A Warning

^EPILOGUE

“Let’s roll.” Those were Todd Beamer’s final words before he set down the phone.

Todd was an account manager for a computer company, and his early-morning business trip came on the heels of a five-day vacation in Italy. He and his wife had just returned the night before. Rather than take off immediately to his next destination, he spent the evening at home with her and their two children.

Now Todd was midair on the way from Newark to San Francisco, and his plane had just been hijacked.

About forty-five minutes into the flight, four men stormed the cockpit, slitting the throats of the pilots and taking over the aircraft. One of them made an announcement over the intercom in broken English: “Ladies and gentlemen: here the captain. Please sit down, keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit.”

They herded passengers into the rear of the jet and banked back toward the East Coast.

Todd tried to use the seat phone and was connected with Lisa Jefferson, a call center representative for the in-flight phone company. He calmly described the scene for her to relay to authorities. The men had knives out. One appeared to have a bomb strapped to his body. The pilots were lying motionless on the floor. A fellow passenger had been killed.

Todd’s seatmates received word via calls to loved ones that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been struck by hijacked airplanes. The passengers and crew huddled to discuss the situation. They didn’t want to be the next aircraft flown into a target, so they took a vote and agreed to retake the cockpit.

Todd informed Lisa, who was still on the line, that they planned to wrest control of the plane back from the hijackers. He asked her to do him a favor. If he didn’t survive, he wanted her to call his wife with a message: “Tell her I love her and the boys.” She promised she would, but what Todd would never know was that his wife was pregnant with a baby girl, too. He recited the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23.

“You ready?” he asked fellow passengers. “Okay. Let’s roll.”

They rushed the front of the plane. A few minutes later, after a struggle in the cockpit, United Flight 93 crashed into an open field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes flying time from Washington, DC. All souls onboard perished.

The story of Flight 93 filled Americans with solemn pride in the painful days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. In the face of terror, the passengers displayed moving bravery. These everyday heroes undoubtedly saved many lives, diverting an airplane before it could become a missile, one that was reportedly bound for the US Capitol Building. Theirs was the true American spirit, and it far eclipsed the cowardice that briefly controlled the skies that fateful morning. In the aftermath, the words of Todd Beamer became a rallying cry for a more united country.

Most recall the months after 9/11 as a period of patriotic renewal in the United States. We flew flags outside our homes. We held our families closer. We felt an unspoken connection to strangers like never before—simply because they were fellow Americans. The sudden embrace of unity over division was not inevitable, as less than a year earlier the nation was split by one of the most fiercely contested elections in history. But after the attacks, we consciously put aside our differences, a collective act facilitated in part by a president’s unifying rhetoric. In an address before Congress on September 20, 2011, President Bush stoked the embers of a common bond, telling Americans we would come together against the threat of violence from terrorists. “We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.”

Now imagine the scenario played out differently. Pretend that instead of resolve, Bush expressed skepticism after 9/11. Imagine that, as smoke rose from the Twin Towers, he questioned whether al-Qaeda really orchestrated the attacks; he dismissed the intelligence community’s conclusions as “ridiculous”; he suggested the hijackers on Todd Beamer’s flight could have been from “a lot of different groups”; he fanned the flames of conspiracy theory by calling the incident a “hoax” and a “ruse”; he declared at a press conference, “Osama bin Laden says it’s not al-Qaeda. I don’t see why it would be,” in response to increasingly irrefutable evidence of the terror group’s responsibility; and he urged Americans that it would be a mistake to go after al-Qaeda because the United States had the potential for a “great relationship” with them. If that’s what Bush had done, the political explosion would have torn the country to shreds.

That’s effectively what happened when the United States was attacked in 2016. This time, the hijackers were hackers, and the president was Donald Trump. After Russia’s deliberate and coordinated assault on US democratic elections, recall that Trump downplayed the incident and dismissed the intelligence community’s conclusions; he questioned whether the interference was perpetrated by Moscow; he speculated that others could have been behind it; he promoted conspiracy theories; he said he believed Putin’s word that Russia was not responsible; and he suggested it would be a mistake for the United States to ruin the possibility of a good relationship with Moscow over the matter. The collective national reaction was not the patriotism, unity, and resolve of 9/11. It was internal conflict, and in the meantime, the Russians got away with it.

The two attacks reveal a lot about our choices. In both cases our enemies wanted to spark chaos in our democracy. In both cases we had the option to let them, or not. I wish the passengers of Flight 93 could have seen the influence of their example upon the country in the first instance—how their courage on 9/11 became a metaphor for American determination. They would have been proud that we chose to come together rather than allow terrorism to rip us apart. I also suspect they would be dismayed to witness our equal capacity for divisiveness not even two decades after their noble sacrifice.

One might blame Trump for provoking widespread discontent instead of cohesion after Russia’s interference. Go ahead and reread the above paragraph. It’s still stunning to recall that this was the president’s reaction. Ultimately, though, it was our choice whether to follow his lead. We decided to indulge in irrational speculation. We decided to engage in social-media warfare. We decided to alienate neighbors based on whether they agreed with Trump or not. Our response to the attack led to record levels of incivility.

The episode shows us why we need to broaden the national conversation beyond electoral politics. The 2020 election cycle is important and will no doubt weigh heavily on our future, one way or another, but if we want to remedy our political strife in the long run, it will not happen with a single Election Day. The problem is much bigger than that, and the solution is not in Washington, DC.

Donald Trump got elected on the idea that our nation’s capital was broken and needed a disruptor like him. “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first, I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp in DC,” he tweeted on October 18, 2016, the first time he deployed a phrase that became a regular mantra. From Ronald Reagan to Nancy Pelosi, politicians have promised to “drain the swamp,” a metaphor for fixing our nation’s capital and getting corruption out of politics. The phrase is doubly misleading. First, it’s a popular misconception that Washington, DC, was built on a swamp (it was not), and second, the metaphor presupposes our political problems are Washington-centric.

The complaint that Washington is “broken” is almost as old as our capital city itself. Little more than a decade after the US Constitution was ratified, the town was beset with rancorous political infighting. Observers lamented the “spectacle of a perpetual struggle” between the two parties, epitomized by the toxic election of 1800. “Neither reason nor justice can be expected from either side,” wrote one observer, noting that personal resentments were rampant in America’s political center.

Unlike our symbolic gun fights in politics today, the acrimony was so bad that it led to literal gun fights. Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel, in part due to simmering anger from the disputed election four years prior. If that wasn’t enough to increase public disgust with Washington politicians, Burr was later arrested and indicted for treason after allegedly conspiring with fellow politicians, military officers, and foreign officials to create a breakaway republic in the center of North America. It’s difficult to envision something as galling today as Mike Pence or Joe Biden devising a covert secession campaign to create their own country.

The only blip on the radar of discontent with Washington appears to be James Monroe’s presidency, 1817 to 1825. These years are known as the “era of good feelings,” in part because the two-party system was nearly abolished, and the nation’s capital was led by a single-party government, the Democratic-Republicans. Americans were happy with their elected leaders, so much so that President Monroe ran for reelection effectively unopposed, something that hasn’t happened since. But the “good feelings” were fleeting, as the issues of slavery and territorial expansion quickly polarized Washington before he left office.

Today the brokenness of the nation’s capital is broadly accepted as a fact of life. People believe that elected officials spend too much time bickering and too little time governing. They lament the nastiness of political campaigns, the constant grandstanding, the revolving door between government agencies and industry, and the fact that compromise has become a relic of the past. You have heard it a million times before and said it yourself: “They can’t get anything done.”

Public trust in our government is stuck at all-time lows. A mere 17 percent of Americans believe they can count on Washington politicians to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” according to one poll. A vast majority of Americans—75 percent—disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Pollsters have cleverly demonstrated that the legislative body is less popular than root canals, cockroaches, and used-car salesmen. Hence, calls to “drain the swamp” resonate widely. The only branch of government with majority approval right now is the one led by unelected officials, the US Supreme Court.

Americans do not need to grasp blindly in the dark to find the boogeyman that is haunting our civic lives. We need only to look in the mirror. Our representatives are not the source of Washington’s problems. We are the ones who pick them. If you can give the Founders credit for anything, the democratic system reflects the public mood. When we are willing to compromise, our representatives are, too. When we are angry and unyielding, partisan and greedy, they will display the same traits.

As a result, we are getting the presidency we deserve and the Congress we deserve. Is it not obvious that elected leaders are mimicking our behavior? Their snarky attacks and Twitter jabs sound a lot like the text messages we send, the comments we make below news articles, and the condescending memes we post to Facebook because it’s easier to fire rounds from behind a digital wall than hash out problems face-to-face. It’s no wonder people think Washington is broken. We are broken.

Traveling America in the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “In America the president exerts a very great influence on affairs of state, but he does not conduct them; the preponderant power resides in the national representation as a whole. It is therefore the mass of people that must change, and not only the president, in order that the maxims of politics vary.” We can drain the swamp if we want by firing Donald Trump and electing a new Congress. I strongly believe the first action will make a difference. But lasting change will require deeper, nationwide self-reflection. It will require us to alter ourselves—to consider who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.

De Tocqueville noted during his visit to the United States that the people he encountered really knew what it meant to be citizens. Ask any American about their country, he wrote, and the person will teach you about their rights, duties, and the law. He marveled at how we derived our knowledge not from books but from firsthand experience. “It is from participating in legislation that the American learns to know the laws, from governing that he instructs himself in the form of government. The great work of society is accomplished daily before his eyes and so to speak in his hands.” An observer would be hard-pressed to say the same about us today.

The United States is an exceptional nation, but it could soon run the risk of civic-moral bankruptcy, the consequence of losing touch with history. The majority of Americans are unable to pass basic civics exams and know far too little about our past and our form of government. Many of us can’t name our congressman or state representative, let alone describe principles such as habeas corpus or popular sovereignty. We have forgotten about the world we built yesterday. Now our tomorrow is in doubt.

There are two choices. We can either bury our heads in the sand, hoping it gets better by itself. Or we can recognize the situation for what it is and, rather than allow political turmoil to hasten our demise, begin a restoration. It’s time to start searching for guideposts to rejuvenate public life. We need a “civic renaissance” for our day and age. That’s how we’ll right the ship. It requires dusting off the lessons of our forebears—updating them for the modern world—and reinvigorating active participation in our civic life. The topic itself deserves a separate book entirely.

To start with, we need to restore a climate of truth by clearing the air of misinformation and changing how we report, consume, and share news so we aren’t living in different realities. We must also re-learn the art of “agreeing to disagree” with people whose political views we don’t share, rather than alienating them. If we escape our echo chambers it will make it easier to cooperate on issues large and small. It’s likewise important for us to begin re-associating in person. Our proclivity to participate in voluntary organizations was long a defining aspect of the American story, and we’ve been called a “nation of joiners,” a trait that has allowed us to develop a democratic culture unlike any other. Sadly, our growing interconnectedness online is making us disconnected from one another, so we must find new ways to engage.

Additionally, it’s time to bring the focus of politics closer to home. Our problems won’t be solved with one-size-fits-all DC fixes. Washington is slow and cumbersome, and we don’t have to wait for it to act. We can have a faster and deeper impact on the issues we care about—health care, crime, or drug use—by acting within our communities today. At the same time, it’s incumbent upon us to focus on educating the next generation about their democracy.

I will never forget one of my first US history classes. My teacher was a veteran who had fought in the war, had scars to show for it, and ran a tight ship in the classroom. One day I got in trouble for interrupting another student. “Damn it,” my teacher said, silencing the classroom. “Apologize now—now.” I apologized to my fellow student, but the teacher told me I also owed an apology to Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary whose writings we were studying. That and much more, he said. “Uh, what else do I owe him, sir?” I added, probably to a few chuckles. He stared me straight in the eyes and said two words I will never forget: “Your life.”

Our job as citizens is two-fold. We need to preserve the republic for ourselves and get ready to pass it along. It won’t be in our custody forever. There’s a US senator in Washington fond of the saying: “When you’re going down a dirt road and see a turtle atop a fence post, chances are that turtle didn’t get there by itself.” Our country has been saved, time and time again, by the generations that picked us up before we could get run over. Now it’s our turn to do the same for the next generation. We need to get serious about preparing our children for the biggest job title they’ll ever have—citizen. It’s no exaggeration to suggest, as my teacher once did, that our very lives depend on it.

America’s past is its lodestar. Every lesson we need for renewing our country is there, waiting to be rediscovered. The shared values around which it was founded are the true north that united the states and to which we must return to preserve our future. The survival of our democracy is not inevitable. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He may be right, but it doesn’t bend itself. History doesn’t make us. We make history. Its course is changed by the people themselves who, with their values as a sextant, navigate daily moral quandaries. The choices we make define our direction and who we are. Right now we face two momentous ones. The first: Is a man fit or unfit to be president? And the second: Are we worthy or unworthy of the blessings of liberty? One will be decided by ballot and the other by our behaviors in the weeks, months, and years to come. I hope you will debate the answers beyond these pages.

If we look within ourselves and undertake the arduous task of moral repair, America can restore the soul of its political system. We can once again illuminate a pathway for others onto the vaunted plazas of open society. If, however, we shrink from the task, our names will be recorded by history as those who didn’t pass the torch but let its light expire. That is my warning. Every American generation before us faced and passed this test. Our charge is to do the same, proving that the United States can do what other civilizations could not—survive the ages—and bend the arc of the moral universe toward the value that is the real sinew of civic life: freedom.

Let’s roll.