A Democratic Duty

By GENE NICHOL

In one of the final speeches Martin Luther King delivered to the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1956 he asserted: “We not only have the right to be free, we have a duty to be free.”

I thought of King’s phrasing recently – in our different time and less ennobling circumstance. Not just a “right to be free” – to hold, to attain, to roll out and deploy when we see fit. A personal possession. An inherent treasure. A divinely bestowed gift.

But, for King, there is also a “duty” to be free. A public obligation that accompanies and sustains the private one. A duty towards a larger project. An American one, to be sure. But also a human calling, a necessity that inheres. A duty to ensure freedom and, as King would explain on the Washington Mall eight years later, to “make real the promises of democracy.” A mission personal and social, civic and political, defining and instrumental. Pursued in “the fierce urgency of now.”

I haven’t been able to avoid comparing King’s charge to the broad-based Republican silence about, or even embrace of, the recent brutal, insurrectionist attack on Brazil’s congress, court and presidential palace. Overtly following the Donald Trump playbook, right-wing followers of defeated candidate Jair Bonsonaro lied about election fraud, desecrated temples of democracy, and launched bloody assaults on law enforcement in a copy-cat attempt to overthrow the government.

As Eugene Robinson put it, “instead of serving as a model of democracy, the United States has given the world lessons in denying election results and stoking popular disappointment into nihilistic rage.” Rather than fulfilling the duties of democratic freedom, we’re exporting Trump’s authoritarian sedition.

The former president can’t do it alone. He requires legions of subservient Republican Party enablers. Folks so abased they fear condemning even political violence in South America lest they trigger Trump’s ever-present wrath. Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, of course, saluted the Brazilian thugs. But The New Republic reported, more broadly, that despite worldwide condemnation of the coup attempt, “Republican leadership has remained completely silent, with no statements from Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, or Donald Trump, who incited our own Jan. 6 attack.”

This is, by now, unsurprising. It is, nonetheless, a crucial reminder that the GOP remains a dangerous, anti-democratic political force. As NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has noted:

“It is hard but important to see the GOP as an autocratic party, led by someone with a personality cult, Donald Trump, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, out not only to wreck democracy at home, but imbedded in far-right networks that stretch from Moscow to Budapest to Washington to Brasilia. This is the crucial frame.”

I’m not saying every Republican is preparing to (again) storm the barricades and violently subdue democratic institutions – in Washington or Raleigh or Brazil or Budapest. But I am saying that these millions of Republicans are enthralled, subjugated, to those, like the former president, who seek to destroy the mission and meaning of America.

Republicans who continue to cower before Trump – the heavy, heavy majority of American Republicans – violate, hideously, what King deemed the “duty” of freedom. They do so, sometimes, through enthusiastic, if monstrous, idol worship. They do so, more frequently perhaps, through cunning and reprehensible transactionalism – seeking economic, racial or religious supremacy, no matter how vile the arrangement. And most pervasively, they do it through supine submission, bowing before the brute, hoping to save their pitiful baubles as others, more vulnerable, are sacrificed. All embrace the dark nightmare of Trump rather than the defining dream of King.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2023

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