Student protesters worthy inheritors of a noble creed

I have to say, I loved the gun-control march I observed Saturday in Washington. The crowd was good-hearted, gracious, diverse and welcoming. At a time when trust in democracy is waning, everybody kept underlining their faith in our democratic system, that voting is the way to make change. There was no culture war nastiness, no hint of resentment. Hunters and farmers and vets were celebrated. There was no ill will toward anybody but the NRA.

Of course some of the student speakers were grandiose and pretentious. Most of us were like that when we were

18. But for all their talk of “revolution,” at its heart, this march was about a series of sensible, practical and moderate reforms: restricting assault weapons, expanding background checks and similar measures.

Recently, it has seemed like the country is gyrating out of control, that extremism on one side is generating extremism on the other. But the march I saw was not extreme. It was a responsible moral answer to right a very specific wrong, gun violence. It struck me as a very characteristic burst of American moral passion.

The march passed what I have come to think of as The Privilege Test. One of the great privileges of life is to be born an American citizen. We are the lucky inheritors of the American Creed, built around freedom, equality, opportunity and democracy. There’s no such thing as the French Creed or the Italian Creed but there is an American Creed. As Richard Hofstadter famously put it, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.”

Furthermore, we’re the lucky inheritors of the system Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton built to reify that creed, the words Lincoln, King and others used to expand it. We’re the inheritors of not just philosophical generalizations but of a very specific historical struggle — the legacy that Crispus Attucks, Nathan Hale and Sullivan Ballou left by dying for the creed; the legacy that Eugene Sledge, Frances Perkins, Bayard Rustin and a million immigrant ancestors left by suffering for it.

All we have to do is live up to this privilege of being American, to take our turn narrowing the gap between the American Creed, which binds us, and the American reality, which always disappoints us. The rally in Washington, which took place against the symbolic and literal backdrop of the U.S. Capitol dome, seemed squarely in that tradition.

You’ll notice that in the preceding paragraphs I use the word “privilege” in a very positive way. The sense of American privilege fills us with gratitude and humility. That privilege unites us across division and disagreement. It calls forth great energies.

There are, of course, some parts of society where the word “privilege” has a very negative connotation. In those parts of society, history is not seen as a shared debate over how to pursue a common ideal. Instead it is seen as a zero-sum power struggle between oppressor and oppressed, and America is not a distinct and special place but just another country where the powerful stomp the vulnerable.

Saturday I saw people motivated by idealism and humbled by gratitude. Do some people have benefits they haven’t earned? Yes, and some a lot more than others. But none of us has earned the great privilege we share together and which is the furnace of most reform.