat service in Vietnam, which had earned him three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star had been one of his strongest qualifications for office, particularly in contrast to the incumbent George W. Bush, whose own military service as a pilot in the Air National Guard had been attacked as suspiciously light.

To counter this, Texas homebuilder homebuilder Bob Perry sank $4.4 million into a 527 political advocacy group known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. SBVT published a slash-and-burn book, Unfit for Command, that falsely accused Kerry of cheating about his record and exaggerating his wounds in order to win his medals. Starting in the summer of 2004, the group sank millions of TV dollars to promote these vicious – and eventually discredited – accusations in swing states, which helped cut Kerry’s lead in the last few weeks of the campaign and played a major role in his final loss.

Strangely, Anne and I had had a direct experience with the impact of these ads up in Maine. We had stopped at an outdoor seafood place along the coast and carried our trays of food to a picnic table overlooking the water. While eating our lunch, we began to overhear the conversation taking place among half a dozen middle-aged women at the table next to us. They were discussing the Swift Boat accusations and heaping scorn on Kerry. Anne and I, who had known John Kerry personally for more than a decade, were outraged, and we debated whether to interrupt them, to tell them about our friendship with Kerry, and to rebuke them for repeating falsehoods. But the claims were so absurd – and our desire to get into an argument so low – that we left without confronting them. I regret that decision to this day.

So, barely a year later, sitting in front of Dean, I wanted to know how he was going to move past the question of tactics to the deeper question of America’s identity. Near the very end of the conversation, I raised my hand. He pointed at me.

“I have two questions, Governor Dean, and you can choose to answer either one. The first is: what is the purpose of America?”

He looked slightly surprised.

“Or, if you prefer, why do you love America?”

He chuckled nervously. “Wow, I’d like to get back to you about those in a couple of months!”

I felt irritated. The man had spent almost a year running for president of the United States during which he answered hundreds of questions. Surely, he could come up with something to say about this!

“I would prefer that you answered right now,” I said as evenly as I could.

He flashed a look of exasperation.

“Okay,” he said, and then launched into his answer.

Within the first two sentences I realized that he was answering a different question than the one I had asked. I had asked “what is the purpose of America?” and he was answering “what is the purpose of government?” So, combining elements of FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and his own policy preferences, he ably addressed the duty of government to address large-scale public problems and to help ensure that Americans had the basic building blocks of a decent life. When he finished, he looked straight at me.

“Is that okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

But I meant “no.” We were clearly at the end of the meeting, and I didn’t want to stretch his patience, or that of the other participants, who were already looking at me with skepticism, any further.

To be clear, I liked Howard Dean. Although I had supported John Kerry during the primaries, I genuinely appreciated that fresh energy he had brought to American politics. I had friends who were as passionate about his candidacy as they were about Bernie Sanders’ effort twelve years later. And I remembered how arrogantly dismissive and shocked the stodgy Democratic mega-donors were with Dean’s fundraising over the internet. Dean democratized political fund-raising in a way that has fundamentally changed American politics ever since, mostly for the better.

At the same time, I could not escape the conclusion that he had no internal resources through which to answer my question. This confirmed my growing suspicion that there was a serious problem with “progressive patriotism.” Whereas nearly a century ago the noisy, roiling coalition that had constituted the Democratic Party since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had brought together scores of factions who were united, more than anything, by one core conviction: that American democracy was a major innovation in the history of humanity.

Roosevelt believed that the United States could avoid the twin tyrannies of fascism and communism by guaranteeing the four freedoms (freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear) and by pursuing an economic bill of rights (a right to a good education, housing, and healthcare, and protection from old age, sickness, and unemployment). This was not only a national purpose, but, by showing that democracy could generate such benefits, an international one as well.

In recent years, American leaders of both parties and from civil society have continued to stress that the United States has had a compelling and legitimately beautiful vision; the problem is that that this vision has been unrealized, overlooked, and neglected. As Martin Luther King said in his “I Have a Dream” speech:

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note… Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

In the last decades the sense that the ideals that Roosevelt and King articulated have remained out of reach has created deeper and deeper frustration, and that frustration in turn has spawned a growing cynicism not only about whether they can be achieved, but about whether they ever actually mattered to anyone. And with that cynicism has come rising anger, fueled by the apparent inaction, corruption, and hypocrisy of every branch of government.

Yet it is vital to remember that cynicism is, in truth, the bitter reaction of betrayed idealists. Though the cynic withdraws into a cave of grievance and accusation, there remains, buried in many of their hearts, the hope that one day their trust and confidence will be restored. One day, they yearn, someone will come along and give voice not only to their frustration but to their foiled desire to express and to feel love for their country. The notion that the key to the future is to go back to an idyllic moment of purity and innocence is one of our deepest unspoken human creeds – all we need is to go back to the founders, back to the early church, back to the Garden of Eden before we were cast out.

Donald Trump realized that he could shamelessly exploit this rage and nostalgic longing for a time of innocence and pride with an ocean of lies that would unleash militaristic fury in support of his malevolent drive for power. As he did so, Democrats – and particular progressive Democrats – had nothing with which to counter it. Despite the efforts by Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris to parade men and women in uniform across an ocean of red, white, and blue bunting at her convention, Democratic patriotism often seemed contrived, even when it was not.

So the question, which I intend to explore in posts to come, is what do we do now? And we might begin to discover our answers by asking ourselves similar questions to the ones I posted to Howard Dean. I hope I will hear from some of you.

Do you believe that America, born of a historically revolutionary innovation in offering power to the people, still has a purpose -- and, if so, what is it?

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More than a dozen years ago I served on the Dean’s Advisory board of Yale Divinity School, from which I received a master’s degree in 1982. In 2012, the university appointed a new dean, Gregory Sterling, a New Testament scholar and former head of the Graduate School at Notre Dame. When he arrived at YDS he faced a host of challenges, including the mundane task of erecting new student housing.

For institutional leaders, such building projects are often time-consuming, tedious, and thankless. They require enormous amounts of time, money, and debate; they are complicated to manage and prone to cost overruns; and they provide such a basic service that, once built, they fade into obscurity. Sterling wondered how he could do something that might show vision and leadership and make a bold statement about the future of theological education.

In a phone conversation with Christopher Sawyer, a distinguished environmental lawyer from Atlanta and chair of the board, Sterling asked what they could do to make the building more sustainable. Sawyer immediately sent him an article about an electrifying new concept known as the Living Building Challenge, in which the goal was to build something not just sustainable, but regenerative. As soon he has read the article, Sterling knew he had his visionary idea. Shortly afterwards he presented it to the Advisory Council.

I remembered being startled. Since I am married to Anne Tate, a professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, I knew a little bit about the history and stringency of the concept. Conceived by Jason F. MeClennan in 2006, the Living Building certifications requires that buildings generate all of their electricity and meet their water demand onsite. It also barred the use of toxic “Red-List” materials and chemicals; evaluated and limited the carbon emissions of procurement and constructions; and required the implementation of building techniques and processing technology that were in their infancy. More than that, it embraced the idea that buildings should be designed for community, creating places for conversation, connection, reflection, and peace.

As someone who has been dreaming for forty years of the day when the world’s religious traditions would truly wake up to the glory of (and responsibility for) the gift of creation, I realized saw how such a building it might transform not only the students who lived there, but also the guests, faculty, alumni, university and public officials who would visit. Its very existence would stand as an invitation and a challenge to the whole of theological education, and even, perhaps, the whole of the world.

But the dream came with an immense price tag. And huge barriers. When Anne and I met with the architects at Bruner/Cott at a very early stage, I felt some anxiety at the project’s difficulties and ambition. There were less than ten such buildings on the planet, none of this size or us type at a university. It would require the coordination of scores of experts across a huge expanse of disciplines throughout a decade pf political, economic, and institutional convulsions, including, it turned out, a pandemic that killed more than one million Americans. It had to remain a central priority of a tight group of leaders, including the dean, the chair of the board, and the president of Yale. And they had to find the money.

Over the ensuing years the project drifted to the edge of my awareness. I worried that even I though the university had approved it and the dean had hired a small army of professionals, it seemed as though ten years of intense negotiation, planning, and fund-raising had yielded a mountain of drawings but no finished building.

Until last week.

On Monday, October 6, I returned to New Haven for the annual ritual of Convocation, a yearly YDS gathering in which alumni return to campus, attend prestigious lectures, reminisce about the past, and learn about the present – and future – of the institution. This year’s gathering included a showcasing of Yale University’s Forum on Religion and Ecology, led by the world-famous advocates and scholars, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim.

And on that first day, bathed in the golden sunlight of a perfect autumn afternoon several hundred students, alumni, faculty, clergy, deans, donors, architects, university officials, engineers, construction workers, landscape designers, and local neighbors watched with pride and astonishment as Dean Sterling and the new president of Yale University, Maurie McInnis, officially dedicated the Living Village, a magnificent new home for dozens of students directly across the traditional campus built in 1929.

The details are exceptional. Designed to “give back more than it takes,” as Yale President Maure McInnes put it, the Living Village’s network of solar shingles and panels will generate 10% more energy than it uses, with the surplus helping to offset energy demand from the rest of the divinity school’s campus. Water is handled in three forms – rainwater harvesting, waste water treatment and reuse, and storm water infiltration. To capture the rain, 300,000 gallons of runoff from the large roofs travel down open rain chains, which are centuries-old systems of open down-spouts, and eventually are stored in two huge, buried cisterns.

The water filtration systems for waste water interweave lessons of basic chemistry, high-tech hydrology, and deep knowledge of natural biological nutrients and botanical systems into startling new approaches to building design and resource use. As a result, an additional 900,000 gallons of wastewater can be treated onsite and be used as greywater for flushing toilets, washing clothes, and providing drip irrigation for some of the 100,000 new plants and trees that cover the 4.5 acre site. And the third form of water – the sometimes overpowering storm surges that occur during increasingly frequent storm systems – can be tamed, gathered, and channeled into strategically placed pools, rain gardens, weirs, and bioswales, all of which prepare the water to be reabsorbed into the ground water.

Every aspect of the design, financing, and construction of the Living Village required imagination and innovation. The thousands of ideas that flowed from the knowledge and creativity of hundreds of professionals had to be coordinated by a series of interlocking teams from many firms and many parts of the university over more than a decade. “I have to learn many dialects,” said Jason Jewhurst, a partner with Bruner/Cott architects and the lead coordinating architect on the project, “I have to learn the dialect of my structural engineers… I have to be able to speak to a provider of public health through a water system or to an energy utility to understand their needs."

For a time lapse video of the two years of construction, click here.

From the beginning, Jewhurst and all the design teams sought to honor and implement seven guiding principles, symbolized by a flower motif with seven petals that appeared everywhere on the campus: Place, Water, Energy, Health & Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty.

“We shape our buildings,” said Winston Churchill in 1943, “and afterwards they shape us.” This was the goal of the Living Village — and now it is the result. The building – with its living spaces, common kitchens and meeting spaces, its spacious light-flooded halls and restful pockets of water and plants — is carefully designed to encourage rich new forms of community. The students in every corridor and room – even in the lowest part of the basement – are breathing constant waves of fresh air, from which they are taking inspiration, in both the biological and spiritual sense.“ According to Jason Jewhurst, this was always the intention. The building "asks a deeper question,” he said, “in this moment, on this campus, in these spaces, how do you respond to the responsibility you have now?” “It’s sort of a whisper,” he concluded, “it’s a quiet understanding or resonance or mindfulness about how we live as people.”

Such projects have even more value today in our current grim American era when raw and illegitimate power is being used to try to force us backwards into so many discreditedn and damaging methods for doing just about everything. The Living Village is a light and airy rebuke to such dark and dank thinking. Thanks to Greg Sterling, to the lead donors Carol and George Bauer, and to those who came together over a decade of sustained effort, the Living Village will stand for the next century as a powerful testament to what cooperation, tenacity, vision, and hope can truly achieve.

“Maybe we are succeeding in reversing Joni Mitchell’s song,” joked Greg Sterling on the opening day, “because we dug up a parking lot to try to build paradise.”

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To watch Dean Gregory Sterling’s dedication speech, click below

Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the president, characterized the current moment in America as a battle between “family and nature” and those who celebrate “everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.”

He said the “fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology.”

The New York Times, September 13, 2025

Though it has been 243 days since Donald Trump became president, most of us are waking up only now to the reality of the second Trump Administration is already much, much worse than we had anticipated.

Though thousands of voices – including mine – warned of a full-fledged assault on every aspect of American democracy, most of us hoped that this would never actually take place, either because the election would turn out differently or because we could not imagine that a single person could trash America’s most fundamental values so rapidly and thoroughly.

As Stephen Bannon often said, the key to taking control of America was to launch broad and radical changes with such overwhelming “muzzle velocity,” (to use his revealing phrase) that Americans will be reduced to a state of shock. I think they have succeeded – up until now.

This is the time to take stock, regroup, and realize just how severe the challenge is, and then shift our thinking to prepare for the long, hard slog ahead.

A CHALLENGE LONGER THAN WORLD WAR II

Here is a sobering probability: the attacks on American democracy by the second Trump Administration are likely to last longer than all of World War II. For the U.S., the war lasted 44 months and 8 days, from Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender. The second Trump administration, unless he is impeached for a third time and removed from office, will last for exactly 48 months – four months longer -- right up to Inauguration Day 2029.

We must also realize that, at least in the near term, the worst is yet to come. In those first few months, when deranged executive orders came flying out of the Oval Office, many hoped that the pace might abate and the outrages slow down. But now we know that is not going to happen. The success of each transgression is encouraging the commission of new, more radical ones.

I am not saying these things to sew terror, but to ask us to adjust to the truth. As Hannah Arendt said in 1951, “you have to face up to reality if you're going to resist it. While it may not happen again in the same way it happened in Germany, it's likely that totalitarianism is going to come back.” “We have to be prepared for it,” she continued, “We have to understand it.”

Though it is tragic that we must do so, we now must shift our inner lives, our web of relationships, and our future plans. “We have to be prepared for it,” she said. We currently are not, and we must fix that.

So what does this mean for how we live our daily lives? We do not yet know; that’s what it means to live in a time of testing. But as I read the news every morning, I am beginning to have some thoughts about the balance we must strike.

FEARFUL OR FIERY?

There are two reactions to this situation that all of us feel from time to time, each powerful, but neither the fuel for a lasting resistance: fear and fire.

It is normal to be fearful in the face of the sudden infliction of unthinkable damage to something we love, like our country. We have all felt fear and we have seen it in the eyes of others. But despondency and despair can only be temporary reactions. To allow them to take hold is simply to give up. We cannot command those around not to be afraid, but we can approach their fear with compassion and solidarity, knowing that if some of us need to step down and step back for a period of rest and restoration, we can fill the gap in their absence.

The second stance is to be fiery. And yes, we need sometimes to be angry, because anger is the emotion that human beings feel when something happens that we profoundly believe should not be taking place. Well organized anger can fuel constructive change. But when anger becomes the center of one’s life, it turns into rage, which explosively overwhelms rational thought and releases destruction.

“OUT-rage” can be very different, because it is focused outwardly on things that are deeply unjust, immoral and offensive. Though the emotions of anger and rage erupt inside us, we must redirect them into quiet, determined, implacable outrage.

So if we must be careful about how fearful and fiery we are, what inner qualities should we be cultivating for the long haul?

FAITHFUL, FOCUSED, AND FIRM

I have three suggestions – all of which also conveniently begin with “f.” We need to be faithful to our core American values. The extreme right wing in America has wanted to claim that they are the only ones who understand, represent, and defend America values. We must not be mute about our love for and commitment to what this country has been, despite its flaws, and what it still could be.

We also need to be focused. Let’s stop talking about “what those people over there should be doing.” During the next 40 months we each have to figure out what our job is -- then focus on it and do it.

Finally, we need to be firm. One of America’s great journalists, Dan Rather, writes a Substack called “Steady”, and that’s his theme. Let’s join him and stay on course, with our bow pointed in the right direction no matter how many waves come crashing over it. Another crashed over us today, when the President of the United States, speaking to a stadium full of grieving supporters for Charlie Kirk, said he rejects Kirk’s statement that he “wanted the best for his opponents,” “That’s where I disagreed with him. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.” It’s a dangerous and despicable thing to say, but we can endure.

Faithful to our values, focused on our work, and firm in our commitments. That’s what generations of past Americans chose to be in defense of American liberty. None of them expected to be called in their time, and none of us did in ours. But if we can meet this test, we still have the hope of ensuring “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

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