Democracy is blind optimism sometimes.
It was Barack Obama’s first term and I had drool dried up on the front of my shirt the first time that I visited the United States Capitol. It was our family spring break. I refused to fly because airplanes terrified me. Driving was out of the question because a horrible fight would typically erupt before we even made it out of the county. Amtrak, then, was the only option, and we arrived in Washington an hour late and with the various residual effects of having slept while sitting upright. For me, this meant a drool spot on my shirt that I did not discover until after I had my photograph taken sitting in our Congressman’s desk chair.
The Amtrak concourse at Union Station in Washington is a sort of claustrophobic 1980s remodel, but it opens out onto a stunning, cavernous main hall with high ceilings. That main hall, in turn, opens out onto the street, where there is a perfect view of the Capitol dome a few blocks away. The view is breathtaking — not breathtaking in the sense that a mattress store’s inventory selection or a football game might be described as breathtaking, but breathtaking in the sense that it stops you breathing for a moment.
The breathtaking effect that afternoon was brief and was quickly overtaken by the business of the day: rushing toward the building with suitcases in tow so as not to miss our tour from a congressional intern while carrying on whatever argument had started in the station. I do not recall what the argument was, but I remember distinctly that I was right and that my parents made their traditional proclamation that “you had better enjoy this because we are never taking you anywhere ever again” not more than five minutes after we had left the train, which put us in the appropriate mood to bear witness to Congress at work.
Capitol Hill has a way of breeding hollow promises, and we did, in fact, return to Washington after that trip.
Eight years ago this week, we returned for President Obama’s second inauguration. After a long and bitterly cold walk through a maze of closed streets, we watched the ceremony on the National Mall on enormous television monitors about a mile from the Capitol. We had a perfect view of the back of Anderson Cooper’s head in the CNN broadcast booth, tiny American flags to wave, and one million other happy revelers surrounding us. After the ceremony, we watched from bleachers as the Obama family walked alongside a limousine up Pennsylvania Avenue to return to the White House.
Two years later, I had the good fortune to return to Washington again on a group trip that fortuitously aligned with the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that guaranteed the right to marry to same-sex couples.
The experience of standing in front of the Supreme Court as a decision is announced is unlike anything. The decision does not come by push notification or by Twitter. Electronic devices are forbidden in the room where the decision is announced, and so the answer to the great question of the day is revealed to the world in a practice known as “The Running of the Interns.” A group of college students, each affiliated with a major news organization, runs out to their appointed camera crew clutching the printed court decision. From there, the news spreads across the country by satellite and fiber-optic cable, and through the crowd in murmurs that — if the news is good — turn to excited shouts and then to patriotic songs.
Living in this country as a sensible person is typically exhausting, but watching a crowd sing the national anthem in pure joy in the space between the Capitol and the Supreme Court seems to make it worthwhile.
In 2017, I arrived at Union Station on July 3rd in a brand new suit for my first day as an intern in the Senate. I spent the next two months processing incoming letters and voicemails and leading families on tours who, like mine years before, had just arrived from Michigan and were trying to conceal their shock and horror at how much walking a trip to the nation’s capital requires of small children. I loved every minute of it.
The great benefit of the experience was an ID card that allowed access to most of the Capitol Complex, and I would spend hours at the end of the day wandering through the empty corridors of the Capitol and walking around the rotunda under the dome alone. One Saturday, I fell asleep in the sun on the East Front of the building.
On most evenings, military bands would give spectacular concerts on the West Front as the sun set over the National Mall. I am generally opposed to military spending, but it is difficult not to find the existence of the United States Marines Dixieland Jazz Band endearing.
Democracy is, at its core, a way of negotiating our life together. Zoom meetings and absentee ballots are great, but it all means more when we are together in a specific place or with a specific group. Democracy is as much a feeling as it is a concept or ideology. The last year has made that clearer than ever.
Democracy is a Sousa concert on the West Front of the Capitol while the sun sets over the Washington Monument, and it is a Planning Commission meeting in a windowless room about the site plan for a branch bank. It is waiting outside of a polling place at 6:30 a.m. on a cold November morning in sixth grade. It is wolfing cold pizza in a UAW hall. It is singing “America the Beautiful” in front of the Supreme Court. It is the line to renew a driver license. It is marching up Woodward Avenue in Detroit with a mass of protesters. It is driving back down Woodward five months later and joining in a chorus of honking when Detroit delivers the presidential election.
Most of all, democracy is optimism — often blind optimism in situations when optimism seems absurd. “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion,” E.B. White wrote, “that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”
Why spend ten months working with a failing unemployment insurance system that seems beyond all hope of repair? Why not throw our hands up and swim across the river to Canada? Why did Congress return to session a few hours after fascists ransacked the building? Optimism.
The dome on the Capitol was unfinished when the Civil War began. President Lincoln famously remarked of its continuing construction during the war that “if the people see that Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union to go on.” Just less than a century and a half later, I stumbled off a train from the Midwest with drool running down my shirt. In spite of everything I read in the news, the dome still has me under its spell during a week like this.
There will not be a million people singing happily on the National Mall this Wednesday (though the images of the rehearsals seem to indicate we will at least get a nice band concert). Even so, the images on television will be of the Capitol, as Lincoln put it, “going on.” 158 years later and amid everything else, that optimism remains.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
Pretend It’s a City on Netflix.
This is a Martin Scorsese series that follows Fran Lebowitz around New York City as she complains. The New Yorker’s review says “you can only listen to someone kvetch for so long,” which is the same reason my mother gives for her refusal to fly with me, so I am sympathetic to Ms. Lebowitz. I find the program to be a delight and an inspiration.
“I am the Designer of This Restaurant’s Outdoor Seating Space, and This Is My Artist’s Statement” by Simon Henriques in McSweeney’s.
“My choice of medium is intentional and calculated. I have used materials traditionally reminiscent of an indoor structure, such as four walls and a roof and a door, but playfully recontextualized them in the quintessentially outdoor environment of the middle of the street. To be clear, I am not creating an indoor space. Rather, I am complicating our relationship with an outdoor space by interrupting it with archetypal signifiers of the indoors.”