The pool is not the point

The Hill reports that a furor has erupted over President Trump and the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial — a body of water some 2,030 feet long that belongs, in every meaningful sense, to the citizenry of the Republic. The paper calls this a small battle emblematic of much bigger wars. I am inclined to agree, though I would choose different language: it is a symptom, and symptoms are worth examining carefully.

I did not know this memorial, nor the President who gave it its name. But I knew the ground on which it stands — ground consecrated not to any one man but to the idea that public institutions exist to serve those who created them. When an executive treats public property as personal theater, the cost is rarely calculated in dollars. It is calculated in the habit of mind it encourages — the slow drift toward the belief that the office confers ownership rather than stewardship.

This is the precise danger I tried to name when I warned against the spirit of encroachment — the tendency of power, once comfortable in a place it was not explicitly given, to stay there and call it right. I cannot speak to the specific facts beyond The Hill's lead, and I will not invent details I was not given. But the shape of the civic question needs no elaboration: does the person who holds the executive office hold it for the duration of a term, as a trust, or does holding it begin to feel like possessing it?

The reflection that pool is meant to offer is, I would submit, more than aesthetic. A republic that can still look at its own monuments and see the people rather than the current administration — that is a republic in reasonable health. A republic that must ask permission of the White House before approaching its own memorials has already conceded something it will struggle to recover.

The danger of faction makes this worse. When every contest — even over a public pool — is immediately sorted into partisan camps, each side loses the ability to ask the plain question: is this the proper use of the office? The question becomes instead: does this help my side or theirs? That substitution is the slow poison I spent considerable effort warning against, and I observe, as inference rather than recollection, that the poison appears to be working.

My counsel is this: citizens and press alike should keep returning the question to its proper form. Not — who wins this round? But — what precedent does this establish for the next person who sits in that chair, whatever their party, whatever their temperament? The office outlasts the officeholder. The memorial will stand when every participant in this dispute is forgotten. Let us govern ourselves accordingly.