Blog / 2025 / Choose Democracy

This design is May’s Patreon sticker club gift, and you can also find it in my Redbubble shop on t-shirts.

It’s a digital reworking of a self-portrait I made in 2008 as part of a series of portraits of mostly first and second generation Americans. For that project, I combined the subjects’ images with notable characters from US history, the idea being that, together, we could give our American narrative a facelift to make it more accurately reflect who we are as a country.

I combined myself with the Statue of Liberty, because both of us have our origins in France. Liberty Enlightening the World—that’s the sculpture’s official title—was designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi as a gift from the people of France to the US, and I like to think of myself as a gift (to me anyway) from my mom, who’s been an American citizen for decades now, but who was born and raised in France.

I decided to update my self-portrait with the heart reading “choose democracy” because this image was always about the way we choose to be American. What I mean is that in 2008 I painted myself without a torch, because in my United States we haven’t ever been enlightening anybody. Instead, a big part of what makes us great is that many of us are making the decision every day to be present.

This is most viscerally true for those among us who immigrated here and also for those who, like me, have the papers, language, and community to make a life in another country but who nevertheless commit themselves to living in the US. But it’s true more generally as well.

To be an American is to choose democracy, however flawed a version of it we might have had over the last 250 years.

And that’s a choice we have to make every day. We can’t ever stop holding the line against the super-wealthy and the massive corporations that are forever trying to pull all the power and resources their way. We can’t ever stop pushing back against a president who says “I don’t know” when asked if every person in the United States is entitled to due process.* We, the people, have to choose to be free every day.