We Can't "Save" Democracy

But we can strengthen it, and ourselves.

Garth imagines a Kenny G concert (Wayne’s World 2). Side note: this Kenny G documentary was utterly charming (h/t my brother Michael!).

Few words inspire as much immediate, visceral horror as the term root canal. But recoil though we may, when we are faced with the need for that particular procedure, we have two choices: turn away and invite inevitable deterioration, pain, and rot, or courageously show up for our dental appointment and address the problem.

My recent article’s subheading, “Step 1. Save Democracy. Step 2. Everything Else.” was pithy, but I’d like to amend it (pun intended!). There is no saving democracy. By this I do not mean that our democracy cannot once again flourish; instead, I mean that “saving” is itself a false goal, a mirage. A period where there should be a comma, or perhaps an ellipse. When you “save” something, it implies, at some level, that you’ve done your work and can move on to other, less urgent (or at least different) projects; the term gives us an unconscious, end-of-the-movie, credits rolling, cathartic and completed feeling of “the superhero did it!” release. It absolves us of further action.

But just as we do not “save” our teeth by visiting the dentist once a year and ignoring them the other 364, so does the energetic but misleading language of “saving democracy” (or the planet for that matter) entirely miss the point of ongoing, ever-evolving maintenance and improvement in perpetuity; it also, and importantly, sets up a false distinction between the “saver” and the “saved,” and sets us up to be — at some level — powerless beneficiaries of a mechanism we do not control.

There are many of us, in the wake of all that is happening, wrestling with that sense of powerlessness and struggling to see where, exactly, we fit into the story.

At some point — at least on our worst days — we have probably bumped up against a feeling of scrambled, activated overwhelm. “I don’t know; I am angry as hell about [Dobbs, the EPA, guns, election deniers, the cult of Trumpism, etc]. But what the hell can I do about it?” Under that layer, if we’re honest with ourselves, there is probably some sort of amorphous, viscous, boiling underworld of fear, perhaps coupled with a tied-hands sort of tumbling, disoriented feeling. This is not how it was supposed to go. What is happening? What about progress? The arc of the universe bending towards justice? Where are we heading?

This American moment is requiring us to simultaneously come up with both a new sense-making framework and a responsive action plan. In real time, like yesterday. Just like the confrontation with a necessary root canal, the choice seems binary: either we figure this out and inspire ourselves to action or we dissolve in apathy and despair, letting the Constitution and the planet burn.

Our superhero culture runs deep in this country, as does our worship of heroism in general. I think one of the biggest drivers of our ongoing dissonance is the sense, cultivated over the last number of decades by profit-driven market forces peddling “easy street” as an ultimate aspiration, that the more we can be released from the burdens, demands, and pressures of life, the better off we are. So we want things to be easy — is there a prescription for that? — but we also want to be recognized as the heroes of our own story. It’s confusing.

Although it’s a tempting and familiar narrative, I do not believe we are facing a binary choice (“figure this out” or “dissolve in apathy and despair”), and I believe that the limiting logic of either/or is actually blocking both our personal and collective evolution.

If we fully internalize our dual-nature as individuals AND as citizens, we can swim down, against the forceful, hollow buoyancy of bobbing panic, through that boiling underworld, and into a place within ourselves where courage and possibility dwell. There, I think, we will encounter our real, living selves that exist outside of conditioning and expectations. The selves that make us feel real and dimensional, free from the constraints of any particular script or identity. The selves that are separate from the part of us that wants only to be safe, secure, and stable. The part that innately and naturally wants to grow, because that’s our human design.

So the question becomes, when I put aside my worry, fear, and panic, “Where am I being called to grow?” And, at the same time, “Where are we — as American citizens — being called to grow?”

A few years ago, I had a mild panic attack on the edge of the Beehive Loop in Acadia National Park, Maine. I literally could not go forward and I could not go back; my family, ahead of me and up and around a bend, had no idea where I was. For about thirty minutes or so, I stood there frozen, pressed back against the sheer face of rock abutting the narrow trail that seemed to drop off into oblivion below me.

A few hikers eventually came around the bend and, seeing my face, asked me if I was ok (I was not). Miraculously, one of them happened to be a therapist; she calmly told me that they would get me out of the situation, together, one step at a time. For the next fifteen minutes or so, she walked behind me, asking me to vocalize what my senses were experiencing: my foot is on this rock, this tuft of rock grass is in my hand, the sun is on my face, and so on. Step by step, she encouraged me to ground myself in the physical reality of each moment, and we moved forward in this manner until I was out of the crisis and firmly planted on a large, flat rock overlooking the spot where I’d been paralyzed. Her technique was, for a disembodied “absent-minded professor” like me, a revelation.

As poet David Whyte puts it, “The next courageous question or courageous act is the heartfelt one we don’t want to ask or take.” For a child, that courage might look like “putting my head under water for the first time.” For the teenager, it might look like "getting up off this bench and going to talk to those people who seem totally oblivious to my existence.” For me on that rock, it was trusting this woman — and, more importantly, myself — and moving my frozen feet a few inches at a time. There is no difference in magnitude between these examples; they are all, simply and equally, threshold moments for the person involved. To our core, they move us into new territory.

If we view this American moment only as a battle — between ourselves and the bad guys and between ourselves and that faction of our troubled left-leaning coalition (whether that happens to be, for any given person, the Joe Manchins or the AOCs of the party) that just doesn’t get it, then we will only and ever engage in battle, because that’s the Newtonian law of an object in motion. It will be an infinite and unenlightening game of Pong, with consequences that are as disastrous as they are predictable.

But if, instead, we internalize this moment as a series of thresholds for our own development, then we can start to see the next right step. We’ll know it’s right because rather than feed our rage and despair, it gives us a sense of power, agency, and connection to ourselves and to the network of millions who want to see our country and planet flourish.

Rather than living in the dark safety of a festering cavity, in other words — the familiar, aching pain of a hollow space where turmoil and reactive animosity breed — we can step forward and show up for that scary, necessary appointment. Because when we work toward making ourselves whole, when we proactively confront that which is causing us pain, we don’t just “eliminate a problem.” We are forged.

Krista Tippett calls it “muscular hope,” and I think that’s perfect: heart, democracy, body—all muscles, all ours to strengthen.