Ayers roots for the Cubs, and McKibben has his favorite craft brew. McMullin’s a Mount Rainier man. “They endure, they stay where they are. They stand above everything else; they’re the first to catch the morning light and the last bits of our land to keep the evening sun. Our values do the same for us,” he says. “Whether you’re on them looking down, or below them looking up, they guide us.” McMullin even has a favorite mountain, he tells me, the sight of which conjures that familiar old fatherland feeling. Ayers roots for the Cubs, and McKibben has his favorite craft brew. McMullin’s a Mount Rainier man. as I initially thought, they predate and promise to outlast our national attempt at self-government, but because they’ve stood witness to it for nearly two and a half centuries. form the core of our cultural fabric.” When I ask him whether, in addition to our values, any earthly thing – like a particularly good baseball game, the beacon of a Waffle House sign seen from the interstate, or the life and works of Glen Campbell – has ever made him proud to be an American, he says, “It’s more gratitude than it is pride. Although those sentiments can be related.” After a moment’s pause, he reconsiders. “Well, I grew up in Seattle. I like mountains.” But what are mountains, he then explains, if not a testament to our values? Not because,
Richard Painter was an ethics attorney in the second Bush White House, but now he’s a “Resistance icon,” according to the Huffington Post – having spent a generous portion of the last two years prophesying Trump’s demise on MSNBC. (Remember the emoluments clause?) He ran for (and lost) the Democratic Senate nomination to succeed Al Franken in Minnesota, where he teaches corporate law at the University of Minnesota. But he still loves America. He loves baseball – he roots for the Minnesota Twins and the Red Sox – and his kids’ school, a hotbed of religious pluralism. “I am a white Christian but my children go to school with Muslims and Hindus: That makes me proud to be an American,” he tells me, adding that while his family has been here for hundreds of years, some of his best friends are recent immigrants. Mostly, though, Painter loves the Constitution for making all this pluralism possible. In the #Resistance, and on campus, he finds cause to worry that Millennials and Zoomers – the sub-millennial generation, born in 1995 and after, is about to start its third year of law school – don’t respect the Constitution as they should. Not even the emoluments clause. “Overemphasizing the negative aspects of our history not only leads to a decline in patriotism but an increased willingness to tolerate undemocratic behavior,” he observes. “All of that’s very hard to communicate to the younger generation convinced that the
American Consequences
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