Are We Writing a New American Story? Senator Raphael Warnock Discusses the Country's Path Forward in His Latest Book "A Way Out of No Way"
Shortly after 1:00 on January 6, my cell phone began buzzing with news updates. I picked up my phone, glanced down at the screen, and saw reports concerning the U.S. Capitol. I quickly turned on the television and watched in shock as the most violent attack on the U.S. Capitol since the British burned it down in 1814 unfolded over several hours. Mobs of enraged men and women, waving huge Trump signs and flags, toppled temporary barricades around the perimeter of the Capitol, overtook the U.S. Capitol Police, and beat officers trying to hold back the crowd. The rioters smashed windows of the building, pushed their way inside, and then stormed angrily through the halls in search of democratically elected officials they viewed as enemies. They called for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They even called for their fellow Republican Vice President Mike Pence, who had drawn their ire when he had enough dignity to refuse to interfere with the congressional certification of the presidential election results. Security teams rushed Pelosi and Pence to safe locations just as the rioters were making their way inside the building.
My heart ached for my new colleagues and their staff members, some of whom huddled under desks and behind chairs in the House chamber as they waited to be evacuated. Their faces showed a mixture of shock and fear. What was going on? I could not believe the destruction at one of our country’s most hallowed institutions or the disdain for democracy on the contorted faces of the rioters. This wasn’t an attack by foreign enemies. These were Americans, driven by the Big Lie, which had been perpetuated by a defeated president, Donald Trump, since the November 3 election: that victory had been stolen from him because of voter fraud. Just before the insurrection, Trump had addressed thousands of his supporters during a rally at the Ellipse outside the White House. During an hour-long speech in which he called out the Georgia Senate elections as having been “rigged,” Trump dropped incendiary lies about the election, whipped up rage, and urged protesters to march to the Capitol. Never forget this day, he told them.
As matters deteriorated at the Capitol, Trump supporters gathered at state capitols across the country. Many in the crowds were armed. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, was even evacuated from his office with his staff as a precautionary measure. He had been under constant verbal attack after refusing Trump’s urging to alter the state’s election results in his favor.
The racist overtones of Trump’s claim that the election was stolen are clear. African Americans, many of whom were newly registered, showed up at the polls in unprecedented numbers for both the November 2020 presidential race and the Georgia Senate races. And those votes played a crucial role in unseating an incredulous Trump and sending me and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. The former president’s continued claims of widespread voter fraud are just his way of saying that the votes of certain people don’t count, can’t count, and can’t be real because the election outcome was not consistent with the myth of white supremacy.
America’s story has always been complicated.
The day of my runoff election and the day afterward both tell us critical things about America today. January 5 represents the hope of an America moving closer to our ideal. But January 6 reveals the dark, ugly underbelly. Both are true. For now, we the people reside somewhere between the two. But we are the latest generation that gets to decide whether we’re going to give in to bigotry and fear or push closer to our democratic ideals. I choose hope. I choose inclusivity. I choose equal protection under the law. I choose truth and justice. I choose the beloved community.
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I love our country. I love it enough to hold up a mirror so that we might see ourselves in all our beauty, complexity, and imperfection, and work to be better. The work starts with a basic question: Who do we want to be as a nation? Do we lean toward the hopeful, multiracial majority that showed up in Georgia, ready to move forward on January 5? Or do we fall back to the America that showed up on January 6, bitter, destructive, divisive? Reconciling those two Americas is the daunting challenge ahead. I choose the beloved community. That is the kind of world I want for my beautiful children and for yours. I do not believe that those who seek to divide us will have the last word. But that is left to us. We must put forth a vision of America that embraces all of us, all of our children. While I do this work to build the kind of world I want for my children, I know that they can thrive only to the extent that we build a world where other people’s children also have the opportunity to thrive. In that sense, we must build together a more just society and a more humane, inclusive democracy. In a system deviled by pernicious schemes of voter suppression, we must insist that our democracy belongs not to the politicians and their sponsors but to the people.
With vision and courage, we can live up to the promise and the power of our name. We can take all of the broken and beautiful pieces of our complicated American story and weld them together in a new chapter of hope and possibilities. We the people are called to this moment. And as my dad used to say, it’s time to get up, get ready, and put our shoes on. Together, we can make a way out of no way.
Excerpted from the book A Way Out of Now Way: A Memoir of Truth, Transformation, and the New American Story by Senator Raphael G. Warnock. Reprinted with permission by the publisher, Penguin Press.
