A Dinner Party for Democracy

I’ve been asked over the years which historical figure I would most like to have a conversation with. My answer had always been that my dream would be to have another conversation with my personal hero, President Nelson Mandela, who I was fortunate to speak with on two occasions. But that was in a different time.

If you asked me that question today, I’d say I would dream of listening to a dinner discussion between President Mandela and President George Washington.

Here’s why: Our world is increasingly on edge.

Technology is advancing at warp speed, creating enormous wealth for a few and leaving behind so many. At the same time, great numbers of people are migrating from one region to another, bringing different customs, cultures, religions, and thoughts. Together, these forces are disrupting what had been the stable lives for many. As a result, trust in business, government, international institutions, the media, and civil society leaders is at historic lows. 

Who do we turn to, in these unsettling times, to help us sort through these challenges?

As a son of South Africa, I hold President Mandela in the highest regard. He demonstrated enormous personal courage during his 27 years of imprisonment, and remarkable grace and compassion during 23 years of statesmanship following his release in 1990.

Photo credit: Leonard Zhukovsky / Shutterstock.com

While I still wonder how President Mandela might assess the current situation, nowadays, my mind increasingly turns to witnessing a discussion between President Mandela and President Washington. As a naturalized American citizen, I have great love for my adopted home, where no dream is too big for Americans. One can’t say that about any other country; in that regard, the U.S. truly is exceptional. Yet I wonder what the creators of a recent democracy and the world’s most enduring democracy would have to say about today’s state of affairs, here and abroad.

I imagine a dinner party with Washington and Mandela, both masters at bringing together people with disparate points of view and, at times, intense disagreement that would result in violence.

What I would hope each would say is that our democracy is too precious to be torn apart by our differences, that politics cannot become a zero-sum game in which one side has to lose completely for the other side to win, and that something greater than ourselves is at stake. In fact, that’s exactly what they said, each in their own way. 

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” said Washington in his farewell address to the citizens of this nation.

Mandela issued the same caution two centuries later and to his country.

“You mustn't compromise your principles, but you mustn't humiliate the opposition,” the prison survivor said. “No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated.”

Could we imagine a dinner party today in which the leadership of the major political parties, in the U.S. or other nations, broke bread and shared wine in the spirit of brotherhood that these two statesmen professed? It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

But we can make this happen. It just takes leadership.

“Observe good faith and justice toward all nations,” Washington once said. “Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”

Photo credit: gary yim / Shutterstock.com

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner,” said Mandela, who, in that belief, might have been channeling Washington.

Perhaps it’s time for us who feel passionately about these issues to have our own dinner party, in which we eat, drink, and think in a spirit of cooperation and compromise. This is my dream, and I don’t think it’s unrealistic. As President Mandela famously said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”