There was ample bipartisan momentum behind police reform from the moment of George Floyd’s death. But with Congress’s failure to pass reform legislation, action becomes less likely by the day.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey has expressed optimism about police reform, saying it will pass eventually. “If we trip over the language itself [and] we can’t get to the substance, to the heart, to the truth of which [protesters] speak, then we will miss an opportunity,” he told the Washington Post. “And I think there is a tremendous opportunity here.”
Here’s the problem: The loudest message of our current race conversation has ballooned, going from “cops resort to lethal force too often, especially against black people” to “the United States is a fundamentally racist country that has always been and will always be beyond redemption.”
The former message was a uniting one. The latter has everyone scrambling back to the partisan trenches.
So when Booker talks about “tripping over language,” he omits the relevant fact that language is the vehicle of change — the mechanism of law and the means of persuasion.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s polemics were riddled with appeals to constitutional and God-given rights — language coming straight from the nation’s founding documents. He relied on the founding itself and its written record to make his case. He relied on a shared religion, with nods to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Job. He appealed to commonalities, to shared history and a shared ethos.
Right now, the nation needs a common language — a common diagnosis of our illness or, at the very least, similar diagnoses from which to work. And it has to be diagnosed as a shared illness. Otherwise, we’re left only with competing Americas.
Colin Kaepernick found Independence Day, which he once celebrated, to be an occasion for trampling any sense of national pride, rejecting the holiday as a “celebration of white supremacy.” The heart, the truth of which Kaepernick speaks, is that nothing in America is or can be worth celebrating. Those entertaining the demise of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Abraham Lincoln are saying the same things.
“When all is said,” as Russell Kirk wrote of radicals, they are “neoterist[s], in love with change.” If there’s a monument, topple it. If there’s an institution, dismantle it. If there are old national heroes, discredit them all without discrimination. In a phrase: If it exists now, it shouldn’t any longer. That is the true meaning of radical, revolutionary change.
For all its troubled history, for all its current infractions, the U.S. must still have something to offer its people. Only if it didn’t, if it couldn’t, would there perhaps be something to the radicals’ iconoclasm.
