To achieve national unity, Americans must all agree to reject political violence

Good evening from Washington, where we are once again reeling from what the FBI says was an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and deluge of hatred and ignorance focused on immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

It’s a dreadful moment, with escalating risk of violence as fear and anger wash over hundreds of millions of Americans.

Today, I want to focus more on crafting a civic text, not civic tech.

We must hold two truths to be self-evident at the same time:

1) Americans must cast ballots, not bullets.

Political violence is unacceptable in our union. We must not allow the return of lethal violence to our politics. We must never legitimize political violence in any democratic process, on behalf of any party.

We should serve, volunteer, march, protest, petition, speak, & assemble in peace, never to threaten or terrorize teachers, election administrators, or public health officials, with violence — much less members of a legislature or judges if they do not vote or rule as we wish.

2) Any authoritarian threat means we cannot be silent, but fear and anger must not be used to validate threats of lethal violence — much less its use.

If we allow hatred and lies to dominate our politics, the USA will slide further into the abyss that awaits eroding democracies that opened a Pandora’s Box to war and ruin after failed coups. Choose resilience and resolve, not rage and revenge.

A demagogue seeking re-election to evade accountability after conspiring to overturn the last election has been given immunity by the Supreme Court that added an unratified amendment to the Constitution. If such a man can be held above the law in our union, despite the obvious intent of our founders provide Congress and the courts with the means to impeach and prosecute him, then our democracy is indeed imperiled.

That fact does not justify violence, but rather reform over the years it will take the repair the damage to one of the most basic concepts in American society.

In answer, we must turn to the ballot box, the court house, and the debate rostrum — never to the grip of a gun, point of knife, or the flag poles that insurrectionists used to beat federal police officers defending the U.S. Capitol three years ago.

This is the time to call for “unity,“ but not around the illiberal principle that Americans must refrain from dissent or now fall silent about the stakes of an election because of an assassination attempt against a politician who has done more to legitimize violence with dehumanizing rhetoric than any other in modern history.

Do not call for death. Instead, sue for peace, decency, and empathy, and then work over the years on delivering the restorative justice and national reconciliation that will be required after the paired traumas of the pandemic and seditious mob violence.

Every leader must now find a way to remind Americans that we are all bound up together in finding a way forward.

Either our union will perish as a ship of fools, or unite in shared agreement that political violence is unacceptable.

Allowing this basic principle to perish in a cauldron of hatred and xenophobia will risk the return of the worst ideas and atrocities of the last century, supercharged by automation and the surveillance state.

That means that anyone who seeks state-wide or nation-wide office in the United States must serve and protect ALL of their constituents — not just their voters.

Demonizing legal immigrants who are new to a commmunity is disqualifying in a union made stronger by centuries of new Americans, yearning to breathe free.🗽

Injustice to one American threatens the liberties of all Americans.

We are a nation of immigrants, save for the peoples who inhabited these lands when Europeans arrived — and even they walked over the Bering Strait, millennia ago.

Every generation helps bend the arc of moral progress towards an America of, by, & for all of our people, or holds the line against immoral demagogues and foreign despots who seek to turn against us against one another.

Our national story is one of refugees coming here from every corner of the world in search of a better life for their children in a new nation.

They come in search of on a common civic creed that is not grounded in a singular religious or ethnic identity, but the promise of a place in a young, vibrant, multiracial democracy still finding its way to pluralism.

You cannot claim to truly love the USA, if you don’t love all of the people in it.

You cannot claim to be a patriot, if you are unwilling or unable to put our country before party as or yourself.

You can’t credibly lead a diverse, sprawling union that contains multitudes, if you incite hated and violence with racist or xenophobic lies.

To be an American requires us to know our past, so that we never repeat it, to defend our Republic, so we keep it, and to look towards the future, so that we invent it.

In memory of my friend Jake Brewer, I pledge to be an American.

I hope you will, too.