Is American Democracy Dead?

 

Is American Democracy Dead?

September 19, 2024

Since at least 2016, news about American politics has contained things we older folks never thought we’d ever hear. During his campaign for president in 2016, which Trump won despite losing the popular vote, he said again and again that he could lose only if the election were “rigged.” He said the same thing during his reelection bid in 2020, which he lost. When he lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote in that election, he didn’t just claim that the election had been rigged. He set out to do everything he could to overturn the legitimate election result that put Trump out of office and put Biden in office. He tried numerous lawsuits, all of which failed. He tried to threaten state officials into falsifying their state’s election result. He concocted a scheme to  send fake electors and election results to the federal government. He tried to get Vice President Pence unlawfully to block Congress’ certification of the electoral college vote. Pence refused, which may be the only decent thing he’s ever done in public life. When all of his efforts to overturn the legitimate results of a free and fair election failed, he incited a seditious mob and sent them to attack the United States Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying the election results.

Now Trump is running for the presidency again. And once again he says that he can lose only if the election is rigged. Not only that. He continues to claim that he actually won the 2020 presidential election in a landslide and that his victory was stolen from him. We all know that that claim is not only false, it is downright absurd. It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. Yet Trump continues to make it. Millions of his minions continue to accept it as true despite the fact that there is not one shred of evidence to support it. These unthinking, gullible people will no doubt also fall for Trump’s inevitable claim that, if he loses the 2024 election, it too was rigged and a victory was once again stolen from him.

All of that suggests that American democracy is at least seriously ill, but there is more. Republicans across the country but especially in the so-called “swing states” are putting in place election officials who may well come up with excuses not to certify a Harris win in their states. At least Georgia has put in place laws to make it easier for them to do that. For many of these MAGA zealots, the facts won’t matter. All that will matter is that they can find an excuse to do to Harris what Trump falsely claims has been done to him, namely, steal an election victory.

But wait, there’s more! MAGA zealots are attacking election officials and workers across the country. They say those officials and workers, many of whom are simply volunteers working to make our elections free and fair, are dishonest. They harass those officials with threatening phone calls. They send them envelopes containing some white powder that appears to be dangerous, though, thank God, so far none of it has been. In some states, MAGA zealots have won election to the office of Secretary of State, the official who oversees the electoral process.

All of which leads to one foundational question i.e., “What makes democracy work?” Democracy, after all, doesn’t have much of a track record in human history. Its roots go back at least to ancient Athens where some but not all citizens, all of them men, were able to cast votes in public elections. But around the world and across the millennia, democracies have been rare. They have also been rather easily subverted by politicians who want to rule in a thoroughly non-democratic way. Few democracies last for very long by historical standards. The United States has been a democracy, of sorts at least, for over 250 years, but we are a stark exception to the experience of the world in that respect. Democracy is clearly a rare and delicate thing in human history.

So what makes democracy work in the rare cases where it has in fact worked? The answer seems to be that only the support of democracy, or at least the acceptance of democracy, by the people of a nation with a democratic polity can make democracy work. There are always people in every democracy who want to subvert it, who want at least to distort it so that it works in their favor not in favor of the country’s citizens as a whole. The United States has always had such people. Up until Trump and the MAGA movement, those people have mostly been the very wealthy and the very large corporations who benefit from public policies that harm the rest of us.

Only the will of the American people, or at least most of them, through free and fair elections, has been able, at least at times, to keep the country’s anti-democratic forces at bay. We did it in 1865, when we abolished slavery nationwide. We did it in 1932, when we elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt president and gave him a Democratic congress. We have enacted weaker versions of our blocking special interests each time that we have elected a Democrat as president at least since FDR. We have also capitulated to the special interests. The best, or worst, example of our doing so was when we elected Ronald Reagan as president then reelected him despite his immensely harmful economic policies.[1]

Yet even when we have voted against our own self interest, we have done it in a democratic fashion. Though many of us were appalled by it, no one seriously asserted that either the election or the reelection of Ronald Reagan was not democratic. The same is true of the election and reelection of the war criminal George W. Bush.[2] As horribly mistaken as both the election and reelection of Bush II was, it was at least done democratically. No one claimed that a victory by his opponent was stolen from him even though, in truth, the US Supreme Court did steal a potential victory from Vice President Al Gore in 2000. Through all of the ups and downs of American politics, the American people have, for the most part, believed in and supported American democracy. That belief and that support are the only reason our democracy, such as it is, has survived as long as it has.

Now Donald Trump is eroding that belief and ending that support among millions of Americans. Like totalitarian rulers always do, he tells a big lie, namely, that an election victory was stolen from him; and he tells it over and over and over again. Hitler did it. Stalin did it. Come up with a really big lie and tell it so often and so confidently that gullible, uninformed people, that is, most people, will believe it.[3] That’s what Trump is doing. We can’t let him get away with it.

Trump and his MAGA movement represent the greatest threat to American democracy at least since the Civil War more than 150 years ago. There is a very real possibility that the American people, through the grossly undemocratic electoral college system, will put Trump back in power in this year’s presidential election. Trump does not believe in democracy. He believes only in himself. He cares only about himself. He has said that he will be a dictator on day one of a new term in office. He wants us to believe that he will be a dictator for only one day. Only fools can believe any such thing. Trump wants to be an authoritarian ruler not a democratic one. He sees himself as being above the law, and, tragically, the US Supreme Court has agreed with that undemocratic assertion at least to some extent. If he is reelected, he will do everything he can to subvert American democracy in order to insure that only his wealthy supporters ever benefit from a president’s policies.

So. Is American democracy dead? The answer, I think, is, “not quite.” Our democratic institutions still mostly function as they are supposed to function. But American democracy is ill, and its illness may become terminal. Our democracy is under serious attack by what used to be one of its two major, democratic political parties, the Republican Party. That attack has gravely wounded American democracy. Trump and the MAGA movement have eroded the trust in democracy of millions of Americans. In doing so, they have weakened the only thing that makes democracy viable.

American democracy is under threat, and there is only one way to preserve it. We must not just defeat Trump in this year’s presidential election. We must crush him. We must crush every politician who supports him and repeats his lies. To preserve their democracy, the American people must rise up as one and drive Donald Trump and his anti-democratic MAGA movement out of American politics. May it be so.

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[1] Namely, “trickle down economics,” in which wealth that is supposed to trickle down to the mass of the people actually trickles up to a very small number of very rich people.

[2] He’s a war criminal because he launched a totally unjustified, unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq.

[3] Yes. I know that that statement makes me sound like an elitist snob. Yet whether I am one or not, the way millions of Americans support Donald Trump can be explained in no other way.

To Tell the Truth or Not

 

To Tell the Truth or Not

September 16, 2024

On July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, someone took a shot at former president and presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. The bullet grazed Trump’s ear, drawing some blood. Trump was not further hurt. On September 15, 2024, near Trump’s home/resort/hiding place for stolen government documents in Florida called Mar-a Lago, a man was arrested who apparently intended to make another attempt to take Trump’s life. The right-wing media in this country, always more concerned with attacking people who actually care about people than with telling the truth, blame those people for provoking these assassination attempts. Is there any truth in their allegations? Because all killing is immoral, and because political assassinations are sensational violations of America’s political traditions, that is a question worth serious consideration even though it comes from people who rarely if ever deserve to be taken seriously.

It is true that yours truly and a great many other right-thinking people say things about Donald Trump that sound inflammatory. I have called him an American fascist many times on this blog and elsewhere. I and a great many others have called him a threat to American democracy. We have said that he incited the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. We have called both that riot and Trump’s actions before and during it seditious. We have said that he encourages his followers to be violent. We have called him a compulsive liar. We have called him racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, and a xenophobe. We have said that he attacks immigrants the way Hitler attacked the Jews. We have called him a serial adulterer. We have called him a convicted felon and a man who has been found civilly liable for sexual assault. We have called him a fraudster. We have called him a conman. We have called him mentally unstable and totally unfit to be president. We have accused him of turning the once respectable Republican Party in to cult of personality. We have said that he is an embarrassment to the United States on the international scene. This list of Trump’s vices is nearly endless, and everything about him that I have said here is simply the factual truth.

Now, I suppose that it isn’t too surprising that a few mentally unstable people may think that all of Trump’s faults and the threat he is to our country and to the world add up to justification for assassinating him. I suppose one could conclude about Trump what Dietrich Bonhoeffer concluded about Adolf Hitler, namely, that though murder is always sinful, sometimes there is no other way to stop greater evil. So does that mean that those of us who know the truth about Donald Trump must stop speaking that truth?

No, it does not mean that at all. Those of us who know and tell the truth about Donald Trump are not responsible for the illegal, immoral acts of mentally disturbed people. Nor did we make Donald Trump who he is. He did that himself. We did not create the MAGA movement that Trump heads. He and a great many frightened, ignorant Americans and cynical politicians did that. We haven’t asked or encouraged anyone to commit any act of violence against Trump. The deranged people who have attempted to kill him reached that decision on their own.

The truth of the matter is simply this. Donald Trump is who he is, and American voters, as irresponsible as they can sometimes be, need to know who he is before they vote. They need to know the truth. That a very small number of people may respond to Trump with violence does not obviate the value and the need for the truth. Christian scripture says that it is the truth that shall make us free. John 8:32. When our country is faced with the mortal threat Trump poses to our democratic tradition and respect for the law, the truth is more important than ever.

Lies are abundant in our political atmosphere today, but they come from Trump not from those of us who oppose him. We cannot be silenced by those lies. We cannot and will not be silenced by the attempts of Trump and his acolytes to use the unsuccessful attempts on his life as an excuse for silencing us. Trump is who he is. The American people must know who he is. Spreading the truth about who he is can save our country from MAGA madness. Silence never will.

We are faced with an existential choice. We can tell the truth about Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, or we can let the deplorable acts of a couple of unstable individuals silence us. We can speak the truth, or we can be silent and hide the truth. As for me and my household, we will tell the truth. I pray that millions upon millions of other Americans who also know the truth will continue to speak it. Only their doing so can save our country. May it be so.

Reconciliation? No!

Reconciliation? No! 

I hear many people whom I respect deploring the divisions in this country and saying we need to “come together as Americans.” That’s what Kamala Harris says. That’s what Rev. Chuck Currie, a civil rights activist UCC pastor in Portland, Oregon, says. So do a lot of other really good people. I could not disagree more. Let me explain why. 

What does “coming together as Americans mean?” All of us Americans are, of course, already Americans, so “come together as Americans” is something we have, in one sense, already done. Citizens of this country are by definition Americans. At this level, “come together as Americans” doesn’t mean anything. Yet those who say coming together as Americans is what we need to do apparently think the phrase means something not nothing. What might that something be?  

It appears to be that we’re supposed to stop pointing accusatory fingers at Americans with whom we disagree. It certainly is true that pointing accusatory at one’s political adversaries has become the way of American politics and to some extent the way of American life. Donald Trump calls his political opponents socialists and Marxists, though of course he has no idea of what either a socialist or a Marxist really is. He thinks people should be imprisoned just because they oppose him politically , something that is of course both immoral and unconstitutional. Trump and some of his supporters even think some of their political opponents should be executed just because they oppose the authoritarian regime Trump wants to impose on us. Trump and his minions accuse any news outlet that criticizes him of peddling “fake news.” Trump strongly criticizes any news outlet that fact checks anything he has said, most of which is, of course, a lie. Trump has turned the once respectable Republican Party into the Donald J. Trump cult of personality. Saying anything negative about Donald Trump is sure to provoke condemnation from him and from his numerous acolytes.  

Those of us on the other side of our country’s political divide, of course, also point accusatory fingers at Trump and his followers. We say Trump is a threat to our country. We say he is a racist and that he panders to white supremacists. We say he is a misogynist. We say he is guilty of sexual assault and of fraud. We say he plays fast and loose with classified government documents. We say the lies again and again about having won the 2020 presidential election and that his huge victory was stolen from him. We say that he incited a seditious riot on January 6, 2021. We say that he often incites violence through dog whistles, and sometimes he calls for it outright. We say that he has already put in place people who will refuse to certify Harris victories in the swing states and that he will do God knows what when he loses the election. We say that he is perfectly capable of and willing to engineer a violent coup to return himself to power. We call him an American fascist. We say that he is simply evil. 

So are both sides of this divide equally guilty of perpetuating an unnecessary division in this country? No, we are not. There’s a huge difference between us. Essentially everything Donald Trump says is a lie, and his followers follow their leader in virtually never telling the truth. Major news outlets like ABC, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post may make an occasional mistake. They are, after all, staffed by mere humans. They do not, however, intentionally lie. They do not practice “fake news.” Political figures both Democratic and Republican who oppose Trump are not guilty of treason. There is no moral or legal ground for putting them in jail.  

Our claim that Trump is an American fascist effectively sums up everything that is evil about Donald Trump, and when we call him a fascist we are simply telling the truth. To understand that truth, we must know what a “fascist” actually is and whether, and if so to what extent, the fact that Trump is an American fascist makes a difference. The term fascist arose in Italy after World War I. It was the name of Benito Mussolini’s political movement and party. It used violence against its opponents. It suppressed individual rights. It was a cult of personality for Mussolini. It ruled by decree and force not through democratic processes. It dreamt of a glorious past, in Mussolini’s case the Roman Empire of the very distant past, and it set about recreating that past. It was expansionistic, Mussolini invading both Greece and Ethiopia. Mussolini’s regime favored capitalists over workers, suppressing  Italy’s labor movements and proclaiming that it was protecting the Italian people from the Communists. 

The quintessential fascist regime, however, was that of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Mussolini was Hitler’s model and inspiration, but Hitler created a fascist regime far more destructive than even Mussolini’s was. Hitler perfected the fascist tactic of the big lie. He actually had at least two big lies. One was that the Germans were a master race superior to all other people and entitled to rule and even exterminate other peoples. The other was that the Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s problems including the loss of World War I, the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, and the economic troubles of the 1920s, all this despite the fact that there actually weren’t all that many Jews in Germany.1  Hitler created a totalitarian state not dissimilar from the one Stalin created before him the Soviet Union. Despite the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, Hitler, like Mussolini, suppressed labor and claimed to be protecting the people from Communism. 

Beyond that, Hitler set out to conquer all of central and eastern Europe, exterminate the Jews, and kill or enslave the Poles, Ukrainians, and others. He provoked World War II when, in 1939, he invaded Poland to begin that extermination and enslavement. Hitler’s shock troops called the SS and others committed the Holocaust, one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever, with the intent of erasing Jews and Judaism from the map of Europe if not from the face of the earth. The horror Hitler’s Nazis inflicted on all of Europe but particularly on central and eastern Europe was horrific beyond comprehension. Hitler’s big lies justified that horror and made it probable if not inevitable. 

There are a few regimes in the world today that are in effect if not in name fascist. One is the regime of Viktor Orban in Hungary. A similar regime is that of Recep Erdogan in Turkey. More extreme examples are Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian, militarily expansionist regime in Russia and Kim Jong Un’s murderous, militarily threatening regime in North Korea. There are nationalistic fascist movements, usually called far right or neo-conservative rather than fascist, in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe.  

Donald Trump is leading the equivalent movement in the United States. He calls it MAGA, which stands for Make America Great Again. Thus we see right at the outset that Trump’s movement is similar to Mussolini’s in that it claims to be able to recapture and recreate a glorious past, in Trump’s case one that never actually existed. Trump practices the big lie much like Adolf Hitler did. Trump has a couple of big lies just as Hitler did. He says that the United States of American is failing. He says it’s a hopeless mess. He claims crime is out of control and the people are worse off now than they were when he left office in early 2021. Statistics prove that neither of those claims is true.  

His other big lie is that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants and immigrants of color are the cause of America’s problems. He calls immigrants murderers and rapists. He says they are “poisoning the blood” of this country, a Nazi-like statement if ever there was one. He says immigrants are all criminals. He says other countries are emptying their jails and sending their criminals into our country. He says immigrants are taking jobs from “real” Americans. He even says that some immigrants are eating other people’s pet cats and dogs. None of that is true. It doesn’t matter. Trump uses these claims in much the same way Adolf Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s problems in the 1920s and early 1930s. Trump favors the wealthy over the poor, as fascists often do. He proposes destructive economic measures like imposing tariffs on goods imported from China, then he lies and says other countries will pay them not the American consumer.  

Leaders of fascist movements demand that their followers be loyal to them personally not to the nation they claim to lead or to any democratic constitution, like that of the Weimar Republic in Germany of the Constitution in the United States. That is precisely what Donald Trump demands of anyone who works for him. As is true of all fascist leaders, Trump considers the people’s civil rights to be obstacles in his way not guarantees of freedom. As is true of all fascist leaders, Trump wants to be an authoritarian ruler not a constitutional one. As is true of all fascist leaders, Trump is happy to incite and use violence to attain his ends. There simply is no doubt that Trump will create a fascist America if he ever gets another chance to do it. 

So. Is it appropriate for us to come together as Americans if that means, as surely it must, compromising with Donald Trump? If it means, as it does, extending respect and acceptance to that grossly immoral and mentally unstable man? No, it is not. Division is not our country’s primary problem. Trump and his jingoistic MAGA movement are our country’s primary problem. The solution is not to make nice with them. The solution is not to come together with them.The solution is to oppose them the way Italians should have opposed Mussolini in the 1920s and Germans should have opposed Hitler in the 1930s.  

I do not advocate violent opposition to Trump and his movement. Violence is at least as immoral as is the way Trump treats women as sex objects. We must, however, engage vigorously in every legal, nonviolent way that we have to stop Donald Trump and MAGA. We can’t do that by compromising with them. Fascists always use compromise to their own advantage, as Hitler did when Britain and France compromised with him at Munich in 1938 and when Stalin compromised with him in 1939. When a fascist leader sees violating a compromise as advantageous to him or her, as Hitler did with Britain and France when invaded Poland in 1939 and as he did with the Soviet Union when he invaded that treaty partner of his in 1941. For Donald Trump, as for all fascists, compromise is merely another tool he may use to gain his nefarious ends. He will never see it as a value in itself. 

I respect Vice President Kamala Harris. I respect Rev. Chuck Currie. But I strongly disagree with they call for all of us to come together as Americans. I, frankly, don’t even know what that is supposed to mean. If it means Trump’s followers abandon him and his political movement goes down in flames, fine. But I don’t expect that to happen, and I don’t think that’s what Harris and others mean when they call for all Americans to come together. For myself, I have no interest whatsoever in coming together with Trump and MAGA, and I will never do it. It is not what this country needs, and I wish people I otherwise respect would stop saying that it is.