Some thoughts about Jamie Raskin and the past and future of democracy in
America. Eric
The Beauty of Jamie Raskin’s America, on Display at Trump’s Impeachment Trial
[https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5e56b9cc214b2d0008fabe24/1:1/w_270%2Cc_limit/bill_mckibben-avatar.png]
By Bill McKibben<https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/bill-mckibben>
February 12, 2021
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[Lead House Impeachment Manager Rep. Jamie Raskin walking on the Senate Side of
the U.S. Capitol Building and looking at...]At Donald Trump’s second
impeachment trial, Representative Jamie Raskin gave a compelling closing speech
for the prosecution.Photograph by Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times /
Shutterstock
The first time I remember meeting Jamie Raskin it was dark, and we were
standing atop the great steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, looking out over a
sea of candles. I was a reporter for the Crimson, the student daily; he was an
undergrad organizing against the Reagan Administration’s involvement in Central
America, and had just pulled off an enormous rally in Harvard Yard. He’d given
a burning, powerful speech; the crowd of students, not an easy audience, had
roared and roared.
I thought of that moment on Thursday, as I listened to Raskin, now the
Democratic representative from Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District, close
out the prosecution presentation in Donald
Trump<https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-importance-of-holding-trump-accountable-for-the-capitol-hill-insurrection?itm_content=footer-recirc>’s
second<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/15/whats-at-stake-in-trumps-second-impeachment-trial>
impeachment<https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-impeachment-trial-lawyers-refuse-to-seriously-engage-with-the-constitutional-issues>
trial<https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-surprising-progressivism-of-the-biden-administration>.
Raskin had opened the arguments on Tuesday with a personal, passionate speech
that described his family members hiding from the rioters in the
Capitol<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/among-the-insurrectionists>
on January 6th; it was as powerful and effective as the speech he gave on that
long-ago Cambridge night. But his speech on Thursday was even more important:
it was, I think, a classic defense of American history, even of the
exceptionalism of American history. That it was left to the left—because Raskin
is very much a man of the left—to make that case is telling. Although
constantly accused of undermining American pride, of debasing American history,
progressives are, in fact, the ones who actually understand the nation’s story.
Raskin grew up in the left—his father, Marcus, after a few early years in the
Kennedy Administration, quit to set up, with Richard Barnet, the most important
progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Marcus was a stalwart
of the antiwar movement—he co-edited “The Vietnam Reader,” which was used at
teach-ins across the nation, and he stood trial, alongside Dr. Spock and
William Sloane Coffin, for urging resistance to the draft. When Daniel Ellsberg
stole the Pentagon
Papers<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/04/paper-tiger>, he handed
them to Raskin père. Marcus Raskin later chaired the group that led the
nuclear-freeze campaign.
Like father, like son. Jamie Raskin, a former law professor and resident of
Maryland’s Takoma Park (a.k.a. Granola Park, Berkeley East), served as general
counsel to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Before this week, his most famous
public remark came in 2006, when, during a debate about gay rights, he reminded
a Republican state senator that “when you took your oath of office, you placed
your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place
your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.” Later that year,
Raskin was elected to the Maryland State Senate, where he worked to legalize
same-sex marriage and marijuana.
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It was to the Constitution that Raskin returned, via the Gettysburg Address and
the Declaration of Independence, in his closing remarks on Thursday. He noted
that democracy—government of, by, and for the people—is the exception on this
planet, and always has been. Ours, of course, was utterly imperfect from the
start, and utterly imperfect it remains: a “slave republic,” as Raskin put it,
that is still a place where George
Floyd<https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-death-of-george-floyd-in-context>
can be murdered by authorities in broad daylight. But the basic insight of the
Founders, the idea that “all men are created equal,” had, Raskin insisted,
allowed us to unleash “waves of political struggle and constitutional change
and transformation,” so that we could become “the world’s greatest multiracial,
multireligious, multiethnic constitutional democracy, the envy of the world.”
These Founders had, at the start, one great fear, he said, “Presidents becoming
tyrants and wanting to become kings.” That’s why, he explained, they wrote the
oath of office into Article II of the Constitution, with its pointed insistence
that the President’s job is to uphold and defend that very document.
I was reminded, as I listened, of Gordon Wood’s classic history “The Radicalism
of the American
Revolution<https://www.amazon.com/Radicalism-American-Revolution-Gordon-Wood/dp/0679736883?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50>,”
published in 1991, and its argument that it is hard for us to understand today
what a remarkable break with the past the founding of this nation represented:
“Living in a monarchical society meant, first of all, being subjects of the
king. This was no simple political status, but had all sorts of social,
cultural, and even psychological implications.” The universe was ordered and
hierarchical; each man had his “betters,” and those betters exercised
patriarchal authority. Replacing inherited power with merit; the idea that we
could govern ourselves; that ordinary people could rise to do the governing,
but that as they rose they could not force submission on those around
them—these were the great American notions, never fully realized but always
honored, at least, as ideals.
Until, of course, Donald Trump<https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump>: the
man who said, of our nation’s problems, “I alone” can solve them; the man who
insisted that the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want.” The
man who installed his family in positions of high power, and who used occasions
of state to line his pockets. The man who, ultimately, put himself above our
system of self-governance when it finally rejected him, refusing to abide by
the outcome of an election, even after the courts and the states made it clear
that he had lost. The man who, on January 6th, tried to end that long history
of self-governance.
On Thursday, Raskin, arguing gamely for a conviction that everyone knows he
cannot
win<https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/we-lost-the-line-trump-is-on-the-brink-of-yet-another-senate-acquittal>,
had to pretend that his audience of senators shared his assumptions about
democracy. But, of course, many of them didn’t—many had truckled to Trump
precisely in order to maintain position and privilege. Is there anyone who
thinks that a 1776 version of Lindsey Graham would have been fighting alongside
Sam Adams and Tom Paine? It’s much easier to imagine him as a bewigged and
bewildered gent ordering the servants to pack the household baggage for the
move back to London with the other Tories. That members of the party that
licked Trump’s spittle called themselves “Republicans” and pretended their
subservience was somehow an attack on “élites” is a reminder of the power of
the idea that they have done their best to wreck.
One has to stand up to that privilege and rank and vested interest constantly,
so Raskin’s case was made for history—a case against Trump, and the next Trump,
and the Trump after that, if we’re lucky enough to endure as a country to see
those challenges. And, if we are that lucky, it will be because new generations
of Raskins will keep standing up to power, very much in the progressive
tradition that goes back to our founding. American history is full of ugliness,
but there is beauty at its core, as well, and that was what illuminated this
week’s proceedings.
