I have just finished watching Ken Burns’ six-part documentary, The American Revolution, the latest work in his canon, aired on PBS, and I’d like to talk about what it was like watching this during these fractious and fractured times in American society.

First, the kudos. As with anything Burns and his team put their hands to, the production values were excellent. The mix of re-enacted battle scenes, paintings, made-for-the-production sketches, on-camera commentary by historians and others, and a posse of velvet-voiced actors speaking snippets from letters and journals, all over-voiced by Peter Coyote’s warm baritone, made the long sessions (running about two hours each) move along quickly without losing clarity or getting sidetracked.

Burns had a clear objective in doing this work, which is always his objective: America has and needs patriotic stories that will help our multiple different selves live in harmony, an “unum” distilled from the “pluribus.” His instinct is always toward synthesis, and his storytelling is always civic-republican, so he presents the American Revolution as a dramatic story that ends in union – imperfect, to be sure, but sanctified by shared suffering for high ideals. (And with the kinds of funding behind him, both nonprofit and corporate – Bank of American was a major funder – Burns could not have turned out anything else.)

He could get away with this traditional patriotic twang in his piece on the Civil War because the national narrative on that conflict has been so mythologized. But that is not the case with the American Revolution because the accumulation of scholarship over the last 40 years, which Burns does include and acknowledge, has underscored strongly just how unfinished the Revolution is, how we are still playing out as a society the contradictory revolutions that made up the Revolution.

The Revolution was many things happening at the same time. It was a set of concurrent and clashing liberation movements involving Native Americans, merchants, rural farmers, landed gentry, speculators in western properties, and slaves, to name just a few of the combatants. It was also a settler-colonial project to build an American empire powered by Enlightenment ideologies about race and destiny and which was embedded in the larger imperial conflicts happening in the Atlantic and Caribbean. It was also the generator of revolutions in other places and times because it was so philosophically radical: that the people, if they have a government this is not governing as they wish, should change the government pretty much by whatever means necessary.

In short, while Burns might want the story of the Revolution to be a story of disparate peoples forging their differences into a nation, imperfect to be sure but committed to expanding and perfecting this radical experiment, the truth is that the goal of the Revolution was never that because the goals of the many revolutions happening under its aegis could never be reconciled without savagery and dispossession.

It doesn’t take too much pondering to see how all of the overlapping and immiscible histories of the Revolution are still being played out today, sharpened by 47 and his minions, to be sure, but only because they have been simmering and erupting for 250 years.

Where was I left after watching the series? I thought a lot about this. One thing that thrilled me were the moments about the writing of the Declaration and the power of the words these white propertied men came up (words they must have known would come back to haunt them): all men are created equal; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, with the Constitution, “We the people.” These are incendiary ideas, and those committed to resisting the autocracy threatening us now must recover them, repurpose them, revive them as guides and fuel for their resistance.

Beyond this, though, I am not sure. I do know that if Americans want a real democracy rather than the performative democracy that they have, then these words need to be deployed in a fight against money in politics, in finding some economic system other than our current capitalism that won’t gut us and disappear us, in dropping the misplaced devotion we have to individualism for a more mature understanding of how equality is indispensable to freedom. And so many other fights to be fought.

Democracy, especially the kind of democracy we’ve given ourselves to bear, is an insane way to do our life’s business because it can never be finished in the sense of “one and done.” But part of what makes our democracy so difficult is that we don’t have enough democracy in our daily lives – in our workplaces, in our economics, in our neighborhoods. If we had more opportunities to build democratic habits, we might take to building democracy from the bottom to the top with more energy and enthusiasm. We might, in the process, become real citizens and assume our rightful powers against those who would do despicable things in our name.

This is an argument made by Astra Taylor, in her book Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. She quotes with approval Cornel West when he says that democracy is a “leap of faith,” one that requires “living in the tension” between the knowledge that “you must be losing your mind if you believe the demos is going to make good decisions” and “lo and behold, so many of the best ideas…often come from the very folk you thought you had no grounds for trusting.” West concludes: “Cuts both ways. Living in the tension. I think that’s the key.”

Taylor goes on to add that her book is her own “leap of faith” about why we should keep democracy around and what it takes to do that:

The ideal of self-rule is exactly that, an ideal, a principle that always occupies a distant and retreating horizon, something we must continue to reach toward yet fail to grasp. The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the powerful; it is a promise that can be kept only by regular people through vigilance, invention, and struggle. Through theory and practice, organization and open rebellion, protecting past gains and demanding new entitlements, the inspiring potential of self-rule manifests, but it remain fragmentary and fragile, forever partial and imperiled. In the end, living in the tension, embracing the incongruities and possibilities of democracy without giving up, is the message of this book.

That’s the ganlet being thrown down by 47 and his ilk: they will resolve the tension toward autocracy and self-dealing, cruelty and grifting. I must resolve my part of the tension toward a continuing American revolution of emancipation and justice. The end is in doubt; doing anything less against them is not. Time to leap, I guess.