Today is Election Day, which to me has always seemed to be the most appropriate national holiday for our country — better than July 4 or Thanksgiving. Today, the powerful are reminded that they serve the powerless, and another link in our intricate set of checks and balances is renewed.
The judges serve the law and the politicians who appoint and people who elect them. The politicians are bound by the law and by their accountability to the electorate. Citizens are bound by the law as interpreted by judges, and by the rules and practices set up by politicians. Each one bound by another and each — in theory at least — reminded that they serve as much as are served by the rest of us.
This miracle of spinning plates is in reality our civic religion, and adherence to it — and to the freedom and self-determination it brings, and of the kind of polity that grows out of balanced powers and the individual freedom and self-determination that comes with them — is what makes us Americans, and makes America exceptional.
We aren’t American by blood. My neighbors on one side were born in Mexico, and on the other in Tehran, Iran, and they are each as American — if not more so in their deep attachment to this place — than I am.
We aren’t American because of our attachment to a specific place. America isn’t Mount Rushmore, or the mall in Washington. When Irving Berlin wrote “God Bless America” (and Woody Guthrie answered with “This Land Is Your Land, This Land is My Land”) their attachment was to the nation as an idea as much as a nation of soil and surveyor’s stakes.
We are American because of our attachment to a set of ideas and customs — the foremost of which will be demonstrated today by the poorest citizen walking into a polling place and casting a vote. That vote could decide the election, and that citizen is as entitled to cast it as any other.
That attachment to a civic ideal is something that anyone can take up. Anyone can move to America, embrace our ideals, and become an American — and that, to me, is the true power of American exceptionalism.
One cannot become a Frenchman having been born in Queens, N.Y. When I lived in Paris, it was clear that if I stayed there for 30 years, I would never be French. But you can readily become an American having been born in Le Havre.
Every culture and nation has core myths; Rome had Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, Britain, Queen Bodaecia battling the Romans, France, Asterix — sorry, that one’s a comic, not a myth. But the issue in becoming American isn’t accepting the myths — George Washington and Valley Forge, Lincoln at Gettysburg — it’s accepting the tacit civic religion that glorifies the Founders for setting these plates spinning, and confidently asserts that this over-complex, cumbersome Erector set of a government is the best government of all.
And it all rests on the simplest possible foundation. Today, my wife and I will walk to a neighbor’s house, and in their garage will stand and decide who will govern our state, who will represent us in Congress, and who will fill a host of other positions.
And we will be reminded that they serve us, not the other way around.
Other nations vote, and other governments must stand or fall at the service of their people. But nowhere except America is the right to vote as central to the national identity, and nowhere but America is the true temple of the civic religion to be found in your neighbor’s garage.
Don’t forget to go there today and worship.
Marc Danziger is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at windsofchange.net.
