Has the American
Experiment Failed?
March 6, 2025
I just saw online that the Bronze Buffoon’s niece Mary Trump
has said that the American experiment has failed. The question immediately
occurred to me: Has it? And then two follow up questions came to mind: What is
the American experiment? And: What could it mean to say that it has failed? None
of those questions is easy to answer, but I’m going to take a shot at answering
them here. I think I need to address them in this order: What is the American
experiment? What would it mean to say that is has failed? And then: Has it?
Here goes.
What is the American experiment? To get any sort of answer
to that question we need to go back to the country’s beginnings. Before the
United States of America was a country, it consisted of a number of British
colonies. They belonged to and were ruled by Great Britain. Great Britain was,
at the time, a sort of constitutional monarchy. There was a parliament that was
politically significant. There was also a monarch. At the beginning of our
country it was King George III. The people of Great Britain, or at least some
of them, had representatives in parliament. The American colonists did not. The
American colonies may have been democracies of a sort at a local level, but
they were subject to the laws of Great Britain, laws in the enactment of which
they had no voice. To the extent that they were able to govern themselves as
all, the colonies were ruled by land-owning white men. Slavery was legal in all
of them, and the economies of some of them depended entirely on the free labor
provided by enslaved human beings either from Africa or of African origin.
Beginning in 1775, the American colonies revolted against British
rule. The revolution ended in 1783 when Great Britain recognized the
independence of its American colonies. After a first, failed attempt to for a
national government under the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen American
colonies that he won their independence established the Constitution of the
United States, which remains in effect, with amendments, to this day. The
Constitution is in many ways an expression of the American experiment. It
establishes a republic not a pure democracy. It provides for the election of a
president every four years. It provides for popular representation in a House
of Representatives and a Senate, though originally the people did not elect the
senators, the states appointed them. The American experiment, then, is an
experiment in democracy, of sorts at least. Its biggest shortcoming was that it
tolerated the continuation of race-based slavery.
Shortly after the Constitution was adopted, the states
amended it by adding ten amendments. They’re known as the Bill of Rights. They
establish certain freedoms that the federal government was not entitled to
infringe. They include freedom of religion and speech, freedom of assembly,
freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, due process of law, and,
tragically, freedom to own weapons. Yes, the Second Amendment says that’s for
purposes of a well-regulated militia, but the Supreme Court, in one of its
worst decisions ever, has read that provision out of law and made meaningful
regulation of firearms essentially impossible. It is clear that from the
beginning the American experiment wasn’t perfect. It was, however, an attempt
to create a sort of democratic republic of a type the world had never seen be
successful before. Benjamin Franklin famously answer a question about what sort
of government the Constitutional Convention had created by saying, “A republic,
if you can keep it.”
It predates the Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence,
the signing of which on July 4, 1776, is often considered the real start of the
American War of Independence, succinctly states one of the values on which the
United States is supposedly founded: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.” The men who signed the Declaration of Independence, or at least
most of them, didn’t really believe even that all men are created equal much
less that all people are created equal. Afterall, women in colonial America
were kept down in subordinate positions in society and there were millions of
enslaved human beings that white American racists didn’t believe to be equal to
them at all. Still, “all men are created equal” is an American ideal if not an
American reality at least, that is, if we take “men” to mean everyone.
The closest the American experiment has ever come to failing
began in 1860, when the country elected Abraham Lincoln president. Southern
slaveholders feared that he would somehow abolish slavery, and they seceded
from the union and formed the Confederate States of America. The states that
remained in the original American union fought a brutal civil war against the
confederate states. At first, Lincoln and most white northerners said they
weren’t fighting to abolish slavery, they were fighting to preserve the union. The
South, on the other hand, clearly was fighting to preserve slavery. By 1863,
however, many in the North had come to see the war as being one to abolish
slavery. After the war ended in 1865, the country did adopt the Thirteenth
Amendment that abolished slavery nationwide. Somehow the American experiment
had survived a yearslong civil war, something it has not had to do since.
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. It did not,
however end American racism, nor did it even purport to do so. The enslavement
of human beings white people had kidnapped and brought to America against those
people’s will was part of what became the United States since the very
beginning, from 1619 when Europeans began to settle the North American
continent, never mind that there were already a great many people already here
who had no desire to be massacred and displaced by invading white people though
that is what white people eventually did to them. Racism has always been
endemic among Americans. When the Republicans sold out the South to the
Democrats in 1876, the south descended into decades of hell for Black people
under Jim Crow. It wasn’t much better for Black people in the north. There were
no Jim Crow laws, but there was plenty of racism and racial discrimination. So
the US claimed to be based on “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal…,” but American reality has never come close to
meeting that contention.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t good things in American
history too. We have had more freedom under the Bill of Rights for all of our
country’s existence than essentially all people the world around have had for
most of human existence. We defeated Japanese imperialistic expansion
essentially single-handed in World War II.[1]
We have made progress toward living up to “All men are created equal.” The
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are landmarks of
that progress. After World War II, the US created a standard of living for
most, though hardly all, Americans that few people in the world had ever had
before and that, frankly, far too many people in the world don’t have today. We
consumed a grossly disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources to do
it, and consume a grossly disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources
to maintain it today, but we did it, and we maintain it.
What about the republic our constitution created? It has
worked well enough from its beginnings to today. Or at least it has done that
since 1920 when women secured their right to vote in every state. Or maybe only
since 1965 with the Voting Rights Act of that year. But it is true that we have
held off-term elections every two years and presidential elections every four
years since the states ratified the constitution in 1787. That is a record no
other country can match. Moreover, there was no significant violent attempt to
overturn one of those elections until Donald Trump unleashed a seditious mob on
the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Up until that date, the peaceful transfer of
power from one political party to another was a hallmark of American democracy.
OK. The American experiment in republican government and a
mostly capitalistic economy succeeded, more or less at least, at least until
recent times. But what would it mean for the American experiment to have
failed? It would mean mostly the failure of our republican (r not R) form of
government. It would mean first of all a takeover of that government by some
non-democratic force, be that takeover violent or nonviolent. It would be a
takeover by people not committed to protect and defend the United States
Constitution. People who would end our long history of peaceful elections and a
peaceful transfer of power. People who would rule by decree not by the
constitutional processes we’ve used for so long. People who would not respect
the separation of powers our constitution establishes, most particularly people
who would not obey legitimate orders by federal courts. It would be a takeover
by people not committed to, and who did not believe themselves to be bound by,
the rule of law. People who did not respect Americans’ civil rights. It would,
in other words, be a takeover of our federal government by fascists.
It could also be something a bit less than that but still
disastrous for American democracy. It could be the American electorate putting
in power people to whom most of those fascist things I just listed apply. It
could be the reelection of a former president who once unleashed a mob in an
attempt to overturn his loss of a legitimate election. It could be the election
to the presidency of a man who has been convicted of 34 felonies in a
legitimate trial in a legitimate court. It could be the election to the
presidency of a man who could not at first rule completely like a fascist
dictator but who would position himself as close to being a fascist dictator as
he could and who would not be satisfied until he was truly a fascist dictator
over this country. It could be the election to the presidency of a man who most
admired nondemocratic rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who may in fact be a
compromised agent of Putin. Yes, a failure of the American experiment could
look very much like that.
Now of course, I’ve just been describing Donald J. Trump,
who is the American president as I write these words. Does the seemingly
incomprehensible fact that the American electorate has put Trump in the White
House a second time mean that the American experiment has failed? I think I
must answer that question by saying that the American experiment has taken a
serious blow, but it remains to be seen if that blow is fatal. It may well be.
Trump has turned the Republican Party, at least in its public aspect, into
essentially an American fascist party that kowtows to Trump at every turn. That
will do whatever Trump wants it to do. That offers no check on Trump’s
irresponsible behavior and inane policies at all. Trump hasn’t done it yet as
far as I know, but he has certainly said that decisions by the federal courts should
have no effect on what the president can or can’t do. Trump clearly does not
respect the rule of law. He neither understands the US constitution nor does he
intend to live up to the presidential oath he has now taken twice to protect
and defend that constitution. He wants to withdraw the US from NATO, a
multi-national defense group to which the US has belong since NATO’s creation
in 1949 and to which the world owes the stopping of Soviet communist expansion
in Europe. He has turned this country’s back on Ukraine, that nation what has
waged such valiant and unexpectedly successful opposition to Russia’s illegal,
unprovoked war of aggression against it that began in 2022. He would be
perfectly happy if Russia conquered Ukraine and crushed the Ukrainian people’s
hopes for an independent and democratic nation.
It is not too much to say that Trump wants to be America’s
Vladimir Putin. He would love to turn American democracy into a farce the way
Putin has turned Russian democracy into a farce. He would very much like to
squelch the free speech of all who oppose him in the way Putin has done that
fascistic job in Russia. He is perfectly willing to follow Putin’s lead on
essentially every issue of importance to this country and to the world. Trump
is committed to democracy in no meaningful way.
Yet it still remains to be seen if the American experiment
has failed. It remains to be seen for one primary reason among others. Trump
did not get a majority of the votes in the 2024 presidential election. He got
more votes than Democrat Kamala Harris did, but he won without a majority vote.
He therefore does not have the mandate that he claims to have. There are other
reasons for hope as well. Our public media may mostly be controlled by big
business; but they are not yet controlled by the government, and at least some
of them speak out against Trump. State governments oversee elections; and while
some of those state governments are run by Trumpists, at least some of them are
not. Even in Trump controlled states, elections still take place the outcomes
of which are not determined in advance by the government. Not all Republican
politicians or voters back Trump enthusiastically, though most Republican
politicians are afraid to say in public that they don’t. Americans committed to
democracy, to the success of the American experiment, are numerous and are
organizing, at least to some extent.
The Democratic Party is being nowhere near vociferous enough
in its opposition to Trump. Democratic politicians tend to pull their punches
when they criticize him. I’ve even seen Senator Bernie Sanders, who claims to
be a socialist, do that. But the Democrats still are an opposition party.
Because Trumpist Republicans control the White House and both houses of
Congress, there isn’t a whole lot the Democrats can do to stop Trump’s
antidemocratic madness, but they can and to some extend do speak out against
it. We can cling to some hope that the Democrats will regain control of
Congress in the 2026 off year election. If they do, they will be able to do
much more to reign in Trump and his fascist agenda.
Has the American experiment failed? I’ll say: Not quite yet.
It may be in the ICU, but it hasn’t died yet. That the American electorate put
Donald Trump back in office should send chills down the spine of every loyal
American who believes in that experiment to any extent at all. That it doesn’t
is a major cause of concern over the experiment’s fate. But that experiment isn’t
dead yet. We must all do all we can to keep it from dying.
[1] It
was different in Europe. There the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany with some
but not much help from the west. By D-Day, the Soviets had already beaten the
Germans at Stalingrad, thereby assuring Germany’s defeat in the war. D-Day was
not the turning point in the war. Stalingrad was.
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