Bending the Arc

On July 4, 2026, the United States of America will commemorate and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Each month, we will share an article inviting reflection on this anniversary, the current state of our democracy, and our personal role in its maintenance. 

January 6, 2026, marks the Feast of the Epiphany and the fifth anniversary of the insurrection at the United States Capitol. Diana Butler Bass published the following article in January 2022. 

The Unwanted Anniversary: Remembering and contemplating democracy

I’ve been thinking a lot about anniversaries this month.

A few days ago, my husband, Richard, and I marked twenty-five years of marriage. The milestone prompted us to remember what was surprising and good in our time together and to look ahead and consider what we’d like to do in the next decade or two. Anniversaries are like that. Part memory exercise, part imagining the future.

But that’s not the only anniversary on my mind.

I’ve also been thinking about the first anniversary of January 6, the Insurrection at the Capitol. It may seem odd to put these anniversaries together in this reflection, given one celebrates love and the other recalls a violent political event. But anniversaries, whether commemorating something joyous or painful, invite us into the same two movements: remembering what has been and considering what might be.

And so, prompted by the unwanted anniversary of January 6, I’ve been ruminating on democracy — its past and its future.

Movement 1: REMEMBERING DEMOCRACY

The most significant memory I have of democracy is having no memory of it. Democracy was just what was. I took it for granted. It was always there, and it would always be there. Sort of like Jesus, “the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

Some of my earliest memories are political ones — mostly of John F. Kennedy and of the Civil Rights Movement. Between the two, I learned that democracy was a hope-filled possibility and that it wasn’t perfect. Indeed, it wasn’t complete. It was a project. There were people who couldn’t vote because of the color of their skin. There were people who didn’t have certain rights because they weren’t men. There were people who couldn’t publicly proclaim who they loved because others considered them deviant. There were those with no access to democracy because they were poor or marginalized or went unnoticed.

How to fix these things, make the project work?

Democratic shortcomings were addressed by better democracy. In the middle of the twentieth century, people fought to widen democracy’s reach, to establish the dignified participation of everyone in voting, and to guarantee equity under the law. The federal government must stand as a protector of democracy for all citizens, no matter an individual’s political party, class, or creed. Indeed, many Americans shared a sense of democratic responsibility for people across the globe who were seeking a fairer, more just, and humane existence. Democracy was a worthy project, and it was a bright birthright, our political North Star.

In addition to being an incomplete project, it seemed pretty obvious there were problems with democracy, too. People guessed there were rigged elections (I’m still convinced that my junior year student council election was fixed) and demagogues of all sorts. And democracy has always had violent impulses — its discontents quick to threaten and even kill dreamers and reformers. White middle-class people — the people who raised me — tended to see the misuse of democracy as aberrations, “mistakes,” to the genial progress of history. We eschewed the Joseph McCarthys of the world, were horrified by the Bull Connorses and George Wallaces on the news, and could barely believe President Nixon would lie to us but held him responsible when he did. It was different for others (I know that now) who warned that mistakes were purposeful and that abuse might be baked into the system. But, oddly enough, most of them appealed to democracy to fix it, too.

My upbringing not only took democracy for granted, but we also thought it inevitably progressed. It would grow, move forward, and win the world. Democracy would triumph.

Truthfully, however, democracies move in fits and starts. They leap forward with utopian fervor; they lurch backward when those in charge fear a loss of status and power. In most American schools, we celebrated the leaps forward and minimized the backward lurches. Because we believed in the triumph. We loved a “chicken in every pot,” “morning in America” and a “place called Hope,” but we cower from whirlwinds and storms. That means that we’re mostly unprepared for the backlashes when they come. And, in a democracy, they always come.

Democracy, the rule of the people, is a political system based on us. The rule of the people can be as inspiring as the greatest human impulses, as fickle as human nature, and as devious and deluded as human beings can be. In this way, “democracy” isn’t an ideology. You can’t put an “ism” on the end of democracy. Indeed, it is a practice of being a person in community, a polity based more on faith in the commons than a systematized doctrine. You can’t really believe indemocracy. Instead, democracy asks us to trust that we belong to one another — all of us — and that together we can behave more justly and learn that liberty and happiness are possible.
If you have a political polity based on the rule of the people, however, it can’t be anything but messily human — sometimes shining like the sun, sometimes still or scatterbrained, sometimes stuck in a sinkhole of sin.
I think of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writing on the irony of American history — in effect, the irony of democracy — in the early days of the Cold War:

Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning. Our own nation, always a vivid symbol of the most characteristic attitudes of a bourgeois culture, is less potent to do what it wants in the hour of its greatest strength than it was in the days of its infancy. The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world. The pattern of the historical drama grows more quickly than the strength of even the most powerful man or nation.

Niebuhr would go on to say, “Meanwhile we are drawn into an historic situation in which the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity; and the conviction of the perfect compatibility of virtue and prosperity which we have inherited from both our Calvinist and our Jeffersonian ancestors is challenged by the cruel facts of history.”

He never imagined that the “paradise of our domestic security” would become paradise lost. That’s why the first anniversary of January 6 is so significant. The cruel facts of history came home when armed Americans, deceived by an American president, destroyed a proud tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and attempted a coup to overturn the results of an election — all in a corrupted notion of actually saving democracy.
January 6 proved there’s no escaping the insecurity that roils the globe. There is no domestic paradise. There’s no Kansas to go home to. Somebody stole the freaking ruby slippers. And we’re stuck in a this brilliantly colored world with poisoned poppies and flying monkeys. We’re going to have to figure out how to live here.

Remembering democracy is more than nostalgia. It isn’t a couple on their anniversary toasting their success saying, “Isn’t it great? We did everything perfectly!” No. Remembering is a bittersweet task, involving honesty, confession, regret, and the deep knowledge of how much we did wrong. And yet the central promise remains — love, commitment, partnership, building a life together no matter what.

Remembering democracy is like that. It is memory with layers of irony on ironies, while understanding that democracy is the only thing that can correct all the problems of democracy. The central promise remains — a polis where every person really matters, building a society together no matter what.

Movement 2: CONSIDERING THE FUTURE

These memories shape how we contemplate the future of democracy. More than anything else, we need to be fully alert to the perils of what might be.

January 6 was backlash on steroids. Backlash to a Black president. Backlash to marriage equality. Backlash to women’s rights. Backlash to the widening of democracy over most of our lifetimes — a widening that saw democracy reaching to include all sorts of people who had been excluded, a democratic correction of the flaws and misuses and mistakes of democracy past. January 6 wasn’t just about Donald Trump or the Big Lie. It was backlash to four decades of democratic progress that had been, by any historical account, extraordinary.

Thus, the backlash was a dramatic, violent, and dizzying demonstration of what Niebuhr warned: “The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.”

In some ways, January 6 echoed other violent backlashes in American history. But it was also singular because it was an epiphany of sorts — it revealed that among us are those who don’t believe that democracy is the way to fix a democracy. Rather, less democracy, even violence, even a paramilitary and quasi-religious coup, is the path some have embraced for the future. The rule of fake histories and lies. The rule of people with guns. The rule of “Jesus Saves” and a gallows.

As much as we might not want to remember January 6, we must remember it. 

We need to ask: 
Where do we go from here? Was this the last act of “recalcitrant forces” against a democracy that opens its arms wide, as inclusive and pluralistic as its implicit promises? Or was January 6 the first act of the end of a democracy that most of us too often took for granted? What kind of future do we want? What future can we commit to make?