My father, Professor Jim Klonoski, taught political science at the University of Oregon for over four decades. Generations of students remember his courses — Introduction to U.S. Government, The Supreme Court, and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties — not as academic requirements to check off, but as awakenings that fundamentally transformed how they understood their power and responsibility as citizens.

I know this for a fact because hardly a month passes without someone stopping me or my brothers to share how his class fundamentally shaped their understanding of democracy. What they remember most isn’t just the content — it’s the conviction behind it. 

Our father taught that democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a living system, at once fragile and resilient, that depends on each of us to keep it honest, just, and alive.

That lesson has never been more urgent.

Ten months into President Donald Trump’s second term, our country faces constitutional crises unlike any in living memory — and the window to act is closing fast. Federal agents detain people off the streets — disproportionately people of color — without explanation, without due process, without the ability to call a lawyer or even understand why they’ve been taken. 

Federal agencies painstakingly built over decades to serve the public good are being systematically dismantled. Programs that fight hunger, disease and climate change have been gutted — leaving our most vulnerable neighbors adrift, and removing the safety net from beneath each of us. 

Horrifically, headlines report of food rotting in warehouses while children go hungry, the direct result of abruptly canceled programs and the manufactured chaos that follows. Tens of thousands of career civil servants, people who dedicated their lives to public service, have been fired or silenced simply for doing their jobs with integrity.

And in an act that almost defies belief, just last week the East Wing of the White House  — the People’s House — was demolished without congressional approval, without public discussion, without oversight, to make way for a “grand ballroom” built on the ruins of our shared history. This happened during a government shutdown, as health care assistance is gutted and costs skyrocket —  the direct result of Trump and congressional Republicans’ sole legislative “accomplishment.” 

This “grand ballroom” (which the most recent estimate indicates will cost $350 million dollars) will be a monument built from lobbyist tributes, designed to wine and dine corporate executives, constructed for a would-be monarch to honor himself when world leaders come to sing his praises. 

Meanwhile, due to the government shutdown, supplemental food assistance is cut off for millions of American families because Trump and the Republicans in Congress would rather Americans go hungry than use their power to lower health care costs for the American people.  

It’s tempting, in the face of such lawlessness, corruption and cruelty, to surrender to despair. But if our father taught anything worth remembering, it’s this: Despair is not an option in a democracy. It is, in fact, democracy’s opposite and its most likely undoing. Despair is what authoritarians count on. Action is what defeats them.

He used to remind his students that the U.S. rests on three deceptively simple principles: the consent of the governed, the separation of powers among three co-equal branches of government, and the rule of law. When any one of these is eroded, the whole experiment is at risk. Over the years, he asked generations of his students one question again and again: “How do you think the People could gain, regain or maintain control of their government?”  It is The Question for our times.

Today, as we each ask ourselves that question, we must remind one another of what we stand to lose – and what we still have the power to protect. Already, fundamental rights are being hollowed out before our eyes:

• The right to walk down the street freely without fear of being detained by our own government.
• The right to free speech, to dissent, to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation and to hold our leaders accountable.
• The right to demand honesty, decency and service  — not corruption, lawlessness and cruelty  — from those we elect.

This is not someone else’s fight. It is ours, and it is winnable.

In moments like this, I hear our father’s voice — equal parts scholar and optimist  — urging us to return to first principles: to disagree without hatred, to rebuild our civic community, and to remember that patriotism is measured not in slogans but in action.  

Yes, these are dark times. But they are also clarifying ones. We are being asked — as citizens, neighbors and Americans — to decide what kind of nation we will be.

We can choose cynicism, or we can choose to engage. We can choose silence, or we can choose to speak up. We can choose despair, or we can choose to fight. As our father’s political hero, Franklin Roosevelt, once said, we can hold to “the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.” But hope without action is merely a wish. 

Democracy demands both.

The horizon is still there, but we must maintain an optimism for what lies beyond it.

In the final days of our father’s long, well-lived life, I witnessed a moment that crystallized everything he had fought for. On Jan. 20, 2009, as Barack Obama took the oath of office as America’s president, our father —  weakened by age, voice taken by cancer, but unbowed in spirit — raised his fist in triumphant celebration. Tears filled his eyes as he watched history unfold on the screen before him.

For decades, he had dedicated himself to the foundational American promise that “all men are created equal” — not as empty words, but as a sacred covenant demanding our constant vigilance and sacrifice. He had marched, organized and believed through the darkest moments of doubt. And in that moment, watching President Obama place his hand on Lincoln’s Bible, he saw with his own eyes the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice. It didn’t create a perfect world, but it revealed a better one within reach.

Our father also understood something profound: that despite our nation’s grievous missteps and painful stumbles, we possess within us the capacity to rise, to learn and to march forward — slowly, imperfectly, but inexorably — toward fulfilling the promise of this great experiment in democracy. 

That moment, with his fist raised in defiance of cynicism and despair, embodied his life’s deepest conviction: Progress, though never guaranteed, is always possible when good people work together, refusing to surrender hope. 

The challenges before us demand more than remembrance of Professor Klonoski’s lessons. They demand our active participation, our unwavering commitment, our willingness to stand up and be counted.

The time for passive observation has passed. Contact your representatives. Vote in every election. Organize in your communities and peacefully take to the streets. Speak truth to power, even when your voice shakes. Our father showed us that one person’s courage and conviction can inspire countless others to get politically engaged, that one generation’s sacrifice can transform the future for all who follow. 

But that transformation only happens when we choose action over apathy, when we choose solidarity over silence. This is our moment. This is our test. Will we rise to meet it? The answer lies not in what we feel in our hearts, but in what we do with our hands, our voices and our votes. Jim Klonoski’s work remains unfinished — and now, it falls to us all to carry it forward. The question is not whether we can make a difference. The question is whether we will. 

On election night 2024, as the polls were getting set to close in the Midwest, my brother, his 10-year-old son and I stood exhausted on the cold streets of Milwaukie, Wisconsin, having spent the previous 14 days knocking on doors and talking to voters about the dangers of a second Trump presidency. 

Clearly, we were not the difference in the presidential results (though Senator Tammy Baldwin did defeat her Republican challenger by a little over 15,000 votes which is likely due to all the volunteers who descended on Wisconsin in the final weeks of the campaign), but boy, do I sleep a bit better knowing we did all we reasonably could do while balancing all the other demands of life. 

The terror and despair we felt as it became clear Trump would win the election and we’d be in for another four years of cruelty, chaos and corruption was palpable. As President Trump and his administration are busy spending tens of millions of our tax dollars to launch federal invasions of American cities (a sentence I can hardly believe is our reality, but here we are) the 2026 midterms are shaping up to be — wait for it — the most important election of our lives. 

I am buoyed by the thought of another wave election where We The People reassert that this country belongs to us and there will be real consequences and accountability to the corruption and criminality that has gone largely unchecked since President Trump reassumed the presidency. 

Put simply, make your plan to make a difference in 2026 now. That’s what Professor Klonoski would be challenging of anyone who claims to care about our great country.

Zach Klonoski lives in Eugene where he practices nonprofit law.