Sunday, Jan. 30, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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This experiment in democracy continues.
It continues to amaze and inspire the rest of the world. And it continues to disappoint and depress, deep in the soul of America.
The eternal optimist in me longed for our yesterdays as I listened Thursday to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, standing next to President Joe Biden at the White House, as he formally announced his retirement. He has served this nation on the Supreme Court for nearly 28 years.
Justice Breyer used his words to express a powerful lesson. It is the same one he teaches when he speaks to the many high school, college and law school students with whom he has visited throughout his career.
He quotes — loosely — from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in which the Republican president dedicated those killing grounds to those who sacrificed so much trying to insure that this fledgling democracy would continue and, therefore, the United States would long endure.
For those who haven’t read or have long forgotten Lincoln’s words, I recommend you read them. They tell us a whole lot about who we were nearly 160 years ago and, perhaps more telling, who we may not be today.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,”
Lincoln said. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation … can long endure.”
He finished his short, 272-word speech with a challenge to the war-bloodied country that pitted brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor:
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. … (T)hat … we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion … 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.”
Justice Breyer made certain to emphasize that his audiences were always the young, the next generations of America, because it is their freedom, their “experiment in democracy,” that requires continued devotion to the founding principles.
That speaks loudly to an optimistic future.
As Biden was announcing Breyer’s retirement and his criteria for the next justice of the Supreme Court, a Yahoo news poll hit my inbox.
It reflected a finding that would make the most optimistic among us cringe in the reality of this moment.
According to the poll, “nearly 60 percent of Republicans say they will not vote for any candidate who admits that Joe Biden won the presidency ‘fair and square.’ ”
The rest of the poll is equally destructive to the concept of free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power and the importance of democracy powered by the people.
This, of course, helps explain — but not excuse — why Republican candidates like Joe Lombardo, who wants to be governor of Nevada, refuses to admit that President Biden is, well, the legitimately elected President Biden. Lombardo is scared to death of Republicans.
By the way, given how far the GOP has descended into a darkness fueled by conspiracy theories and lies the size of whoppers, he has good reason to be frightened.
But that reality should scare the great majority of Americans and, certainly, Nevadans as we look forward to the next election cycle.
For how can you square Abraham Lincoln’s immortal challenge to “increase our devotion” to the cause of democracy with a Republican Party today that is hell-bent on doing just the opposite?
Benjamin Franklin made it clear that this democracy would only last as long as the people in each new generation fought boldly to keep it.
Justice Breyer said the same thing this past Thursday.
As always, the choice is ours. I choose to do all that I can to ensure that this nation and our democracy “shall not perish from this earth.”
Can you say the same?
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.
