The great American journalist and jazz enthusiast Stanley Crouch died in September 2020, yet his death was not given the proper recognition. COVID restrictions were still preventing a lot of mass gatherings, and the news was preoccupied with an election and other things. The recently released volume Victory is Assured: Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch will hopefully do something to help correct that.

Crouch was a large force of nature, a brilliant thinker, and quite funny. As journalist Glenn Mott explains in the introduction, “To experience Stanley, indomitable, indefatigable, irrepressible Crouch, was to know the kinetic energy and bombast of an indelible force of New York , as large and complex as any character this city has produced.”

Crouch’s greatest contribution to American culture was his elevation of jazz as the great American art form and one that reflects the creed found in our founding documents. Crouch called the Constitution “a document based in tragic optimism.” That is to say, the Constitution recognizes that men are not angels; it starts with the premise that we are flawed and often prone to despicable behavior. Yet the document that enumerates our rights can be amended when, as is inevitable, we make mistakes. Thus, we accept our flawed nature while being energized with the optimism that comes with knowing we can correct our wrong turns.

Crouch compared the nature of the Constitution to the nature of jazz and the blues, the American art forms he wrote about for more than five decades. Like the Constitution, these are art forms of tragic optimism. “There has never been anything more American than jazz,” Crouch wrote in an essay repainted in Victory is Assured. “Jazz music remade every element of Western music in an American way, just as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution remade the traditions of Western democracy, expanding the idea of freedom to levels it had never known any prior time.” American democracy “updated the social order with its checks-and-balances system and its amendment process.” These measures were, again, “based in tragic optimism, the idea that abuse of power can create tragic consequences, but if there is a form in place that allows for the righting of wrongs, we can maintain an upbeat vision that is not naive.”

Crouch then offers this magnificent observation:

Crouch was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 14, 1945. In his early life, he was on the political left, publishing black nationalist poetry and teaching literature at Pomona College before moving to New York in 1975 to become a cultural critic at the Village Voice. Crouch rejected Marxism and black nationalism in 1979, identifying with writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who believed they could embrace their black identity as well as their American one.

Crouch, whose prose could be battering, blasted radicals such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. “When compared to men like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King,” he wrote, “Malcolm X seems no more than a thorned bud standing in the shadow of sequoias. Given national recognition by television in 1959, Malcolm X was just beginning to realize how empty his platform had been when he was silenced in 1965, shot down in the very same Harlem that he had victimized either materially as a street hustler or intellectually as the loudest mouthpiece for the Nation of Islam .” Crouch lamented “the intellectual dishonesty that has dogged Negro America since too many in positions of influence and responsibility started sipping at the well of a black nationalism.”

In the 1980s and until his death, Crouch championed what some called “rebop,” or a return to the jazz traditionalism of Duke Ellington and the bebop era of the 1950s. Like so many of his fans, I, too, found something to disagree with him about. Crouch didn’t like a lot of the “free jazz” of the 1960s, some of which I love. However, in our era of tribalism and online bickering, Crouch’s vision of expansive democracy based on excellence and foundational principles is terribly missed.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.