If I don’t get a full night’s sleep, I can’t function. I’m a wreck for the next two days. Yet Cory Booker, of New Jersey, stood on the floor of the United States Senate to give a speech that lasted 25 hours. He broke Strom Thurmond’s record, a feat made sweeter by the fact that Thurmond was a Dixiecrat who was trying to stop Black people like Booker from having a say in democracy, much less being a US senator.
It was a heroic achievement that, according to MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown, is lighting up the Democratic base. There has been “a maddening thirst for leadership from Democratic political figures,” Brown said today, with one poll showing a huge majority of Democrats – almost two-thirds – is tired of the party's compromises with Donald Trump. The question now, Brown said, is whether the congressional Democrats “can keep this energy going beyond this specific moment.”
“We need to see the party do this when there’s an inflection point, that is, when there’s a time where Republicans are demanding they move aside and they instead throw themselves upon the gears of the federal government,” he said. “It makes little sense to engage in such a protest when the stakes are lower and not do so when they’re much higher.”
Cory Booker suggested that he shared this view about Democratic leaders doing too much following of public opinion and not enough leading. The conventional wisdom in the party’s dominant faction, which is Chuck Schumer’s faction, is that the way forward is appealing to voters who are alienated by Trump’s economic policies, but only after his polling has fallen sufficiently. Twenty hours into his speech, however, according to Aaron Rupar, Booker said: “I'm not going to be a politician that's going to say 'we're going to do more for you.’ I'm going to be a politician, a leader, that demands more from America."
I cheered when I heard that. (I didn’t see the whole speech; like most people, I watched clips.) What he’s talking about is something I have called customer-service politics, in which Democrats force themselves to bargain with voters, especially white voters, in terms favorable to their greed, arrogance and stupidity. A multiracial democracy is good in and of itself, but Democrats tie themselves into knots arguing that it’s good for the economy and, therefore, in everyone’s self-interest. Most voters couldn’t recognize their own self-interests if you slapped it out their mouths. The sooner the Democrats drop that, the better.
While Booker’s comment can be read as a criticism of the party’s leadership, it could also be read as a criticism of the party’s base.
Here, context matters. He was talking about needing a new generation to redeem the promise of America. He said Trump “wants to divide us against ourselves, wants to make us afraid, wants to make us fear so much that we’re willing to violate people’s fundamental rights. … Don’t let him do that. Don’t become like him. … We can overcome this.
“Our American history is a perpetual testimony to the achievement of impossible things against impossible odds,” he said. “We are a nation that is great … I don't want a Disneyfication of our history. I don't want a whitewashed history, I don't want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.”
It was in this context that Cory Booker gave voice to a less poetic but equally potent variation of John F Kennedy’s famous line: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
And it was in this context that I suspect some liberals and Democrats may have missed a finer, more profound point, which is that America is great, not in spite of “the wretched truth,” but because of it, and as a consequence of that, no matter how bleak things may seem, greatness is within us, all of us. It’s already there. We just have to activate it. Why is there a “maddening thirst for leadership”? You are what you seek.
This may seem like pie in the sky, but it’s not.
It’s hard liberalism.
Soft liberalism doesn’t make demands of individuals. It treats politics as entertainment, status-signaling, fashion. Citizens are not agents of democracy. They are buyers of things. It’s satisfied with complaining about unfairness and hypocrisy. It is happy to wait and wait and wait for public opinion to turn, all by itself, as if it were an act of God. It’s deeply morally ambivalent, free to indulge in pleasure-seeking and “leaving politics out of it,” as the material outcomes of elections are almost always felt by others. Evil isn’t really evil. It’s just ignorance or a misunderstanding. Soft liberalism is many things, but mostly, it’s easy.
Hard liberalism is the reverse in every sense. It makes high moral demands of individuals while sweeping them up in a story about the nation’s character. It asks them to fight injustice, uphold goodness, venerate community and respect competing views, even when, or especially when, there is disagreement. It asks us to take responsibility for the republic, if necessary to the point of personal sacrifice, as the late Congressman John Lewis did. (Booker referred repeatedly to Lewis and his choice to allow himself to be beaten nearly to death for the sake of liberty and justice for all.) Evil is evil and all you can do with it is fight it. Hard liberalism is many things, but most of all, it’s hard.
It’s soft liberalism that can be found in the first part of Booker’s quote: “I'm not going to be a politician that's going to say 'we're going do more for you.’” He’s not going to be like previous generations of Democrats who treated voters like consumers and bought into the idea that the customer is always right, even when the customer, especially the white one, is clearly greedy, arrogant and stupid.
It’s hard liberalism that can be found in the second part of Booker’s quote: “I'm going to be a politician, a leader, that demands more from America." He is part of a generation of Democrats that’s going to treat Americans as citizens and that inspires us into believing that we do not need a leader’s permission to act righteously. But most of all, he’s not going to be a leader who expects others to follow blindingly. You don’t need me. You already have greatness within you. Now act like it.