Saturday Night

I am taking time today with friends and family after a long week full of an overwhelming amount of news on the democracy front. We’ve managed to analyze and dissect it all far better than I would’ve thought was possible, with the help of the friends who joined us to help understand it this week. Your comments on the posts and the lively chat during the Substack Lives we’ve done this week tell me that this community is thriving and committed to keeping democracy going. I feel lucky to be in this with all of you.

Before I go, I’d like to leave you with an experience I had earlier this week. I went to hear the filmmaker and documentarian Ken Burns speak in Kennebunkport, Maine, with college friends. Burns said something that has stayed with me and that I have been thinking over in connection with my own work for the last few days.

Photo Credit Stephanie Berger

Burns described most people as thinking about the additive value of the work they do, what they uniquely bring to their subject matter or their area of expertise. He described the challenge of documentary filmmaking as subtractive instead of additive, explaining that there is a lot that is known about historical events and a finite universe of documents, sources, and photographs to draw upon. He explained that his challenge is to figure out how to draw from that whole and present an accurate picture of history in the limited amount of time he has and with the resources available to him. No small challenge—and something that he delivers on immaculately.

I was struck by his insight because it felt like he was putting into words the job I feel like I’ve assigned to myself here. He was describing, with precision, what I hope I’m able to do for you.

In a world full of legal briefs, courtroom hearings, congressional proceedings, and commentary on all of the above, including from an abusive president, I try to read all of the primary sources, to filter them, to take them in, to think about what they mean. There is an endless rush of cases, laws, issues, government proceedings, and so on, far too much for us to all understand at a meaningful level, and I try to evaluate them, think about the through lines, think about the most serious situations to make you aware of. I try to assess the strengths and the weaknesses of arguments and to think about what their most important parts are. I try to put it all in the context of our democracy and how we sustain it. And then I try to bring that to you, often with very little time to write (and extraordinary gratefulness for your patience with the typos that I make in that process) so that you can have the benefit of my experience in government and at the Justice Department and can use my analysis to reach your own conclusions about the history that we are living through.

It is no easy job to understand history as you live through it and to know what the right thing to do is, but I’m incredibly grateful that I have the opportunity to do this work. I am guided, as I wrote in my book, by the lesson of the Civil Rights movement that the only way to survive a moment like this is for us to be together in community. We all face an incredible challenge. We can best face it together.

I understand how fortunate I am to have an assigned role to play. And I love and will carry in my heart Ken Burns’ characterization of it as subtractive—not in any negative sense, but in the most positive way possible. I take my obligation to bring you information, knowledge, and analysis you can use very seriously. I take my obligation to get things right very seriously. Being an old DOJ hand with decades of experience means you’ve been around long enough that you’ve seen just about everything that can happen, and you know when the norms and the laws are being busted. You know why it matters and you can only hope for the response I’ve found here—smart, engaged people trying to make a difference.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share all of this with you and for sharing your knowledge and your thoughts with me. We are all, I think, better off for this hands-on experience with democracy, however painful it may be at times. I so appreciate being part of this community of people who care about the future.

We’re in this together,

Joyce