Professor Keith Fitzgerald's address to the Democratic Club of Sarasota at the November 13, 2004 luncheon in which he uplifted us with a bright outlook for the future.
(as amended)

Good afternoon.  Thank you for having me here today.  I would like to address you this afternoon, as a friend and a fellow citizen, not as a state employee, or even political science professor.  I take it that I have something of a special mission in this address because for many of you this is a time of grieving and lament.  I am asking you to let me speak to you from my heart about that which  causes great pain, and I take this up with a sense of real gravity.  I know how important it is.

My main mission this afternoon is to reach out to those of us whose hearts have been broken by this great election.

The heart of my message is this.  For many of us, this election was an absolute tragedy.  For those of you who share my perspective, the last four years have been gigantically destructive to what we love most about this country.  On the occasion of this great despair, our first task is to reflect on the meaning of our sorrow.  Why are we so heartbroken? 

The answer is, much to the surprise of many of us, that we are deeply patriotic, that we love our country, and we are grieving for the possible loss of what we love about it the most.  In our sorrow, let us embrace this love we have for our nation and its greatness, not just its wealth but the grandness of its promise that we see now imperiled.  We are born again patriots and it is from the passion drawn from our love of the American project that we will rise again, stronger than ever, and we will redeem the promise of the dream that is the United States of America.

If we did not have a great love for our country, for its goodness, and hope for its destiny, we would have less sorrow over this election.  I know that this born-again patriotism surprises many of us because we are not used to thinking of ourselves as patriots.  How many times, over the last few days have you heard someone say or said yourself “I am moving to Canada, or Finland, Sweden or New Zealand” or where ever?  Let us think about that.  Many of us in the Democratic Party and on the Left long ago accepted and internalized the idea that we are aliens in our own nation. 

Perhaps it began in the Vietnam era when many young men literally left for other countries rather than subjecting themselves to the draft.  That specific historical fact linked up with a sense that many of us had throughout the era from McCarthy through Nixon and Watergate that the United States was at its core corrupt.  When I grew up my parents flew the flag proudly on every holiday.  But for my generation and those that came after, flag waving was something the other side did as they shouted “love it or leave it.”  It wasn’t for us.  We thought of ourselves as apart from the United States.  But that was wrong.

The great pageant of American history has always been defined by the visionaries who saw the United States as a project unfinished.  It has been the openness of that project to confront its failures and the improve them that has made this country admirable.  And it has been the progressives, the left, the Liberals, and the Democrats who have called us to redeem the promise of this great nation, and who have called each of us as citizens to realize our better selves.

The Founding Fathers bequeathed us a great republic—but it was a republic deeply scarred by racism and slavery.  It was the progressives of their day, often religiously motivated, from Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, the abolitionists, Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln who challenged us to redeem the promise of equality laid out in the Declaration of Independence and who eventually triumphed with the end of slavery.  And it was men and women, great and small, African American and others, again, often religiously motivated, lead by perhaps the greatest American of the last century, Martin Luther King, who fought to redeem the greater promises of this great nation during the Civil Rights era.  These were progressives, and these were Americans, and these are the heroes who have made this country great.

Whether we call ourselves Liberals, or progressives, Leftists or simply Democrats, whatever our disappointments with the facts about our country, we should never allow ourselves to think that we are aliens in it.  From John Dewey, one of the 20^th century’s greatest philosophers, to Jane Addams, the first woman win the Nobel Peace Prize, to Franklin Roosevelt who built the New Deal and helped win the Second World War to end fascism, to Harry Truman, the person who actually deserves the title as “the most liberal candidate ever to run for president” and the president who truly deserves the most  credit for winning the Cold War, and to the countless thousands who built the labor movement, who fought for Civil Rights, and fought for the rights for children and the rights for women, and who, in most cases, out of true patriotism, like John Kerry, protested a war in Vietnam in which our political leaders misled us into a fiasco without leveling with the public and without a plan to win, to those who have fought to improve the environment, to those who give up more lucrative careers to teach our children, to provide public health, to conduct basic research, to all of us who work and vote for social justice and values of citizen participation and self-governance, this is our country.  We did not only help make it, we helped make it great.

Never again should we allow ourselves to feel like aliens in our own country or that that American flag belongs to someone else.  So to all of you who have talked about moving abroad I invite you to stand with me today and say this:

“This is our flag.  This is our country.  We love it enough to fight it and we aren’t going anywhere.”

Now, let me make another point, and I know some of you are not going to be happy with me for what I am about to say.  So great is the loss of this election, for many of us, we are in grief something like what one goes through at the end of an intimate relationship or a death in the family.  The experts tell us that the first stage of grief is denial.

We have to move past denial.  It is important for us to recognize that we lost this election.  The other side received more votes than we did.  I have heard and studied all the stories about voting irregularities.  My perspective on this is informed by knowledge of the long history of the conduct of elections in the United States.  There is much room for criticism, many constructive suggestions for improving the reliability and transparency of the voting process to be made.  However, we must not allow ourselves to cling to the idea that we did not really lose, that in fact the election was stolen, a contention for which there is simply insufficient evidence to be credible.  To do so is denial.  To do so is to delay facing the facts.  If we allow ourselves to get caught up in denial, we are delaying the time when we get down to the work that needs to be done to fix our party and to win the next election.  We need to stop obsessing about the vote count and get to work on winning.

The second stage of grief, by the way, is depression.  Well, there is much about this election loss that is disheartening.

I argue this.  We should do nothing to sell short the immensity of the reelection of the President.  The increasing size of the majority that his loyalists hold in both Houses of Congress, and the prospects of a complete capture of the Supreme Court and Federal judiciary are disastrous.   There are real reasons for hope to be found in the results of this election, however.  We must hold onto this hope because if we are to turn the tide of history we must first face the fact that part of why we are losing is due to our own failings. 

We also need to understand, as hard as it is to face, that the other side won not only by scaring the daylights out of everyone, which it did, not just because it used demagoguery and mobilized deep-rooted prejudices, although these were important tools in its arsenal of weapons.   The other side also won because it presented for many a compelling message.  It presented what for many is a message of optimism, of hope, and of idealism. We have to understand this and do a better job of competing with the other party on these grounds.  We need our own message of optimism, hope and idealism.   We also must work harder and smarter to make that message clear and compelling.  The facts show that we can succeed.  If we call from ourselves what is best, and we do our best, our day will come.

I hardly need to list all the reasons that the Bush administration’s reelection horrifies many of us.  I want to remark on a few as a way of remembering that, despite the other side’s message to the contrary, we do have strong moral values and a rich vision for the future of this country.

This administration has pursued a foreign policy that is both shameful and disastrous.   The United States of America from the time of the administration of Woodrow Wilson used its unique position of leadership to build an international regime based on international law, cooperation and collective security.  It did so because it was right and it did so because it was in the security interests of the United States.  That is so because if we, as the wealthiest and mightiest nation in the world can be more than the enforcer of privilege, but also the promoter of peace, prosperity and human dignity, we can secure own economic fortunes and security while advancing the greatest ideals of the humankind.  The United States deviated from these ideals on many occasions, but that it proclaimed them and mainly followed them made us respected, won us the Cold War, and made us the hope of an anxious world.

Despite failures such as the Viet Nam War, and partly because we are the kind of polity in which the people could confront the failures of their leaders even in matters of war as we did in Viet Nam, it was to the example of the United States that Vaclev Havel and millions resisting the tyranny of the old Soviet Empire turned for hope and inspiration.

With the disastrous war against Iraq, the president tore apart the very edifice of international law and collective security that the United States built the throughout the 20^th century under every president, Democrat and Republican.

By conducting this war as he did, the president took the international good will that we enjoyed after the despicable attacks of 9-11 and instead now has left us with literally hundreds of millions of Muslims world wide, including huge numbers under the ages of 30, believing that Osama bin Laden may be right and justified in his radical call for a holy war.

Because of his grotesque incompetence in the way he conducted the war, the President has now left us on the brink of utter disaster in Iraq.  In the closing days of the election campaign, President Bush accused Senator Kerry of advocating a “cut and run” policy in Iraq.  I suspect that that is exactly the direction President Bush is taking us.  We will brutally repress the insurgency against us, as we are right now in Falluja, to buy time for us to run hasty elections that will lack credibility.  Then we will withdraw declaring victory.  In all likelihood, should we follow this path, Iraq will face a disastrous future.   The alternative scenario in Iraq, a bloody quagmire in which we remain involved, is even worse.  In either case, while Iraq was not a center of terrorism prior to our invasion it likely will be one for decades to come, and the enmity that the world will visit on us for it will be immense.

For all of this, peace in the Middle East will be more remote rather than closer, and the force that the United States could play as a peacemaker and a credible broker has been lost for a long time to come.  This fact is especially sad since the death of Chairman Yassar Arafat could have opened a door for peace if it were the case that the United States had any credibility left in the Muslim world.

The domestic implications of this election are just as big.  The president speaks of an ownership society, and that is what we are likely to get—a society where those who are vested with vast holdings of capital are first class citizens and those who are not are second class citizens, where the poor, the non-white, the disabled and the aged will have perpetual insecurity, where upward mobility will have disappeared and the less fortunate will have no stake in the future of the country.   We may well see tough times in the near future as the deficit undermines economic growth and we are less able to pay for health care and education.  But the worst effects of Republicans’ “ownership” policies are found in the redistribution of wealth in this country away from the shrinking middle class to the richest among us.  This is bad for all of us.  We’re a capitalistic country and there is nothing wrong with running an economy in which large numbers of people can become hugely prosperous, but no society can sustain a healthy democracy in the long run that is divided deeply between the haves and have-nots, especially if those on the bottom half does not have the hope of upward mobility, if not for itself, at least for its children and grandchildren.

Now, let us face it.  The most depressing part of all of this for all of us who fear these trends is that our fellow Americans just reelected this president.  What scares us is not just what the future holds due to these polices, but what it means that we live in a country where our compatriots see the world so differently from us that they could put this administration back in office, and in fact, increase the hold that the president’s party has on the Congress.

It is here that I want to tell you that I think that there is good news.  The evidence is clear.  Despite a 3 million vote and 3% victory, the Republican Party has not won the hearts and minds of the vast majority of the American people. 

The exit polls show quite clearly that terrorism was the main issue that won the president his reelection.  Karl Rove played this issue to the hilt and successfully so, and bin Laden himself helped by bringing the whole focus of the election back to the terrorism issue on the final weekend of the campaign.

The polls showed that most voters remain highly critical of the conduct of the war with Iraq.  Most voters do not approve of how President Bush is running the economy.  Most voters do not agree that abortion should be regulated by the federal government and most support stem cell research.  Most voters do not approve of gay marriage, but most voters do express higher levels of tolerance for gays and lesbians than in the past, the young at higher rates than the rest.  The simple fact is that Democrats won on the economy, Democrats won on the social issues, and Democrats won on most aspects of foreign policy. 

This is good news—but it also shows something crucial that we have to wrap our heads around.  Winning on the issues is not enough to win elections.  I will say more on this in a few minutes.

Here is another reason for hope.  We did mobilize better than ever.   (We simply forgot that they are more experienced at this than us—we worked harder and smarter than in the past, but they worked harder and smarter than us.)  New voters favored Senator Kerry at a rate of 53% to 46%.  We made progress here on the mobilization front—we simply need to work better and harder next time and the time after that.

Perhaps the most exciting reason for hope lies in the fact that we won the young people.  Voters aged 18-29 voted for John Kerry at a rate of 54% to 45%.  In 1964, The Republican Party ran the first hard core conservative candidate for president since the New Deal began.  Their candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost that election 61 to 39 percent.  Yet, a new generation of activists moved into positions of leadership in that election including William Rehnquist, George Will, Sandra Day O’Connor, and thousands of others.  The victory of the Democrats this year with the young people, the fact that we not only won most of their votes but we had droves of them passionately active in the campaign for president and other offices means that this can be our watershed election.  And unlike the Republicans in 1964, we are only three percentage points behind.

To capitalize on these two important accomplishments, we need to focus on building organizations and communities.  We need to be able to keep the faithful together, to recruit new members, to make people excited, and be poised to mobilize these resources during the next election.

The Democratic Party at the national level, the state level, and the local level did some things better this time, but they are all a long way from building the kind of communities that I am talking about.

We can talk more about this later. 

The most important single fact to keep in mind is that we saw in this election, held in a time of global insecurity, an incumbent party win a narrow 51-49% victory.  It would be foolish not to recognize that the other side has made inroads at a time when we hoped to turn the tide, but as bad as this defeat was from the standpoint of a disastrous set of policies being pushed farther, it simply is not a sign of a mass conversion of the entire population to the conservative point of view.

Finally, I want to talk about one of the most important failings of our party, and perhaps the most urgent item for us to address if we want to win in the future. Democrats lost big on values and vision.  We have to stop making excuses about this and confront the fact that this is a real failing.  A good place to begin is by stopping the bad habit of thinking and speaking in condescending terms about people who are not voting with us.  We want these people to be with us, and assuming that they are idiots is not a good place to begin the conversation.

Specifically, we have to stop acting as if there is something stupid or disreputable about voting for moral values rather than economic self-interest.

Once we accept that there is something hopeful about the fact that some people will put their moral values above their pocketbooks, we should be able to see that we can reach people with our own moral values.

We also have to stop acting as if people bringing their religious faith into politics are vulgar and unfair.  After all, even among those of us who are secularly oriented, is it not our religious background that serves as the fount of our faith in social justice as a transcendent value?

That which does make the term ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ meaningful at all is that the Gospel of Jesus is at its root a Jewish message about the implications of Jewish moral law for resistance against oppression and injustice.  Not only can we be comfortable in speaking in religious terms, I think we can win the argument that our side is right on just such terms.

The Jewish and Christian traditions, like the great pageant of American history, revolve around stories of redemption, of covenants made, lost, and renewed.  For this reason, for those of us of faith and for those of us who have strayed from our religious traditions, Jewish and Christian ethics can provide direction our born-again sense of patriotism, because the ideals of these traditions claim that human goodness is not rooted in privilege, a smug sense that we are already perfect, but instead a sense of commitment to community, responsibility, and striving for the realization of our better selves.

Finally, let us pay homage to President George W. Bush.  He has inspired many of our fellow citizens to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose for American power than just our national interest.  Let us recognize that his success shows that people want more from politics than a substitute for the market as a source of service delivery.  They want meaning, to feel like they are part of something beyond themselves, something great that will lift men and women of good will up and give them hope.

We believe the President is a false prophet in this respect.  The hopefulness and optimism that he has inspired in his adventurous foreign policy may be fraught with danger and lead to disaster, but let us not lose faith with what the fact that he has inspired people says about our fellow citizens.

Millions of our compatriots are willing to sacrifice American lives to further democracy and justice abroad.  President Bush has convinced them that we have gone to Iraq to bring peace and democracy to a part of the world that has not known it before.  He has tapped into the great idealism of self-sacrifice and patriotism that Wilson drew on when he took us to Europe, that Franklin Roosevelt drew on in calling us to arms against not only Japan but also Germany and Italy, and that Kennedy drew on when he created the Peace Corps.

So, in addition to protesting against Iraq, we need to lay out a constructive vision for what we want the role of the United States in the world to be.

Without detailing such a foreign policy here, I would say that our task is the same as it has always been for those of us whose concept of patriotism lies in redeeming the highest of our ideals.  President Bush articulates a bold vision for the United States of American as a nation that promises to bear great costs to promote democracy and respect for human dignity in the world.  Our task should be to answer that call by challenging our compatriots and our leaders to redeem that promise.  The greatest challenge in this respect will be to allow such goals to inform our policy not only toward our enemies but also to our friends.  If we are willing to spend the blood of young American patriots in a war justified nobly as a struggle for democracy in the Middle East, should we not also be willing to bring pressure to bear on our friends the Saudis to begin to liberalize and democratize?

We need to begin to speak of our vision for a better world and we have to do it in unabashedly moral, and yes, even religious grounds.  The theme of redemption begins at home.  We promote democracy abroad.  It is time to realize it at home.  Yes, this should begin with transparent voting procedures.  But democratization should go beyond that to include making a moral commitment to an education for all children sufficient for them to have the chance to grow into contributing citizens.  Such a commitment goes beyond schooling and includes a social commitment to decent health care, housing, communities with less crime, and meaningful opportunities for young people to contribute to their communities and country.  It means redeeming the promise of real opportunity to gain a stake in the future—not only an economic stake but also a moral stake—and this requires a commitment to securing a better environment, cities that can grow in size and quality, but without sprawl.  It means regenerating a sense of citizenship in which all of us have a chance to make our mark.

The progressives in American history have always had the special job of challenging the rest of the nation to redeem the promises promoted in the banners of those who would have us believe that ours is already a perfect country.  Our side has lost time and again, but in the end it is up to us to make our country great.  Now is not a time to lose faith, now is a time to renew it.  It is worth fighting for what we believe in and if we believe it we will not give up because it is hard.  Join me today in recommitting to the American project.  Remember the phrase:

Our day will come.