America’s 250th Birthday Comes With a Crisis of Democracy
Too few of us would pass as credentialed American historians or licensed litigators for maintaining our legal protections, but all of us can feel that this U.S. experiment in democracy over 250 years is slipping away.
What should be a moment of national pride on this Fourth of July about issuing a Declaration of Independence instead is a shattered reflection of our divisions, not only about partisan politics, but about who we are as Americans, about our shared values and about whether we still recognize the central qualities of equality, fairness and lending a hand to those with less.
While the desire for nationwide identity rises and wanes with regularity, overly dependent as it is on whether we can afford the cost of fuel, health, shelter and food, something more sinister has emerged in recent years about the fragility of the American experiment. The decline obviously has been hastened in the two years of Donald Trump’s second presidency, but the prime causes of distrust and perversion of an all-inclusive America to one for the privileged classes have been noticeable for the full Trump decade or more.
Our history as an American entity always has been flawed, of course, marked by genocidal attacks on Native Americans, permanently stained by decades of sanctioned slavery, and the constant need over 250 years for efforts by women, racial, religious, ethnic and gender-identifying minorities to gain access to the American Dream. Despite the current active campaigns by the Trump government, concurring Republican states and unquestioning corporate elites to whitewash our history, the underlying American story has been one of constant fights to expand individual rights for equal treatment.
Or so we have told ourselves. We too quickly overlook locking up Japanese Americans, turning away immigrants fleeing violence and hunger, and our institutionalized racism buried in mortgage redlining and access to education, hiring and promotion.
Why is Trump wondering why people are shunning his version of the Fourth that glorifies himself rather than the principles of democracy?
What’s New?
Trump’s so-called populism of the angry, of a White middle-class that has felt abused by efforts towards fairness, has brought a boatload of anti-democratic words and deeds to the surface.
Set aside Trump as plunderer, or Trump as hypocritically running to stop wars only to start his own, or the Trump who values self-glorification over the responsibilities to lower costs, promote jobs, education, health, welfare and to provide safety nets for the vulnerable.
Most actual Trump public policies are generally wrong-headed, but they are the matter for the kind of debate that has been imagined from the start.
What had not been anticipated is the organized Trump program to undercut democracy itself – supposedly the very thing about which all the midnight fireworks displays and public gatherings are meant to be celebrating.
Taken together, Trumpism has achieved in two years what had not been possible in 248: He is dismantling the systems of public checks and balances on the presidency and the ever-growing executive branch. He is neutering Congress through threats and stacked the Supreme Court. He is seeking to manipulate who can vote, how we both vote and count ballots, and how we declare election outcomes. He is threatening to send his privatized, virtually rule-free, armed federal army into our streets and around our polling places.
The voices of Democrats and pro-democracy independents are being ridiculed, sued, prosecuted or simply ignored as Trump has actively encouraged sympathetic corporations to buy or control news outlets and the activities of journalists, lawyers, educators and protestors.
Importantly, the tools of the Trump campaigns are a bastardized Justice Department and FBI, takeover and manipulation of Homeland Security and national intelligence agencies and an ugly anti-immigrant, mass deportation campaign that fails to veil its racialist roots. The transformation of an anti-criminal focus to a generalized effort to undercut legal as well as illegal immigration is well underway.
Oversight is dead or will be unless there is a huge anti-Trump outcome in the November elections, and the damage done across the board by efforts to undercut regulations for health and environment, international agreements and relationships, and trust in elections, government and law itself will take decades of repair.
It’s the Fourth of July, a time to celebrate the very monarchical systems that Trump is reinstituting, along with the personal spoils of self-crowning. It’s marked in the nation’s capital with fences to protect expensive algae-ridden reflecting pools, National Guardsmen everywhere to handle protests and virtually empty Trump events held in 100-degree heat.
What we should be asking is why we are allowing America to be overtaken by Trump, Inc., corporate greed, and the intolerance of anyone not White and wealthy.
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