Opinion: Keeping D-Day remembrance alive throughout this year's elections can help Americans support democracy

Omaha Beach 116th Regimental Combat Team Memorial
in Normandy, France. (Adobe Stock photo)

The 80th anniversary of D-Day occurred about a week ago, but how many Americans stopped to think about using that day's massive human undertaking as a sounding board for this year's elections? In his opinion for The New York Times, Garrett M. Graff encourages Americans to look at what the country accomplished together during the World War II years and use it as our North Star to guide how we support our democracy through this year's election cycle.

"Day by passing day, the Greatest Generation is coming toward its end. D-Day, June 6, 1944, had more than two million Allied personnel on the move across Operation Overlord, and today, perhaps a few thousand veterans remain," Graff writes. "As we mark the final passing of those who won that war, it's easy to get caught up in gauzy romanticism and lose sight of how the Axis powers unified the free world against them and showed Americans, specifically, what we are capable of."

As Americans follow this year's elections and prepare to vote, "it's worth asking what we are doing with the legacy that the Greatest Generation defended and bequeathed to us. . . . A story of hard-fought rights and bloodily defended liberties that each generation of Americans has handed down to the next," Graff says. "We now face the very real question of whether America will embrace a vision of a country less free and less democratic, more divided and more unequal. It would be a step backward unlike almost anything else in American history."

Consider D-Day's planning and execution. It was "a titanic enterprise, perhaps the largest and most complex single operation in human history — an effort to launch a force of more than a million men across the English Channel on more than 3,000 planes and more than 7,000 ships; to methodically transport entire floating harbors, a herculean secret project known as the Mulberries, as well as 300,500 gallons of drinking water and 800,000 pints of blood plasma, a stockpile carefully segregated, as mandated at the time, between white and Black donors."

What do we, as Americans, have in common with the soldiers and support personnel from 1944's Allied invasion? "Across the next few months, we will be hearing a lot of argument about what America is and what it isn't," Graff writes. "There's a simpler answer to that question than many would like to admit: What we'll fight for is who we are. And, as we look ahead, we must decide if we're still as willing today to fight for democracy as the generation who stormed Normandy was 80 years ago."