First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Stanley McChrystal, December 2023
Devotion and duty would seem to be the watchwords of your life, judging by your record of military service to our country. Few Americans today match your dedication in rising to John Adams’s call: “Our Obligations to our Country never cease but with our Lives. We ought to do all We can.” But your recent writings suggest a third maxim guiding your civilian life. One deployed not to defending America’s interests and assets from foreign aggression but that would instead preserve its republican form of government: egalitarianism. In Lincoln’s Call to Service – and Ours, you noted your concern over poverty. In At 63, I Threw Away My Prized Portrait of Robert E. Lee, you wrote how you now equate his image with racial inequality. And in We fought to defend democracy. This new threat to America now keeps us awake at night, you deplored our past “contradictions, prejudices, and systemic inequalities.”
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Mike Pence, December 2023
Although I’ve never voted against the Republican presidential nominee, I salute you for certifying Donald Trump’s defeat on January 6, 2021. In so doing, you placed the orderly transition of power ordained by the Constitution above partisan politics. You may even have single-handedly prevented a constitutional crisis for which, as your legal counsel put it, there would be “no neutral arbiter to break the impasse.” But though you protected our republican institutions from that crisis, the populist forces which precipitated it – the “disorders and miseries” that George Washington warned lead men to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual” – yet gather strength. There will be more crises. And those disorders and miseries which inflame them flow from one main source: middle-class decline. Noah Webster warns that the same middling insecurity which fueled Rome’s tournament of demagogues has inaugurated our own: