Decency Will Win

For the first time in well over a year, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Thank you, Senator Cory Booker.

Sen. Cory Booker, NJ, makes the longest speech in Senate history.

by Julie Roginsky

On Monday night, Senator Cory Booker, clad in a black suit and black tie, entered the Senate chamber and took to the floor. For over twenty-five hours, his voice growing ever more hoarse, he made a plea for a return to decency.

With all the daily outrages inflicted upon a weary nation by Donald Trump, it is hard to recall how out of vogue decency has become in our body politic. The Trumpian worldview is fundamentally Hobbesian, based on a philosophy that life — or at least civic life — is brutal, nasty and short. We are governed by a president who has mocked veterans, the disabled, women, people of color, religious minorities, and pretty much everyone who has not bent the knee to him unconditionally. His minions in Washington have followed suit, engaging in insult purely for the sake of insult. He has elevated shock jocks and alleged sexual assailants to his cabinet. And he has done all this as the country has coarsened on his watch, splitting apart at the seams at home while turning its back on our allies abroad.

It was not always this way. A decade ago, before Trump descended that golden escalator, this kind of behavior was rendered to the margins of talk radio and dark web chats. Today, Trump’s alter ego Elon Musk declares that, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Let that sink in for a moment: empathy, promoted across major world religions as the Golden Rule and instructions to “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” is considered weak by this Administration. The very trait that parents work so hard to instill in their children from birth is derided by the men who run this nation.

That is not to say that the country had not gone through moments of rank cruelty before. The senator who had previously given the longest floor speech in history was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who spent more than 24 hours filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Thurmond dedicated all that energy to denying Black Americans equal rights under the law. This week, a Black American from New Jersey smashed that record with a very different message.

Unlike Thurmond, Booker did not spend his time on the senate floor reading the election laws of each state or quoting from the speeches of George Washington and Alexis de Tocqueville. Instead, he focused on what Democrats should have been speaking about every single minute of every single day since January 20th: the horrors that this president is inflicting on every single American, irrespective of party affiliation. He spoke about the threat to our democracy, about the dangers to regular Americans who relied on Medicaid and Social Security to survive, about the failures of his own party to rise to the challenge of defending the country against Trumpism. “I confess that I’ve been inadequate. That the Democrats have been responsible for allowing the rise of this demagogue,” he added.

But mostly, Booker appealed to our collective decency.

“This is not right or left, it is right or wrong,” he said many hours into his speech. “This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment. Where do you stand?”

It may seem naive to believe that in this day and age, Booker’s call for decency will prevail. After all, these kinds of gimmicks do not often result in lasting change. Within hours of Thurmond ending his filibuster in 1957, the senate overwhelmingly passed the Civil Rights Act, which President Eisenhower quickly signed it into law. Less than a decade later, Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but also failed to prevent its passage. So, it may be too optimistic to think that Booker’s speech will have a lasting impact, that it will return us to a time when it was unacceptable to kidnap people off the streets and ship them off to a foreign prison without an ounce of due process; when it was unacceptable to stock a cabinet with incompetents who jeopardize our national security; when it was unacceptable to side with totalitarians while threatening our longstanding allies.

But I don’t think it is. Booker’s record-shattering speech ended right before polls closed in two House special elections in Florida and in Wisconsin, where voters cast ballots in a judicial election that determined control of the state Supreme Court. The results in all three elections were a sound rejection of Trumpism.

Though Republicans held on to the two deep-red Florida seats, their margins were more than half of what Trump had received just five months ago. In Wisconsin, which Trump won by less than one percent, his endorsed candidate is on track to lose by 10 points.

Remember, we are fewer than one hundred days into Trump’s term. This is supposed to be his honeymoon period. What is clear from yesterday’s elections and from a special Pennsylvania election two weeks ago where a Democrat flipped a long-held state senate seat is that many people who cast their votes for Trump last November have buyer’s remorse. They are no longer willing to be patient and give him the benefit of the doubt. They have seen enough.

There is no question that we are living in dark times, that attempting to keep up with the horrors of this Administration is like drinking from a firehose. Still, a confluence of events happened yesterday that should provide a real sense of optimism for a nation that has been living a nightmare for the last several months.

A United States senator showed us that there is fight left in some of our elected officials in Washington. And voters from Florida to Wisconsin showed the rest of us that they reject Trump, Musk and MAGA in all their forms. They showed us that it is not naive to reject the toxic worldview that this president wants to convince us is inevitable.

In full disclosure, I was Booker’s consultant more than a decade ago when he first ran for senate and, during that time, I got to spend many long days with him. (Trust me, nothing strips a candidate down to his bare essence more than being put through the wringer of debate prep.). In private, Booker really is who he appeared to be this week: a man who cares deeply about this country and who loves it enough to criticize it, so that he can help build it into a more perfect union.

Booker may not be everyone’s cup of tea and his earnestness and constant talk about love may not resonate with those who have grown angry and disenchanted with politics in the age of Trump. But what he demonstrated so powerfully this week is that we can fight Trumpism and its ever-creeping authoritarianism in a way authentic to each of us.

I am also old enough to have worked in the United States Senate when Thurmond was still serving there. By the time I arrived, he was a caricature, propped up by his elbows by two staff members who all but physically dragged him to the floor for votes. The only time he would ever perk up is when a blonde, large-chested woman would come within a hundred feet of him, at which point he would yell out, “Come over here, honey!” and grind himself up against her.

Thurmond and Booker served in the same legislative body, with two very different views of how to treat their country and their fellow human beings. One gave into cynicism by calling legislation to provide Black people with rights “cruel and unusual punishment.” The other called on our better angels by invoking the Constitution and reminding us of civil rights leaders who forced the arc of the universe to bend towards justice just a little bit faster.

There are dark days ahead, much darker than we have already experienced. But yesterday, for the first time in well over a year, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. From the Florida panhandle to the Midwest to the floor of the Senate, Americans fought back against despair in very different ways. And at every turn, they succeeded.

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