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CLEVELAND, Ohio The Transformer Station gallery in Ohio City was a blur of activity last week.

Art handlers were busy installing artworks big and small for the upcoming FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, an 11-week extravaganza of local, national, and international art officially opening July 16 at 30 venues across Northeast Ohio.

The opening will follow two days of previews intended for out-of-town visitors and media, but also open to the public.

The triennial which debuted in 2018 is roaring back after having been delayed for a year in 2021 by the coronavirus pandemic.

The new FRONT will feature works by 100 artists at locations including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Public Library, the Akron Art Museum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and even the Cleveland Clinic. Details are unfurling at frontart.org.

Mark your calendars: A free, opening-day July 16 block party from 2 to 6 p.m. at Public Square in downtown Cleveland will feature food trucks, live music performed by a half-dozen ensembles, and a finale performance led by Berlin-based FRONT artist Asad Raza.

The Transformer Station at 1460 W. 29th St., a repurposed landmark that once powered electric streetcars on the citys West Side, will serve as the headquarters for this years FRONT, in part as a response to comments that the sprawling 2018 triennial lacked a central point of orientation.

The expanded and renovated Transformer Station gallery in Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood will be the headquarters for the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, July 16-October 2.Steven Litt, cleveland.com

Throughout the new triennial, the Transformer Station will function as a thematic hub, a visitor center, and a hangout with an upstairs lounge where visitors can pause and refresh while planning forays back and forth across the region in search of the latest and best the art world has to offer.

(Free parking near the gallery during FRONTs initial weekend will be available at the Lutheran Hospital parking lot between West 25th and West 28th streets, north of Franklin Boulevard. Paid public parking is also available in the Church and State garage at 1436 Church Ave.)

Last week, amid drilling, hammering, and the creak of wooden crates being opened, FRONTs founding CEO Fred Bidwell, who established the nonprofit gallery in 2013 with his wife, Laura Bidwell, was confident that everything was on schedule.

This place is crawling with people but its transforming literally as we speak, he said in an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. Its all happening in a good way.

Artworks installed at Transformer Station included a massive, delicately balanced installation created by New York-based Sarah Oppenheimer, and Tony Cokes, based in Providence, Rhode Island.

Their project is comprised of two hollow rectangular beams of black-painted steel and aluminum that can be spun like telescopes on turntables mounted in towers of X-braced aluminum trusses rising 24 feet to the gallery ceiling.

By turning the beams on their mounts, viewers activate belts inside the towers that raise or lower an interconnected system of digital projectors and screens that block or reveal fragments of writings by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez that are projected on the gallery walls.

Prem Krishnamurthy, artistic director of the 2022 FRONT Triennial, twirled a heavy steel construction created by artists Sarah Oppenheimer and Tony Cokes at the Transformer Station in Ohio City.Steven Litt, cleveland.com

Oppenheimer said in an interview that she was inspired in part by news reports on redacted documents in Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into alleged coordination with Russia by former President Donald Trumps 2016 campaign.

If were playing with ideas of absence and presence in [a] text, that has a whole host of social connotations, Oppenheimer said. What does it mean to redact text, to make text legible differently, to re-author it, to rewrite it?

Other highlights of the new FRONT include an installation at the Main Branch of the Cleveland Public Library by New York-based artist Jace Clayton in which visitors can share audio files of their own choosing by connecting cellphones or other digital devices via Bluetooth or audio jacks to 40 audio speakers arranged in a semicircle.

In the atrium of the Samson Pavilion at the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University Health Education Campus at East 93rd Street and Chester Avenue, FRONT will display films, videos, and performances by a number of artists. The exhibits will highlight what FRONT describes as the potential that storytelling holds for developing a more holistic understanding of healing practices and care work.

Students and staff walk through the atrium at the new Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion at the Cleveland Clinic - Case Western Reserve University Health Education Campus, designed by Lord Norman Foster of London. The pavilion will be an exhibit site for the 2022 FRONT Triennial. (Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer)Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

At the Cleveland Museum of Art, FRONT exhibits will include a show of works chosen from the museums permanent collection by widely respected artist Julie Mehretu. It will be the first collaboration of its kind between the museum and a contemporary artist.

Mehretu, who paints large, complex, abstractions suggesting high-velocity movement through space, has also accepted a FRONT commission to create a towering mural over the coming year on the 282-foot-high south faade of the Standard Building overlooking Public Square. Shell visit Cleveland in early October to engage with city residents over the project.

The FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art has commissioned internationally-renowned contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, a native of Ethiopia who lives in New York, to paint a massive mural by the summer of 2023 on the 21-story Standard Building, overlooking Public Square and Old Stone Church in downtown Cleveland. Mehretu is also participating in the 2022 FRONT Triennial exhibition in Northeast Ohio this summer.Steven Litt, Cleveland.com

FRONT has turned over the entire Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland to Cleveland native Rene Green, now based in New York and Somerville, Massachusetts. Her show will interweave her own works, with what is described as works by a vast array of invited participants with whom shes been in conversation through the years.

In Akron, the Swedish architectural collective Dansbana! will create its first North-American public dance floor at Lock 4 Park, with Bluetooth loudspeakers supporting live performances and improvised engagement.

The first FRONT four years ago was designed to introduce the art world to Cleveland and vice versa. Bidwell saw the triennial as a way to flood the city with global art, and to bring the eyes of the world to a region far more richly endowed with cultural institutions than outsiders (and some locals) realize.

Wisconsin-based artist Michelle Grabner, who led the inaugural FRONT as its artistic director, explored the theme of An American City. The exhibition invited artists to respond to Cleveland as the heart of an urban region confronting growth and decay, ruin and revival, sprawl and segregation, opportunity and injustice.

Prem Krishnamurthy, a designer, teacher, and curator based in New York and Berlin, is the artistic director for this years FRONT. He and members of an extensive local and international team of curators and advisors took inspiration from the idea that amid trauma and conflict, art can be a solace, a refuge, and at times a much-needed source of bliss.

Left to right: Tereza Ruller, Lo Smith, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Courtenay Finn, Meghana Karnik, Murtaza Vali, Tina Kukielski, Prem Krishnamurthy, Evelyn Burnett, Dushko Petrovich, Emily Liebert. Image: Paul Sobota.Paul Sobota Photography

Were experiencing a global climate catastrophe and crisis; we have economic and social injustice across all levels across the world; we have migration problems; we have everything, he said last week at Transformer Station.

The shows title, Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, comes from a Langston Hughes poem imploring readers to see That without the dust the rainbow Would not be.

If FRONTs theme of art as therapy seemed prescient when it was announced in January 2020, it became even more so as COVID lockdowns ensued across the U.S. just two months later.

The police killing of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 and the police murder of George Floyd two months after that painfully raised the issue of violent law enforcement against Blacks a topic explored in the 2018 FRONT by artists responding to the police killing of Clevelands 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.

In January 2021, a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, seeking to block the orderly transition of power after Joseph Bidens victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Its a fraught moment for the arts. Audiences are seemingly primed and ready to pounce on transgressions. With a war in Ukraine and a culture war thats on full boil in America over abortion and guns, land mines and trip wires are ready to be triggered everywhere.

In Northeast Ohio, the Akron Art Museum and MOCA Cleveland are still recovering two years after race-related controversies led to the resignation of their directors.

Scenes from the Akron Art Museum Accountability protest on Thursday, July 16, 2020.Steven Litt, Cleveland.com

The dangers of making a cultural misstep have been underscored anew by the current Documenta exhibit in Kassel, Germany, a high-profile global event that helped inspire FRONT. After an outcry from German and Israeli lawmakers and diplomats, organizers removed an artwork widely interpreted as antisemitic.

Bidwell is mindful of the risks involved in displaying contemporary art that might prove offensive, but hed rather see an artist make a mistake and have a piece quickly withdrawn, as at Documenta, than be overly cautious.

Id rather see that than a bland show of trophy art taken off the checklist of internationally accepted artworks that is very expected, very safe, and takes no chances, he said.

As it gears up for its opening, FRONT 2022 faces a number of challenges.

It needs to buttress itself as a not-to-miss presence on the international art calendar. It needs to match or surpass benchmarks including generating $31 million in economic impact and attendance of more than 227,000 in 2018, with 25% of visitors coming from out of town. And it needs to elevate local artists in meaningful ways that challenge art world hierarchies instead of reinforcing them.

For the FRONT 2022 triennial, artist Cory Arcangel has developed an algorithmic composition for the Alexander McGaffin Carillon at Church of the Covenant, 11205 Euclid Ave.George Leggiero

Those are tall orders, but FRONT is ready, having raised the $5 million it needs to operate this year, 70% of which came from foundations, corporate, and private individual donations, 25% from government, and 5% from earned income.

For Krishnamurthy, the triennial is rooted in three principal ideas: the psychic benefits and dignity of making art as a daily practice and discipline, the need to share joy through music and movement, and the notion that artists can speak with power and influence political systems and structures.

A still from "Dansbana!", a 2018 video documenting an installation by the Swedish architectural collaborative which goes by the same name. The design team installed a public dance floor in Stockholm, and documented how the public used it. A similar project will be developed in Akron during the FRONT Triennial in 2022.Steven Litt, Cleveland.com

Bidwell and Krishnamurthy also said the new FRONT has tried to reach its goals by working more collaboratively with participating institutions instead of employing a more centralized, top-down curatorial approach.

Other innovations include higher participation by local and regional artists, and the inauguration of a new FRONT fellowship for emerging Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, and Pacific Islander visual artists in Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Portage, or Summit counties,

Four winners will be announced July 14 at the triennials $450-a-ticket opening and fundraising gala. They will be awarded $25,000 in career-building stipends, plus money for research trips, and career-development services from triennial staff and partnering institutions. They also receive a berth in the 2025 triennial, funded separately from their stipend.

FRONT will coincide for the second time with the CAN Triennial, a regional exhibition organized by the nonprofit Collective Arts Network that will run from July 7 to Oct. 2. It will involve works by scores of artists at dozens of venues across the region. Details are available at cantriennial.org.

Bidwell said he welcomed feedback from the original FRONT that more participation by local artists was needed. Participants in this years FRONT from Northeast Ohio include sculptors Paul OKeeffe and Charmaine Spencer, collagist Dexter Davis, ceramicist Seuil Chung, and painter Alexandria Couch.

Cleveland Heights artist Paul O'Keeffe supervised the unpacking and installation of his works chosen for display in the FRONT 2022 installation at the Transformer Station in Cleveland.Steven Litt, cleveland.com

He said bringing artists from around the world to Cleveland is the draw and always will be the draw. But he said that getting a sense of the ethos of Cleveland, the [artistic] ecosystem thats something people were looking for. Having that insight and bringing that into this show was really important.

The role of art museums in their communities will be explored in a two-day Art Futures Summit on Friday, Sept. 16 at the Clinic-CWRU Samson Pavilion in partnership with CWRUs art history department. Community workshops and a keynote will follow on Sept. 17. Among other things, the summit will examine the fallout from the recent controversies at MOCA Cleveland and the Akron Art Museum.

As they looked ahead to the launch of the new FRONT, Bidwell and Krishnamurthy projected energy and excitement, along with high hopes that the show will engage new audiences and raise Clevelands profile as a cultural community of consequence.

I dont think you can change the world in one exhibition, in one grand gesture, Krishnamurthy said. You just have to keep going at it one day after another.

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FRONT Triennial opens July 14-16 with regionwide art exhibits promoting a healing vision amid culture wars - cleveland.com

I am concerned that the popular mass media focus mainly on the cultural issues which divide us and give less voice to the underlying issues which are fueling them. It is cultural issues such as abortion, marriage (same-sex marriage), guns, religious freedom, censorship, what is taught in schools, race and gender which define our identity, excite our emotions, and ultimately bring out the vote.

Some oligarchs, individuals and institutions, motivated by self-interest and greed, disproportionately fuel the cultural divide to increase their political and economic power. They want less government interference, less economic protection for ordinary Americans, restricted voting access for those who do not vote for them and, at worse, a fascist state. The effectiveness of their manipulation is evident in recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the laws enacted or not enacted by Congress and the attempts of a recent president to illegitimately hold on to power.

I wish that the mass media would focus more on what is happening behind the scenes in state legislatures with dark money, schools policy and with regressive constitutional amendments and laws which interfere with our democratic processes and usurp power that belongs to the American people.

Roslyn Price,

Shaker Heights

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Media need to expose malevolent actors stoking culture wars, regressive rulings - cleveland.com

The introduction of unisex lavatories has angered some fans who fear that the All England Club has gone woke, frowned the Times on 27 June. Woke Wimbledon to scrap Mrs and Miss titles from honours board this year, screamed the Sun on 27 May after the All England Lawn Tennis Club dropped marital honorifics for female players. Keep virtue signalling out of sport, urged the internet dustbin Spiked in response to Wimbledons ban on Russian and Belarusian players at this years tournament.

Yes: with a breathtaking inevitability, the culture warriors have come for Wimbledon. One imagines that this is a source of no little discomfort for Wimbledon itself, an institution that for much of its history has resisted even the mildest form of ideological engagement. We spend a lot of time not having a view on things, its chief executive, Sally Bolton, told a business conference last October. The reality is we dont have a position on most things, because its not for us to comment.

Wimbledons leafy shroud of silence has served it perfectly well. You could argue that a rejection of reality is the basis of its appeal. Stroll through its bustling grounds during Championship fortnight and what strikes you is the incongruous Arcadian unreality of it all: the vivid colours, the orderly lines of ball children marching towards their next assignment, more food than you could hope to eat. Everything works and everything is on time: a little make-believe model English village constructed for our own escapist pleasure.

[See also: The football transfer market has become a soap opera, with players the willing stars]

There are quiet structures of power at work here too: unspoken hierarchies and tacit conventions, layers and barriers that prevent anybody from seeing any more of the machine than they are supposed to. We may all be watching the same tennis, but the sense of shared experience is fleeting and illusory: once the match is over the well-heeled return to their debenture lounges and corporate boltholes, while the rest of us return to Henman Hill and queue for some nachos. Who gets invited to the Royal Box? How are court assignments decided? Whats behind that door? If you needed to know, you would already.

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Wimbledons lack of an overt world-view constitutes a world-view in itself: a paternalistic, rules-based conservatism where everyone has a place and knows what it is. Invariably, the punters and players are mostly white, while catering and security staff are disproportionately black. Even the appeals to tradition have an element of theatre to them. Behind the scenes Wimbledon has embraced the trends of global sporting capitalism: expanding its commercial presence, undertaking ambitious construction projects and honing its digital identity, right down to the inevitable Wimbledon non-fungible token (NFT) collection, unveiled to cautious fanfare on 13 June.

And of the criticisms levelled at Wimbledon over the years, you could scarcely accuse it of failing to move with the times. In the 21st century alone virtually the entire infrastructure has been rebuilt or refurbished, final-set tiebreaks introduced, retractable roofs installed on Centre Court and Court One, and manual scoreboards replaced with electronic ones. At this years tournament play will be scheduled on the middle Sunday for the first time. But change has been enacted on its own terms, and at its own stately pace. It was the last of the four Grand Slams to award women the same prize money as men. Marital honorifics should have disappeared with wooden rackets. And recent years have raised the question of whether the worlds oldest tennis tournament is able to encompass a social and political landscape that is shifting at an unprecedented pace.

[See also: The secret to Iga Swiateks dominance in tennis is not just winning, but enjoying it]

The ban on Russian and Belarusian players, announced in April, was applauded in some quarters and condemned in others. Almost immediately the mens and womens tours responded by stripping Wimbledon of its ranking points. Conversely, many questioned why Wimbledon was adopting this stance on Russia while maintaining a cosy commercial relationship with HSBC, which has been accused of supporting the repressive Chinese government. But while the morality and effectiveness of the ban can be debated, the real surprise was that for the first time in recent memory Wimbledon had chosen to take a political view on anything at all.

There are more battles ahead. Last year the club announced its intention to build 39 new courts, including a new 8,000-seat stadium, on the current site of Wimbledon Park Golf Club. The plans have piqued the anger of residents and the local Tory MP, Stephen Hammond. At the heart of this debate lie more profound questions: about the balance between profit and public good, between developers and residents, between sport as a national asset and sport as a vessel for speculation and return.

For a long time Wimbledon was able to sidestep these debates, straddle them, often ignore them altogether. But as paternalistic, order-based conservatism finds itself squeezed from both directions, plotting a careful middle path feels less plausible. The wedge issues will keep coming: the gender balance of show-court assignments, the diversity of its board and crowd, Russia and China, tradition and modernisation, perhaps one day even trans players. Wimbledon has always liked to imagine itself as all things to all people. The time may soon come when it has to pick sides.

[See also: Can Emma Raducanu survive her super-brand status?]

This article appears in the 29 Jun 2022 issue of the New Statesman, American Darkness

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Cries of a woke Wimbledon show that it can't avoid the culture wars forever - The New Statesman

by Daniel J. Moses

Daniel J. Moses, PhD is an educator who hasworked with Seeds of Peace from 2006-2021, most recently as the Director of Educator Programs. In 2022, with friends he has started a new initiative, The Fig Tree Alliance, to continue work that supports the values and skills necessary for self-government and human flourishing.

The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David, 1787

Its no secret that the teaching of history in the United States has become a flashpoint in the culture wars. But as I finish a semester of teaching a course on the classical Mediterranean at a boarding school for girls in upstate New York, what hits me hardest is how much support my students need; how misleading and damaging the culture wars are; how badly we, Americans, prepare future citizens; how little attention most of us pay to the culture, ideas, and history, that have shaped us, no matter where our ancestors come from, no matter the color of our skin; how far most of us are from a self-aware relationship to the American experiment; how deeply American educators and students need common sense approaches to studying the past, to explore who we are, where we come from and where we want to go; and how even a high school introductory survey course is enough to show that the classical Greek and Roman experiences of downfall land uncomfortably close to home.

From January until June of 2022, my students and I started with Paleolithic hunters and gatherers and followed the transition to agriculture and urban civilization. We finished with the fall of the Western half of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity. Mostly, we focused on classical Greece and Rome.

Although early in their histories the ancient Greeks and Romans did away with their kings, concentrations of wealth and power persistently led to political instability and conflictas well as continual efforts to to redistribute land and power. Solon and Cleisthenes succeeded as reformers in Athens and set the stage for The Athenian Golden Age. In Rome, The Struggle of the Orders led to constitutional revisions that increased the power of the Plebeians and established the right of Plebeians and Patricians to intermarry.

The conditions for limited self-government, though, remained fragile. The people of Athens sentenced Socrates to death basically for asking questions. Plato, a witness to the trial, rejected democracy and put his faith in Philosopher Kings. Aristotle believed that active participation in civic life was essential for the good life even though he spent most of his own life as a foreigner in Athens without the rights of citizenship. He also believed in the critical importance of the diffusion of propertyof conditions of relative equalityfor self-government. After doing an empirical survey of Greek city states, he created a typology of governments: monarchy and aristocracy are rule by the one or the few when they operate in the interests of the common good; when single rulers become corrupt, it is tyranny; when the few become corrupt it is an oligarchy. For Aristotle, democracy was a corruption of an ideal, tempered, form of self-government that we translate into English as republic.

After the Greeks unified to defeat the Persians, Athens turned into an imperial power and spent decades fighting the Spartans and their allies, which weakened both sides and made it easy for Phillip of MacedonAlexander The Greats father--to conquer the Greeks.

In 457 BCE, Cincinnatus, a man of the Patrician class who earned his livelihood farming a few acres, was elected dictator of Rome for a term of six months in order to fight against Romes enemies. After leading his army to victory, Cincinnatus resigned his office and returned to his farm in little more than two weeks. But Romes military successes over generations were accompanied by growing concentrations of land and wealth which made it impossible for small farms, such as the one that Cincinnatus owned, to survive. This broke the backbone of a citizens army, which was replaced by a professional army and by mercenaries. Americans of his day often compared George Washington, who voluntarily relinquished power and went home, to Cincinnatus; there is a famous statue of Washington as Cincinnatus. But in ancient Rome, as in the United States centuries later, the spoils of empire proved enticing. Republican virtues were difficult to keep in the midst of such wealth and such inequalities. Writing in the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman historian Sallust contrasted the good morals of the early Roman republic with the Rome of his day. The Roman Republic, he argued, was corroded from within.

The Roman general Sulla seized control of Rome in a way that would have been previously impossible because the social conditions, the order of society, had changed. Not long after, Caesar made himself dictator for life. The Brutus who plotted against him claimed descent from the Brutus who centuries earlier killed the last Roman king. But after they stabbed Caesar to death underneath a statue of his rival, Pompey, this second Brutus and his co-conspirators were surprised to discover how popular the dictator had become with the people. Where Julius Caesar grabbed for power quickly, his heir, Octavian (Augustus) Caesar, patient, with more time, engineered his election to a series of traditional Roman offices. He took the title of First Citizen. Even as he consolidated power in himself, he maintained a faade of continuity.

In 430 BCE, during the Great Peloponnesian War, a plague killed off about one third of the Athenian population. Centuries later, the Antonine Plague (165-180 CE) killed off millions across the Roman Empire and through trade spread all the way to China. It probably killed Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors who, a devout Stoic, came as close as anybody to becoming a Philosopher King.

At its heyday, the Roman Empire succeeded where the Greek city states failed in large part because Rome was open and welcoming. Roman citizenship was continually extended to people across the empire. Former slaves and their children could become wealthy citizens, great poets, and political leaders. But The Empire, too, was eaten away from within. What we call The West is what grew from the ruins of the Western half of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, in the hills of Judea, a new religion grew from the political ferment against the empire, with visions of a new political order, a messianic age.

Political institutions crumble; political states appear and then vanish over time; borders are constantly rearranged. Cultures continue even as they change. Americans communicate with the letters bequeathed by the Romans; our language is filled with words that come to us from classical Greece and Rome; we use the calendar, more or less, that Julius Caesar imported from Egypt; our doctors continue to take the Hippocratic Oath. The American democratic experiment draws from these classical traditions, as we can see from our founding documents, the correspondences of the nations founders, the name of our upper house of parliament, the architecture of the national capital, how we are called to jury duty, what is etched in stone and into our legal codes.

My struggle as a teacher this past semester was to spark interest within the painfully awkward young people who walked with masked faces into class each day. I celebrated when they expressed in their quiet voices even a tentative idea or emotion. Gradually we became human together. One of them talked of her love of horses, another of her love of dystopian fiction. I asked them about the difficulties of being a teenager today. I tried to alleviate their anxiety about grades. We read out loud excerpts from The Trial of Socrates. Once we broke down how much time they each spend daily on their phones. I counted it a great victory when they facilitated their own dialogue about Platos Parable of the Cave. One of them came into class the next day and told me with excitement that she had been thinking about the difference between truth and opinion. In a few words, she articulated what I wish more Americans would reflect upon as we watch the January 6th hearings unfold. They are not the same thing, she explained.

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It's a Mistake to Think the Classics Only Serve a Reactionary Agenda in Education - History News Network

Can you still love America, even when you hate her?

Yes, you can. This the Fourth of July. America is still great, even if youre mad about everything.

Caitlin Flanagan, a writer at the Atlantic I admire, tweeted on Tuesday. "Well, looks like the Experiment is winding down. Never let anyone shame you for having been an American. This was the country that created the free world."

Flanagan's comments come in response to the Supreme Court's overturning of the federal right to an abortion. But whether tongue-in-cheek or somber, Flanagans sentiment echoes across social media and other media. Many people, some of whom consider themselves patriots, feel angry, disappointed, and have had it with America.

The Supreme Court has recently made several decisions critical to the culture wars. The highest court decided in favor of religious liberty, gun rights, and returned the issue of abortion laws to the states. If you lean to the left politically, June was definitely a disappointing month.

Believe it or not, however, conservatives have been here before too. There were times it felt like the things conservatives adamantly believed were not shared with the president, Congress, or the highest court in the land. But America is more than the sum of the opinions released by the Supreme Court. Shes even more than a Republican or Democrat: The "Experiment" Flanagan is referring to is Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that America itself was an experiment, an idea, founded on a unique experiment in democracy, liberty, equality, "of the people, by the people, for the people."

Is the "experiment" over, now that gun rights are solidified, religious liberty is stronger than ever, and the legality of abortion now must be decided by each individual state?

De Tocqueville believed that equality was the great political and social idea of his era, and Americans had a passion for it. By that standard, many believe the reversal of Roe v. Wade, giving the unborn more of a chance at life than ever before, demonstrates that America is as interested in preserving equality as ever.

Still, even just the idea that now the issue is forced upon the people of each state underscores the very democracy de Tocqueville admired. Americans tend to believe that democracy means order, peace, and pluralism. Sometimes it does. But the process of reaching that point is often messy, chaotic, and heated. The democratic process is not for the faint at heart, and Americas Founding Fathers would not have designed it to be any other way: Freedom requires effort.

Even after a tense Supreme Court term, elections that have boggled the mind, and a pandemic that weakened our economy, America still remains a land of opportunity and freedom. More than 1 million immigrants enter America yearly. More than that try to, even risking death. America allows more immigrants to enter than any other country. Americans are fond of visiting the rest of the world, but the number of us who choose to live elsewhere permanently is small compared to our population.

For all Americas flaws, and theyre obvious to almost anyone regardless of political party, the fundamental ideas that shaped this democracy are still intact. They still make this country a great place to live. In addition to observing Americas obsession with equality and liberty, de Tocqueville noticed this: "The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

If this is the litmus test for greatness, the Experiment is still going strong.

Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.

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The experiment advances - Washington Examiner