The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy
A Note of Explanation: I am working on a new book, and what follows are some of the “sketches” I’ve been making as I try to discern its shape. Normally, I don’t share notes like this in public. But since my topic this time is democracy, I thought it would consistent with the topic, and good for me, to open my thinking to discussion. And since the Center is planning to host several large gatherings on this topic at sites around the country, your responses will help us shape those events as well. I’d love to hear what you think, with one proviso—I cannot respond to your comments individually or I will never get the book written! So thank you in advance for whatever you have to say. The topic is of great importance to me and I hope it is to you, too, whether or not you agree with what I have to say about it. That’s the way of democracy! —Parker Palmer
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It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. —Audre Lord
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
—Rumi
Like most Americans, I treasure our nation’s unfinished experiment in democracy. And like many I know, I find it heartbreaking when democracy’s highest values get trampled—when, for example, government “of the people, by the people and for the people“ is trumped by corrupt deals and official lies, or when “we, the people” declare those with whom we disagree “unpatriotic,” eroding the foundations of the public on which democracy depends. Watching something or someone you love come undone is one of life’s most painful experiences, and heartbreak is the most honest word I know for that pain.
When we fail to treat the underlying disease and allow cynicism, anger and hatred to spin out to their bitter ends, the outcome is predictable: a handful of citizens will become violent, slashing the fabric of our common life, while many will become disengaged, slowly but surely unraveling that fabric.
I name some causes of my own heartbreak for the sake of full disclosure, but I do not intend to argue those issues in this book. I want to explore a hopeful possibility: that the institutions of American democracy and our own human hearts can hold the tension of our differences in ways that will bring us new life. The differences between us are not the seed of democracy’s destruction. They are the test of democracy’s genius and the powers of the human heart—using “heart” in its original sense, not merely as the seat of the emotions but as the core of our sense of self. We may differ significantly on the essence of the American dream, but we have this much in common: a shared experience of heartbreak about the ways that dream can devolve into a nightmare. Rightly understood, that experience can build at least a footbridge of understanding between us.
There are two ways for the heart to break. The brittle heart will shatter into a thousand pieces that are very nearly impossible to retrieve and reassemble. But if the heart is a supple, well-exercised muscle, it can be broken open rather than apart, giving us a larger capacity for both suffering and hope.
The broken-open heart is not the gift of a special few; life gives us many opportunities to exercise our hearts. I know many people whose hearts have been broken by the loss of something or someone they deeply love. They have lost jobs in a heartless market, homes in a corrupt economy, children to their own bad choices, elders to death. And yet many of these people, in the wake of their losses, have not become bitter and withdrawn. They have become more compassionate, extending their hearts to other sufferers and reaching out with forgiveness to the people who caused their pain.
If we can learn from such losses in our lives, the broken-open heart can become the source of what Lincoln called “the bonds of affection,” a sense of unity amid diversity. And that, in turn, will allow us to do what citizens of a democracy must do: engage with issues of great moment that require a collective and creative response.
Here is a principle as relevant to raising up democracy as it is to raising a child: the heart that is broken open because what it loves is in danger has the power to help restore the beloved.
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My claim that American democracy is in danger of failing may sound a bit like Chicken Little crying “The sky is falling!,” or a maniacal preacher urging his followers to have a hearty breakfast because The Rapture will arrive before lunch. But government of the people, by the people and for the people is a non-stop experiment in the potential and limits of the human spirit, in the strength and weakness of democratic institutions. As is true of any experiment, the outcome is never guaranteed. The American experiment will continue to be in peril until we blow up the lab, and the explosives to do the job are found within us as well as around us.
The current sources of democracy’s danger are many and complex, and not directly traceable to one political party. They range from the dominance of big money to the divisiveness of religious fundamentalism; from the failures of mass journalism to the undemocratic dynamics of capitalism; from schools that ignore citizen education to political parties more concerned with their own survival than the survival of democracy.
But the root cause of democracy’s peril is that we, the people, fail to understand the meaning of our citizenship—and fail to use the means at our disposal when threats to democracy arise. Democracy fails when we withdraw from the fray, or stay in it while trusting and talking with only the people who hate what we hate. Democracy fails when we allow the differences between us to loose the irrational and violent angels of our nature, having never called upon the “better angels” that Lincoln tried to evoke in his First Inaugural Address a month before the Civil War began.
And yet the better angels have not abandoned us, and there are ways to call them out. When we are able to meet each other at the level of heart, of soul, of human identity and integrity, the barriers that blind us to each other’s humanity become thinner and the gaps that divide us become smaller. Heart, soul, identity and integrity, call it what you will: it is the “being” in human being, and it has no race or ethnicity, no creed or doctrine, no philosophical, ideological or political commitments. When we meet at that level, we can have the kind of encounter that helps heal our alienation and suffering: I know this from experience. At that level, Rumi is right: “even the phrase each other/doesn’t make any sense.”
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I love Rumi’s poem and the truth and possibility he points to. But if Rumi wants us to abandon altogether the world of “ideas, language” and “each other,“ I part company with him. Ideas and language are important and so is the reality of “otherness.” In the rhetoric of American democracy, we are “one nation, indivisible.” And yet the differences between us are vital—not least the differences in our experiences and ideas: as individuals and as a society we advance from the creative conflict of those ideas. So Audre Lord is as right as Rumi: “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
Think of us collectively as a prism. The prism itself is one thing, indivisible. But a prism is useless until we turn it this way and that, allowing each of its facets to refract a particular dimension of the light: only so can we begin to comprehend light as a whole. As American citizens, we are one reality and each of us possesses a piece, and only a piece, of the reality puzzle. To comprehend the whole, we must grasp both of those facts and live in the tension between them, simultaneously embracing our diversity and our unity.
What does all this have to do with “healing the heart of democracy?” Everything. If democracy is to thrive or even survive, we must first acknowledge that we have a responsibility for each other’s lives, that there is a “common good” and we must work toward it together. At the same time, we must accept the fact that “we, the people” have radically different notions of what the common good is, and a right to hold those notions limited only by the rule of law.
Simultaneously affirming the claims of community and the rights of individuals is no walk in the park, but democracy demands it. Most of us spend most of our time thinking about ourselves, not others; and when we think about those others who disagree with us, we do not always think kindly of them. When we stop thinking about ourselves long enough to consider our community, we tend to draw its boundaries pretty tightly around our family, friends, race or social class.
Only when we are marginalized by the majority do most of us give much thought to making a place for “otherness” in community. And only when we are forced by circumstance do we seek sustenance from the commons—as when losing a job or a home or our health forces us to depend on public assistance of some sort—does the common good arise for us as more than a pious abstraction. As a close observer of our species once said, “You can learn a lot about people by discovering who they mean when they use the word ‘we.’”
In this book I will explore ways to deepen our capacity—inner and outer—to hold the tension of our differences for the sake of the common good, ways that can help bring new life to individuals and the nation. As I have examined some of the obstacles to that agenda in these notes, it may seem as if I have already written myself into a corner! But two facts give me a way forward:
• The institutions of American democracy were designed by the Founders to help us practice our national motto, e pluribus unum, by holding the tension between our diverse visions of the good society in a life-giving way. That infrastructure, though weakened, has not yet failed; it still has the capacity to serve as a tension-holding loom on which to weave the common good.
• As individuals we can and must develop what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart” that allow us to use that loom in the way it was intended, to inhabit the institutions of democracy in ways that bring democracy to life. Those habits can be evoked, developed and expanded by education in its many forms, an education where we learn to speak and listen in ways that keep us engaged with the great conversation of democracy that opens everyone to larger truth.
The first three chapters of this book will explore American politics, public life and social change, with special attention to the inner dynamics of citizenship and change agentry. The next three chapters will focus on the myriad ways we can educate the heart for its critical role in renewing democracy. I will explore traditional and non-traditional venues in which we can help each other develop the citizen capacities on which democracy depends—schools, colleges and universities, religious communities, workplaces and other settings of public life—spelling out practical ways of doing what we need to do to help heal democracy’s heart.
What we need to do, put briefly, is to create safe spaces where Americans can meet and grow as human beings, at the level of the heart. Our society has admirable expertise in many arenas. But we know very little about creating safe spaces of this sort, spaces where we can gain access to our own and each other’s hearts, evoking their life-giving powers and doing what we can to forge “the bonds of affection.”
On the relatively rare occasions when human beings have understood how to do this, life-giving history has been written. Heart-power helped animate the civil rights movement and the women’s movement in this country, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa. Indeed, heart-power animated the movement that led to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, without which we would not have an experiment in American democracy to keep alive.
If we care about the fate of democracy in America, we can no longer afford to do business as usual in any of the settings of our common life, from schools to the workplace to the public arena, since “business as usual” not only excludes the heart but sends it scurrying to find cover. Without imagining that we can or should give up our conflicting political convictions—and without imagining that we will end up as friends or even liking each other very much—we must find ways to meet first as human beings and then as fellow citizens of this precious but imperiled experiment called American democracy. We must call upon the better angels of our nature for the sake of restoring ”we, the people“ and our shared quest for a common good.
This, I believe, is a possible impossibility. For all the challenges we face, Leonard Cohen got it right in his song, “Democracy:”
It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
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