Democracy can withstand ideological attacks if democracy will provide earnestly and liberally for the welfare of its people. … Throughout this period of tension in which we live, the American people must demonstrate conclusively to all other peoples of the world that democracy not only guarantees man’s human freedom, but that it guarantees his economic dignity and progress as well. To practice freedom and make it work, we must cherish the individual; we must provide him the opportunities for reward and impress upon him the responsibilities a free man bears to the society in which he lives.
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Omar Bradley, Armistice Day speech, 1948
The terms “liberal” and “conservative” used to mean something. They don’t anymore, at least insofar as signifying an ethos that is grounded in the courage of real convictions — as opposed to political expedience — and tethered firmly to the reality that there are — and, for the national good, must be — times and circumstances that transcend the superficialities of political difference.
Now is such a time, and such are our present circumstances. The welfare of the People is very much in peril, in no small part because of the dismaying extent to which America has ceased to cherish the individual. Nor, in our intractably divided state, is there much opportunity for cultivating any individual or collective sense of the civic and human responsibilities that come with freedom.
As a result, and in accordance with General Bradley’s admonition, we are watching our freedoms diminish. Not coincidentally, this is happening at a time when our political options have been stripped of all nuance, reduced to a choice between one set of buzzwords and another, a choice no more or less substantial or meaningful to the life of the average American than that of which toothpaste or antiperspirant or breakfast cereal or automobile to purchase.
We have come to be motivated less by shared national ideals than by narrow personal interests. We bow in the abstract toward the notion of ever-expanding democracy, but in practice find ourselves compliant in its ever-quickening decline. The 20th century was The American Century, and rightly so in many important respects; but to date in the latest millennium, the only thing our nation has “demonstrated conclusively” to the rest of the world is that we have lost — or, at the very best, severely misplaced, and at the very worst, given away — our ability to govern ourselves.
For that matter, we’ve lost the ability even to get along with one another. We can’t have a political disagreement, it seems, without descending into all manner of name-calling, innuendo, threats of violence and violence itself. And so we either plunge in to advance or defend our own positions on the assumption that we are right, or else we withdraw into enclaves of the like-minded, electing to live in an echo chamber of our own opinions.
Americans are not supposed to be afraid. And yet, we have reached a disjuncture in our national discourse — in our beliefs about what it even means to be an American in the strange and unsettling day and age in which we live — at which we are the sum of our collective bundle of fears, the most looming of which seems to be the soul-shaking fear of our fellow Americans.
It’s no accident, I suppose, that I’m airing these ruefully glum impressions in a column that is being completed late on the afternoon of Veterans Day. Certainly, my quoting of Omar Bradley, with his talk of “human freedom” and “economic dignity and progress” is very much intentional and appropriate to the occasion. Bradley was known for his devotion to the soldiers he commanded — during World War II, he was known as the “GI’s General,” and after it, he headed the Veterans Administration before being appointed the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and the remarks reprinted above show that his concern extended to the American people in general.
I thought about that earlier today, as my 10-year-old son and I took in Birmingham’s Veterans Day parade from seats on the curb alongside 2nd Avenue North. One of the major battles in which Bradley was a commander was the Battle of the Bulge, the last, desperate, all-out German offensive that took place in the winter of 1944-45, some of the worst fighting in a conflict chock-full of blood and guts.
Today, we watched as a small cadre of Birmingham veterans of that awful campaign passed before us in a few vehicles. My thoughts were of the sheer, wilting terror these men faced down; of the sacrifices they made; of my own gratitude that I have never been called on to demonstrate courage of that magnitude; of the debt our nation owes them, and of our deficiencies in repaying that debt in the manner that Bradley prescribed.
I thought, too, of the sacrifices that military families have made throughout American history, starting with the conflict from which America gained the independence to form and shape and define itself — and continuing, with no apparent end in sight, with those whose husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, serve today.
What do we owe these people, beyond the heartfelt-and-yet-too-easy applause and Thank Yous that emanated from the throngs gathered along the parade route? We owe them a country that is worth fighting for. We owe them the willingness to take on that battle, each in own own way, striving to preserve freedom, expand democracy and promote the general welfare in the manner in which we live our lives, do our jobs, treat each other, behave in the civic arena, and shoulder the responsibilities of citizenship.
We owe them the effort it takes to practice freedom and make it work.
Are we holding up our end of the bargain?