If we Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again, and lose our slim grip on power by forfeiting our senate majority and perhaps the White House, we will have no one to blame but ourselves, and our shameful failure to stand united and to always demand fairness and justice for each other, even and especially our own leaders when they may be guilty of failings we should rightly condemn.
Do you remember the McCarthy era? Probably not, but I do. The scariest thing about that time was not the vile and absurd Joe McCarthy railing against the liberal establishment and claiming to find a communist under every bed, but the silence and complicity of the liberal establishment enabling him. The Democratic politicians and congressional staffers who sat on his committee (even the young Robert Kennedy was one of them!); the Hollywood producers who instantly blacklisted everyone who was called before the committee, before any due process occurred; the social, cultural, and political climate of fear in which so many good people on the right side of history capitulated without a fight, presumably because they were afraid of being cast as being on the side of the communists themselves. It was not good for any business, celebrity or institution to be seen as defending anyone accused of communism in those days, when the soviets had just acquired nuclear weapons and we were doing ‘duck and cover’ drills in our grade school classrooms — and so, many rushed to condemn them, and most at least failed to speak up and demand justice and investigations and the benefit of the doubt for all people accused of having had communist party sympathies in previous decades. After all, many of them had been party members or sympathizers back during the 1930’s, and a few of them may even have been spies; the present danger from the Soviet Union was all too real, and above all, it was just too dangerous to speak up in defense of someone who had been accused, or continue to employ them, or risk being seen as “soft on communism”. It was politically dangerous, socially and economically dangerous, and it took insight and courage to recognize that not all these people were guilty of crimes and that maybe in fact many of them were innocent, or at least more admirable for their successes than they were despicable for their failures. And so many of the best and the brightest who fought in World War II and rose to prominence in government and elsewhere afterwards were persecuted and hounded out of their positions in the 1950s and their service was lost to us before McCarthy was expunged, because we let it happen.
Do you remember the Nazi march in Skokie when the ACLU lost a third of its membership by defending their right to free assembly? My father joined the ACLU when they did that. The test of your moral conscience comes not when you defend a principle for a heroic, noble cause but when you defend it in the service of a disreputable, despised or deeply offensive action.
Governor Cuomo would be deserving of an impartial investigation and due process before calls for his resignation even if he were a corrupt failure of a governor like Desantis of Florida who followed Trump’s lead in suppressing the response to the pandemic, suppressed and lied about the numbers of cases and deaths, and then sought to profit politically from the crisis by steering resources including vaccines to his own donors. But Cuomo is the American political leader who, in this past dreadful year, provided the most exemplary leadership. I tuned in to his seven-day-a-week hour-long briefings without fail for months, and I don’t even live in New York any more. My governors in California and Vermont (where I do live now) did very well during the crisis under the impossible condition of an absent (or actively hostile) national government, but neither of them could hold a candle to Cuomo, who provided exactly what the president should have (and what Obama or any other Democratic president surely would have), which was action, explanation, reassurance accompanied by all kinds of explicit demands upon us, humor, humility, science, and above all a vision of sheer competence — masterly command of a government at work doing everything possible to stem the crisis and stop the dying, like a war president in action as Biden is now, finally. Last spring Cuomo was the only one truly and visibly filling that role, like no president I can remember since John Kennedy during two weeks in October 1962, and I will never forget it.
We must investigate sexual harassment and other misdeeds of our leaders, and the governor will have to be held accountable for all his actions, sooner rather than later. We must affirm the rightness of women coming forward and our commitment to hear their stories and insist on justice for them. But Governor Cuomo is right when he says that calls by politicians for him to resign before the facts have been established by an impartial investigation are reckless and dangerous — not just to the governor, not just to the Democratic party which threatens to do to itself what the Republican party cannot do to it, which is to betray its own principles of fairness, but to our democratic compact itself. The democracy-threatening actions of the insurrectionists at the capitol on January 7th were self-destructive of their own cause because they ignored the very principles of civic responsibility which they were there ostensibly to demand adherence to. The way in which we treat Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, will be no less self-destructive to our own cause, if it ignores the very principles of civic justice that we demand his adherence to.
