By Chris Satullo

This election is about many questions. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about:

Is America an idea – or a place?

Is it defined more by what it hopes and believes – or by where it starts and ends?

Those gorgeous ideas that midwifed this nation – that self-governance would enable a people to be both free and responsible, at once brave and kind, seizing opportunity but practicing civic virtue – are they really what define us?

Or is America just another place, another puffed-up accident of geography, with a showy, tiresome habit of feigning allegiance to grandiose words it doesn’t really believe?

The last four years have been a painful, punishing debate about what makes an American: blood and soil – or idea and aspiration?

Rarely in our history has the notion of “it’s just a place, dammit, and we own it, not you” found more pointed expression than in the rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his vampire apprentice, Stephen Miller.

Think how Miller spits out his contempt for the Emma Lazarus poem that proclaims the grand idea of America on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Think why Miller’s boss, the President, can’t bring himself to denounce the Proud Boys and other domestic terrorists. It’s not just because they feed his narcissism with salutes. Deep down, Trump agrees with them: This is our place, not yours. Scram. Or else.

To him, America is like a condo tower; there are only so many units, and the original owners get to decide who can buy in.

Another question: Is true patriotism about exclusion, or inclusion?

No surprise, I pick the latter. I believe in America the idea, a nation glorious in concept, even while tattered and tainted in execution. I say this: The greatest love of country rests in being eager to share its central idea, and all the joys and struggles it offers, with the newcomer, the outcast, the refugee. 

To me, any person who reveres the American ideal, who yearns to live in its difficult light, who commits to the struggle to balance freedom and responsibility, individualism and community, minority rights and majority rule, innovation and tradition – well, then that person, no matter where born, has as full a claim to the title of American as I do merely by the happy accident of having been born a Buckeye.

Is it an inspiring privilege to be an American, or a scathing indictment?

As we’ve much pondered in this time of ferment, America’s history is shadowed by far too much evil, by slavery, genocide and oppression. The idea gets trampled as often as upheld.

But greatness can be found in our annals as well, which it does us no honor to forget. In our history, along with the evil, we can find welcome, generosity, sacrifice, bravery, the eloquent striving to awake and nurture our better angels. To dismiss all this with a cynical wave is to forsake the foundation on which we can fashion a more just future. We’re not hopeless, merely sinful, as all nations are, but available to grace.

Which is why, I think, we are called to extend a hand even to the worst sinners among us, the born Americans who betray the American idea through narrowness, bias and violence. Hate the sin, but not the sinners. They may sadden, madden and appall us, but we can’t slip our bonds to them. We are Americans all, fated either to capsize or reach shore together.

Someone has to go first in ending the cycles of polarization and contempt. Who else could that be but the true lovers of the glorious idea, people willing to do hard things to help it thrive?

Joe Biden, while no poet, no orator, believes in the idea of America to the roots of his soul. His anecdotes wander in search of it. He’s stubborn in defense of its authenticity, willing to be mocked for his idealism even by some who will vote for him while rolling their eyes.

Donald Trump?  His hollow soul has no room for ideals, only deals. He is seized not by the glorious idea, but by a dark mania to fill the hollowness with cheers and baubles.   

That’s our choice: Vote for the tattered but enduring American idea – or abandon it to narcissistic, hate-filled hands, to be buried in a hasty grave, the pole of an American flag shoved into its dirt in a final, contemptuous parody of patriotism.

Seems an obvious decision to me. You?

–

Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.