Ken Burns

Because for me, it’s about patriotism

We support candidates for many reasons—policies, identity, personality. We look at the world around us and make a decision. I agree with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz on many issues, but the reason I’m supporting them this year has to do with something bigger. It’s about alignment with the founding values of our country—and our ongoing effort as a people to improve what we’ve inherited. For me, it’s about patriotism. It’s why, I would suggest, former Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator Bernie Sanders—two people who couldn’t be further apart on the issues—agree this year, and why so many Republicans, Democrats, and Independents recognize that what’s at risk here is bigger than a particular issue.

There is no real choice this November. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe in the America that I love—where democracy matters, peaceful transference of power is foundational, the rule of law paramount. It’s who we are—and what we’ve fought for at home and abroad. They believe in and practice respect, kindness, and understand that all of us—regardless of background, where we came from, political point of view, race, identity—all of us, matter.

For nearly fifty years, I’ve been making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of “us,” and also “we,” and “our” and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it’s that there’s only us. There is no “them.” And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life, that there’s a “them,” it’s clear there’s something wrong. Challenge that person.

Our fragile 249-year-old experiment has always been frail, and at times—many times—at risk of unraveling, whether due to demands of Southern slave owners or radicals who thought authoritarianism more efficient than the often messiness of self-governance. The Republican nominee has repeatedly shown a blatant disregard for the law, an unwillingness to accept the voice of the people, and a dizzying lack of civility, intelligence, and temperament required to govern in a system based on goodwill and compromise.

Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer. Our founding poet Mercy Otis Warren said there are times when “the checks of conscience are thrown aside, and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” The Republican nominee is for some an easy cure for what they believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up with a worse affliction, “a bigger delusion,” as James Baldwin would say. Or as Lincoln, our greatest president, who found in our moment of crisis a new birth of freedom, warned, a national suicide.

All elections matter.

Policy is important. But this one is about something more—the integrity and future of our democratic experiment.

Ken Burns, filmmaker.