A Republic, If We Can Keep It

I’m not much of a sports fan, if I’m honest. But I’m a sociology buff, and I couldn’t look away — not from the game, from us. A whole gorgeously mismatched country gathered around a field, and behind the field, the eyes of the world. Goffman would have known exactly what that was: a stage.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he showed that we behave one way backstage, among our own, and another once the audience is watching — and that the self we perform for others isn’t a lie. It’s the self we’re reaching to be. For a few weeks, with the world as our audience, we stepped front-stage as a country and performed something better than what we’d been acting out among ourselves. Generous. Joyful. One people.

And here is the part that stayed with me, the part Goffman understood: the role we play in front of others is where we practice becoming it. A mask, worn long enough and sincerely enough, can set into a face. So the summer didn’t leave me asking: Was that real? It left me asking: what if we kept performing that America — the welcoming, unrancorous one — until it held?

Here’s a word I keep in my pocket for exactly this: meliorism. The unfashionable, stubborn faith that things can be made better — not perfect, just better — on purpose, by ordinary people, on a Tuesday. Situation normal, everything getting better — call it my hopeful rewrite of SNAFU. And I learned a long time ago that you don’t fight for that kind of country with guns. You fight for it with budgets, and better questions, and a network of stubbornly hopeful people. That’s the whole arsenal. It always was.

Because here is the truth I keep circling: every system of government, however nobly it starts, drifts — toward corruption, toward the few. The founders knew it, which is why they handed us not a monument to admire but a practice to keep, and wrote the power of revision right into the thing. When Franklin was asked what they’d made, he is said to have answered: a republic — if you can keep it. The keeping was always the point. Now this republic needs our hands and words.

Some nights I imagine a table with the good ones at it. Madison, who made ambition check ambition because he knew we weren’t angels. Lincoln, who said a house divided cannot stand and then, in the same breath, refused to let us hate each other — with malice toward none. Roosevelt, who steered a terrified people through a crash and told them the only thing to fear was fear itself, then built floors beneath them, because freedom is not only speech and worship but freedom from want and freedom from fear. I look at that table & I know one thing for certain: they would not be measuring us by GDP.

That’s the quiet revolution I can actually get behind. Not tearing anything down — renewing it. Because GDP is a liar. The graphs climb while the country it describes comes apart; it counts whether a billionaire’s stocks ticked up but cannot see whether you can breathe, whether your kid is okay, whether a crowd can gather in a public square unafraid. And we all held a truer instrument this summer without noticing: the freedom to enjoy a game — together, unafraid — tells you more about where a country stands than any closing bell.

So let’s measure that. Our shared humanity, and what makes it good. Robert Pirsig spent a whole book chasing the word for it — Quality — the thing you recognize the instant you meet it, even though you can never quite pin it down. That’s what we stopped counting, and it’s the only thing worth counting. A country is only as good as it is for the least of us. Hubert Humphrey said it like this: the moral test of a people is how it treats those in the dawn of life, the children; those in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the imprisoned. Measure there, or you’re not really measuring at all.

And here is the thing about hard times, which we are plainly in: they are the only force that has ever reliably united us. Moments of greatness & great people emerge from struggle — I believed that at twenty-two, and I believe it more now. We are all on the same ship, and it is taking on water. What is the sense in fighting to stand at the highest point of a tilting deck? The only move that has ever worked is to stop fighting each other and start bailing together — to unite in action against the actual sinking: the violence, the poverty, the ignorance, the apathy. Hard times don’t have to divide us. They are the exact conditions in which people remember they’re in the same boat.

You have permission to start with yourself. (Yes, I believe I need to start with me…) Look, I’m doing ok. But my friends do worry about me. Just like I worry about many of my friends. I want them (and you) to be doing better. I want you to take care of yourself too. I want you to be better off financially. I want your health to be more than good; I want it to be improving. I want your relationships to be deep, meaningful, and full of love, joy, play, and those things that make relationships great for you! You are not exempt from the flourishing you want for everyone else.

We didn’t light the fire we were handed — the debts, the divisions, the damage were smoldering long before us — and you don’t put a fire out by feeding it. So we’re not here to set anything ablaze. We are here to tend — to protect what is actually worth protecting: our collaborations, our communities, the ideals and values that outlast us — and to nurture the ground beneath those who’ve received the least, ourselves included, and make it richer. To enrich. To enliven. To plant. A better country is not burned into being. It is grown, patiently, by hands willing to feed a soil they may never harvest from.

Change what you measure — in your own life, at your own table. Ask the better question, the one worth more than any poll: forget the market for a second — are the people okay? Are we? Then talk about it, out loud, with someone who may even vote differently from you, until you’re both a little startled to find you want the same things for your grandchildren.

And — serious personal advice, mostly to myself — lighten up. We can do more good in this world with a little laughter than with all our righteous exhaustion. So put on the clown shoes. Dance, a little, into this shared & uncertain future. Tend your corner, hand what you grow to the next person, and laugh with me as we do the small things to nurture & support growth in our communities — starting, humbly, with the one in the mirror.

May you be one of the hands that plants a tree you will never sit beneath.