Frederick Douglass: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities (2019)

“Frederick Douglass fascinates us because he embodies all the contradictions not just of the black experience in America but more broadly of the radical experience in liberal democracies. Douglass can readily be seen as the father of the most militant strain of resistance, the kind that insists on the uncompromising rejection of racism and on a relentless depiction of its evils, with violence as a recourse when necessary. He believed in violent rebellion, even at times futile rebellion, when the face of racism became intolerable: his seemingly suicidal confrontation as a young man with a brutal slave-breaker is still a model of manhood, self-assertion at the price of possible death. His sense of moral absolutism was completely vindicated by history. No sane person ever doubts any longer that the Civil War had to be an abolition war and only made sense on those terms. The radical reading was the right reading.

But his understanding of pragmatic democratic action taken on a broad front with many allies was vindicated by history too. He was the progenitor and father of the pragmatic-progressive strain that leads directly to Bayard Rustin—disabused of illusions but insistent that the Constitution can be realized in its fullness over time and that democratic politics are the way to do it. This Douglass is the friend of Lincoln, the man who sustained the necessary relations with institutional power—as Dr. King would do, however guardedly, with Kennedy and then with Johnson.

The liberal tradition, of which Lincoln is the great saint, and the radical tradition, of which Douglass is the greatest American instance, are entwined, entangled, braided one into the other. And, on the whole, it is the liberal political practices that proved most potent, most able to constitute an alliance for the Constitution that could win the necessary battles in peacetime and wartime alike. Douglass was a prophetic absolutist and a political constitutionalist, and the almost unimaginable bravery of his journey should remind us that both are essential. His heroism lay in being able to embody radical prophet and liberal politician in a single arc of purpose and in one mind and body. Both lives matter.”—Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019)