Washington and the Supremacy Clause

Years before the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which led to the establishment of a strong central government, with its checks and balances on power and the critically important Supremacy Clause, elevating federal over conflicting state law, here is George Washington in his last circular as commander-in-chief from June 1783 (first quote marked in red):

“Washington and the American Revolution” by Esmond Wright (1962)

Three years later, on Oct. 31, 1786, he wrote this to “Light-Horse Harry” Henry Lee (second quote):

Let us have (a government) by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured; or let us know the worst at once. … Precedents are dangerous things; let the reins of government then be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended: if defective, let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled upon whilst it has an existence.

Washington was no politician, but having had first-hand experience from the war of how chaotic, unpredictable and ineffective localized leadership could be in providing necessary resources to his army during the American Revolution, he seems to have been wise enough to anticipate that if we, as a country, were to have a national government at all, it should be robust and should be able to stand above often-conflicting and self-serving sectional biases to meet the needs of the whole nation and that certain issues, especially those establishing civil “liberties” affecting the entire body politic, must be decided and enforced at the federal level, lest any individual states go rogue and try to adopt their own laws that subvert federal authority.

“Let … every violation of the Constitution be reprehended.”

The Supremacy Clause was a protection against the latter. An early notable example of its invocation was McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the power, under the “necessary and proper clause” of the Constitution, to establish a national bank, and Maryland did not have the right to tax the bank, pursuant to the Supremacy Clause and Congress’ enumerated right to tax and spend as it chose. The Supremacy Clause has been used many times since to establish the preemptive nature of federal law pertaining to civil rights, same-sex marriage, immigration, gun rights, marijuana legalization and more.

Esmond Wright, author of “Washington and the American Revolution,” notes that the general never wrote down a “coherent theory” on how the country should be run, despite being a key founder of it, and he obviously did not have the Supremacy Clause in mind exactly — there weren’t yet any states to have supremacy over to begin with when Washington wrote to Lee in 1786 — but the roots of it may be found in the above passages, for if the people did not have a government by which “properties and liberties will be secured,” if the central government did not have “supreme power” over the states, then its ability to enforce the securement of those rights would be tenuous at best.

The importance of the Supremacy Clause is hard to overstate. If states were allowed to subvert the Constitution and pass laws that ran counter to it, then the authority of our founding document would be nullified. Further, if states were allowed to pass any and all laws as they saw fit, regardless of their constitutionality, a chaotic, patchwork of statutes that may vary wildly depending on where one lives in the country would result. Worse still, without the clause, state legislators could threaten liberties that had already passed federal muster and potentially roll back decades of civil progress.

What would become the Supremacy Clause was later presented by Washington’s fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph in May 1787, but I can’t find another mention of the idea, or the germ of an idea, that predates Washington’s from the summer of 1783 and fall of 1786. John Locke refers to the legislative branch of government having “supreme powerwithin the government and the people having supremacy over the legislative, but the relationship between the fledgling nation and the individual colonies was completely unique at this point in world history, a dichotomy Locke could not have anticipated from his perch across the pond in the 17th century. And so here, in Washington’s early and rather unlettered political musings, even as the young nation was just then in the process of winning its independence from the mother country, lies one of the essential tenets of American political theory that has stood the test of time.

The Grand Old Party of Sedition

News outlets are now reporting that about 140 Republicans in the House of Representatives and at least 12 GOP senators, who were voted in by a democratic form of government and who swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States, plan to defy the will of the people and object to the 2020 election results on Jan. 6. Without evidence, and parroting one of the most dishonest presidents in the history of the nation, they claim that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent.

The election results have been affirmed by election officials, state governors, lower court judges and the Supreme Court. No significant malfeasance has taken place. Yet, in a desperate and undemocratic attempt to apparently stage a coup and reseat Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley will raise a complaint and force both houses of Congress to take a vote on the election. To their credit, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with whom I agree on almost nothing, and Sen. Ben Sasse voiced their strong dissent in going through with the measure.

According to Sasse:

The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking — first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress — to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.

Likewise, Sen. Mitt Romney called the efforts of his Republican colleagues “madness.”

The other word for it, of course, is sedition. Here is how the Constitution defines it:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress … who … having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same (.)

As this article from The Week outlines, the voting process, which has remained unchanged election after election, confirmed, after holding the line against all sorts of nefarious lawsuits and unfounded claims of fraud, that Biden won the presidency in a fair election both by the popular vote and in the Electoral College. Few people on the left or right disagree that Trump and Republicans did not have the right to question the results. They certainly did. But the results have been vetted over and over, and Trump lost handily.

To now float a bunch of conspiracy theories in the face of no substantive proof that any of them carry any weight whatsoever is a disgrace to Congress, our government, our nation and the people who went out of their way, in the throes of a pandemic, no less, to have their voices mean something, to participate in their greatest right as an American citizen. To have all of that put into question because Trump and his lackeys in Congress are sore losers and can’t bear to cede power to a competent administration, represents failure failure as human beings and failure to be keepers of the democracy for which they pledged allegiance.

Once the fiasco is done next week, the remaining members of Congress who still believe in the process actually have the right, as The Week has said, to “convene a traitor-free Congress” and to prevent these seditious men and women from taking their seats. I don’t believe that will actually happen, but make no mistake, they don’t deserve to hold the seats for which they were elected, and they don’t deserve to stand as representatives of this democracy.

Whatever happens, their names should be plastered all over the Internet so that in two or four years when their names are on the ballots again, voters can remember that when they had a chance to stand up for democracy, they stood against it, and they stood against the clear and unequivocal will of the American people.

Here are all the names that have been released thus far, etched and cached online for all to see:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House of Representatives

  • Rep. Mo Brooks (Alabama)
  • Rep. Jeff Van Drew (New Jersey)
  • Rep. Joe Wilson (South Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia)
  • Rep.-elect Madison Cawthorn (North Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert (Colorado)
  • Rep.-elect Diana Harshbarger (Tennessee)
  • Rep. Brian Babin (Texas)
  • Rep. Andy Biggs (Arizona)
  • Rep. Ted Budd (North Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Jerry Carl (Alabama)
  • Rep.-elect Andrew Clyde (Georgia)
  • Rep.-elect Byron Donalds (Florida)
  • Rep. Jeff Duncan (South Carolina)
  • Rep. Matt Gaetz (Florida)
  • Rep. Louie Gohmert (Texas)
  • Rep.-elect Bob Good (Virginia)
  • Rep. Lance Gooden (Texas)
  • Rep. Paul Gosar (Arizona)
  • Rep. Mark Green (Tennessee)
  • Rep.-elect Yvette Herrell (New Mexico)
  • Rep. Jody Hice (Georgia)
  • Rep. Clay Higgins (Louisiana)
  • Rep.-elect Ronny Jackson (Texas)
  • Rep. John Joyce (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Fred Keller (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Mike Kelly (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Dan Meuser (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep.-elect Barry Moore (Alabama)
  • Rep. Ralph Norman (South Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Burgess Owens (Utah)
  • Rep. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Lloyd Smucker (Pennsylvania)

‘Everything Trump Is Not’ (or the Case for Biden)

In the previous post, I outlined what I considered to be the most important reasons for standing against Donald Trump in the upcoming election. It is a long list, for sure, but I also pointed out the president’s numerous successes, or at least perceived successes. In this piece, I will take a look at the recent and past record of former Vice President Joe Biden, which includes both hits and misses.

***

Liberals and conservatives who do some digging into Biden’s 44 years in national politics — 36 years as a United States senator from Delaware and eight years as vice president — will find some troubling details. Before getting into those details, I will say from the start that any analysis of someone’s past has to take into account the fact that people’s thinking often evolves over time, such that it’s not necessarily enough to write off politicians out of hand for something they said 40 years ago. The important point, in my view, is how they reconsidered their previous positions because what often separates ideologues from intellectually honest, critical thinkers is the ability and, indeed, the willingness to change one’s mind when new information comes in or to admit errors in judgment. Trump’s behavior these last five years has been so rife with dishonesty and anti-democratic rhetoric that digging into his past to try to get at the center of the man wasn’t even necessary, but since the president has insisted that he has done more for America than Biden has in more than 40 years of public service, I will give the claim a full airing here.

Joe Biden is the Democratic candidate for US president.Credit: Alex Wong/Getty

Biden began his career in national politics in 1972, when he won a senate race against incumbent Republican J. Caleb Boggs, running on a fairly typical Democratic platform at the time centered around environment, pulling out of Vietnam, increased taxes for the rich, greater access to health care, and of course, that most familiar of political catchphrases, “change.” Biden’s position at the time animated young people across Delaware, and his victory against Boggs, who was known as “dear old dad,” marked a big surprise victory for the young underdog. The irony now, of course, is that while Biden is probably not the underdog in the current race against Trump, he is even older than the other old man, and on top of that, while Biden may have been viewed as something of an outsider in the early 1970s, today he is as tied to the “establishment” as one can get.

While Biden may have enjoyed the support of young liberals in the early 1970s, presumably the support of black liberals as well, his record on civil rights and race, in particular, is a mixed bag. Biden has said that even though he did not march for civil rights in his youth, he did take part in a sit-in at a restaurant and a movie theater. Dubbing himself a “surburbanite,” he wasn’t extremely involved in political activism and didn’t have a strong position on the Vietnam War as a young person. His main experience with the black community seems to have been working for a period at an all-black swimming pool in Wilmington, where he “got a dose of what was happening to black Americans,” as he said in a news conference in 1987.

This Atlantic article does a good job of covering what Biden has said and done on race during his career, so I’ll just cover the highlights. Biden did not support using federal dollars to bus children back and forth to school as part of desegregation, although he claims to have supported busing itself on principle. This seems like a distinction without a difference. When Biden was pressed about this issue during the 2019 Democratic primaries, Sen. Cory Booker, who is black, was taken aback by the former vice president’s stance, which apparently hasn’t changed, or at the least, he hasn’t apologized for it. According to Booker:

I think that anybody that knows our painful history knows that on voting rights, on civil rights, on the protections from hate crimes, African Americans and many other groups in this country have had to turn to the federal government to intervene because there were states that were violating those rights.

The second troubling thing about Biden’s record on civil rights is his all-too-friendly relationships with segregationalists and racists like Strom Thurmond. I, myself, was taken aback to learn that Biden delivered a glowing eulogy on Thurmond, comparing the late Dixiecrat senator from South Carolina to Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, no less. Here is Biden’s quote about Thurmond as it relates to Lee:

(Thurmond was, like Lee, apparently) an opponent without hate, a friend without treachery, a statesman without pretense, a soldier without cruelty and a neighbor without hypocrisy.

And Thurmond was, like Jackson, apparently:

… an avalanche from an unexpected quarter, a thunderbolt from the sky, and yet he was in character and will, more like a stone wall than any man that I have ever met. …

That seems to me to sum up Strom Thurmond: He is like a thunderbolt from the sky. He is a man who lives by his principles and a man who has gotten all of us to understand what they are.

And then, there’s the following, from an interview conducted in 1970 before Biden’s first Senate run. Biden’s self-proclaimed position as a middle man or a “bridge builder” has certainly got him in trouble over the years.

I have some friends on the far left, and they can justify to me the murder of a white deaf mute for a nickel by five colored guys. They say the black men had been oppressed and so on. But they can’t justify some Alabama farmers tar and feathering an old colored woman. …

I suspect the ACLU would leap to defend the five black guys. But no one would go down to help the ‘rednecks.’ They are both products of an environment. The truth is somewhere between the two poles. And rednecks are usually people with very real concerns, people who lack the education and skills to express themselves quietly and articulately.

As The Atlantic noted, Biden has had trouble explaining himself on race, and the former vice president has said that his work on extending the Voting Rights Act and advocating for establishing a national holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. shows where he stands, although one source said he was a “second fiddle” player on the former issue.

Biden has drawn criticism for working across the aisle with segregationalist senators while in office. He apologized last year for comments he made about those politicians:

Now was I wrong a few weeks ago, to somehow give the impression to people that I was praising those men who I successfully opposed time and again? Yes, I was. I regret it. I’m sorry for any of the pain or misconception that I caused anybody.

But did that misstep define 50 years of my record for fighting for civil rights, racial justice in this country? I hope not. I don’t think so. That just isn’t an honest assessment of my record. I’m going to let my record and character stand for itself and not be distorted or smeared.

As Biden pointed out, the Senate, when he started the job in the early 1970s, was “full of segregationists,” so logically and in his defense, not working with them at least some of the time would have been nearly impossible.

In 2019, Biden said, “I’ve been involved with civil rights my whole career — period, period, period,” and his campaign added that he “literally ran for office against an incumbent at 29 because of the civil rights movement.” According to a Delta Democrat-Times article from 2007, Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi asked Biden why he got into politics. “Biden looked him in the eye and said, ‘civil rights,'” according to the story. Biden has also pointed out that his association with Barack Obama, being positively vetted as a running mate alongside the first African American president also supported his case that he was a strong advocate of civil rights; otherwise, the implication goes, Obama would have had second thoughts about partnering with Biden.

Issues of race are deeply entrenched, especially in the South but elsewhere in the nation, as we have now seen many Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder of scores of black people, who were not afforded their rightful due process under the law, by overzealous, white police officers. Now, more than ever, white supremacy cannot be allowed to gain anymore footholds, and Trump has only served to stoke the flames of racial unrest. It was important, then, as a show of solidarity with the black community, for Biden to select Kamala Harris, who is extremely qualified in her own right, as his running mate. I should note that in doing so, Biden is the only white person to have now conducted two presidential campaigns with black running mates.

***

Since Trump keeps claiming that he has done more in his short stint in politics than Biden has done in more than 40 years, what of Biden’s record on other national issues beyond civil rights?

Biden’s full voting record as a member of the Senate can be found here. To say that Biden has done next to nothing or less than Trump during his time in Washington, D.C., is categorically absurd.

The following chart — viewable in detail here — provides a snapshot comparison of senators who were serving in 2008, Biden’s last year in office, based on their ideologies and their leadership score. Leadership score is the total number of bills a lawmaker has sponsored or co-sponsored while in office. Biden was the main sponsor of 42 bills that went on to be enacted. If we look at total pieces of legislation introduced in the Senate, Biden is near the top, just under former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid. Obviously, just based on the sheer length of time Biden was in office, his bill count is likely to be relatively high, but in any case, this squashes any notion that Biden wasn’t busy in the Senate.

But what consequential pieces of legislation did Biden oversee while in office and in what other ways did he contribute to governance? Perhaps the most important piece of legislation, and one that has been criticized for increasing prison populations and damaging inner city community, is the 1994 Violent Crime Controls and Law Enforcement Act, or also known as the Biden Crime Bill. Among its many provisions, it allocated funding for 100,000 new police officers, provided a little less than $10 billion for prisons and $6.1 billion for crime prevention initiatives, expanded the federal death penalty and required that states establish sex offender registries.

According to factcheck.org, the crime bill had a “modest effect on crime rates,” and although mass incarcerations did not begin with the enactment of the bill, the legislation certainly made the problem worse. In July 2019, former President Bill Clinton conceded that parts of the bill were a mistake. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he said. “And I want to admit it.” Clinton said the bill as having contributed to a drop in crime after it was initiated, but the Government Accountability Office reported that that was only part of the story. As per factcheck.org:

The GAO concluded that between 1993 and 2000 the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) funds “contributed to a 1.3 percent decline in the overall crime rate and a 2.5 percent decline in the violent crime rate from the 1993 levels.” Still, the GAO concluded, “Factors other than COPS funds accounted for the majority of the decline in crime during this period.”

What were those other factors? Increased employment, better policing methods, an aging of the population, growth in income and inflation, to name a few.

“He (Clinton) may be able to claim some credit, but the jury is very much still out on this,” John Worrall, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, told us via email. “Criminologists and economists are in no agreement as to the causes of the crime declines we’ve seen. Could be economic, demographic, a civilizing effect, possibly because of abortion or lead paint, tougher sentences, etc., etc. A dozen or more explanations have been offered and no one agrees.”

The other crucial bill to consider under Biden’s leadership is the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which provided $1.6 billion for the prosecution of those charged with violent crimes against women, and it set up the Office on Violence Against Women inside the Department of Justice. Biden said he was “proudest” of this bill than anything else he worked on during his time in the Senate, and indeed, the legislation seems to have made an impact on reducing the rate of domestic, relationship-based crime by 64 percent from 1994-2010, according to the DOJ. Lawyers who helped draft the bill said the legislation produced a “profound cultural change, and has encouraged Americans to take gender-based violence seriously,” according to Time. Here is Rutgers Law School professor Sally Goldfarb, who oversaw the drafting of the bill:

The Violence Against Women Act, precisely because it was a federal law that took this issue seriously, created an unprecedented level of visibility for this problem. The very existence of this federal law shifted public perception of the problem.

As for his other contributions to governance, Biden sat at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for four years and was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee for eight years. He oversaw the confirmation of six Supreme Court justices.

As vice president, he oversaw numerous efforts, starting in 2009, to bring the nation out of the Great Recession, including the sweeping stimulus package of 2009, the Tax Relief Act of 2010, the Budget Control Act of 2011 to fix the debt ceiling crisis and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. He headed the Gun Violence Task Force after the shooting tragedy in Sandy Hook, Conn., and he assisted in drawing up the United States’ policy toward Iraq following the troop withdrawal.

Although Biden didn’t do a great job of articulating these in the last debate with Trump over all the interruptions, the suggestion that the former vice president was just asleep at the wheel for 40 years is categorically false, a claim that Trump will probably repeat during the upcoming debate tonight.

The Trump and Co. can mock Biden for his age and make allegations about his mental acuity ad infinitum, and they probably will. The undeniable fact, however, is that Biden, while he has not always been perfect, has been a leader in Washington on both domestic and foreign issues during some of the nation’s most harrowing times — the Rodney King beating and many other instances of police brutality against black people; the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy and the aftermath; the invasion of Iraq, which Biden supported, and the troop surge in 2007, which he did not support; the hunt for Osama bin Laden, his capture and killing; and the Great Recession and the economic recovery.

If all of this doesn’t make Biden more than qualified to take the helm now, when we find ourselves in another deeply troubling period of American history, I don’t know what does. He deserves respect for owning up to his past mistakes and past associations, which shows a willingness to grow and a willingness to learn. This, it seems to me, is the true measure of a person. Perhaps most important of all, what we as a nation really need the most in this moment is empathetic leadership, which has been utterly lacking these last four years. Biden has known no shortage of personal tragedy and loss, and this makes him sensitive to the pain and struggle of others.

Ruth Conniff, an opinion writer with the Wisconsin Examiner, said it was Biden’s “radical compassion” for everyday Americans that the country desperately needs. Put simply:

The argument for Biden is an argument for someone who is everything Trump is not — a leader who treats people with empathy and respect, who puts others ahead of himself.

Normalizing Civility and Reason (or the Case Against Trump)

[Note: The following is the first of a two-part series on the presidential candidates. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.]

I have tried to be fair in my political commentary over the years in newspapers and on this blog — criticizing those on both sides of the aisle when I thought it was warranted — but these are unusual times when we have a narcissistic authoritarian in charge who is challenging to overthrow the very founding principles of this nation unlike any other president in American history.

That can’t and won’t stand.

The trespasses by President Donald Trump on our collective decency, on our civility and on our democracy are unconscionable. In this post, I will lay them out in unequivocal terms. Whatever Trump voters might think about the standard Republican platform sticking points — tax cuts for the wealthy, businesses and corporations; strong military funding; faith-based policymaking; standing against abortion and for the “right to life;” less federal government intervention and increased control at the state level; support for the Second Amendment; a general disregard for the rights of the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups; etc. — we, as a nation, are way beyond bickering about these individual points of contention, at least for the time being. That can, and will, come later once a return to normalcy, a return to the center, emerges amidst the rubble.

President Donald Trump arrives for an ABC News town hall at National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. (Evan Vucci/AP)

But right now, the heart of this nation is on the ballot Nov. 3. Trump and his supporters, both in Washington and out in the heartland, have threatened to rot it out from the inside, and I believe it’s incumbent on friends on the right who genuinely care about core American principles, and who care about people in general, to come together in solidarity to help the nation heal and go in a different direction toward more honesty and compassion in politics. Many Republicans have already done just that by denouncing Trump and coming out in support of former Vice President Joe Biden, including John Kasich, Colin Powell, Chuck Hagel, Christine Whitman, Anthony Scaramucci, Carly Fiorina, Jeff Flake and others.

This is not going to be a cheerleading piece for Biden, although I think most people support him because he has almost five decades experience being a public service, whereas Trump had zero experience before his inauguration in 2017, and the president has apparently learned little on the job. If Trump has a campaign platform, we have heard scant little of it from the president himself during the recent debate and town hall. Biden can competently answer questions in minute detail, and he puts forth an economic philosophy that should right the economy and bolster the lower and middle classes, as it did when President Barack Obama took over and began to repair the economy after the George W. Bush years. Biden shows a level of compassion for all Americans that has been completely and utterly lacking from Trump the last four years. That is, for the moment, all I’m going to say about Biden.

***

Before getting into the case against Trump, lest someone complains that I’m glossing over what the president has done, let me highlight what he has accomplished these last four years. Folks on the left will see a few of these “successes” as being bad for the country and not successes at all, but they are, nonetheless, some of the things that his spokespeople will point to as wins for the president.

Job growth — On this crucial metric, Trump’s record on job growth was pretty good for the first three years of his presidency. The country more or less held steady with an annual job growth of 2.5 percent, which was similar to the job growth during Obama’s last three years in office. The pandemic, however, sent the jobless rate into a freefall, which was almost certainly exacerbated over time by Trump’s mishandling of the crisis.

Stock market — As the chart to the bottom right shows, the stock market saw significant gains under Obama, and it continued to rise under Trump, albeit, with some fits and starts.

Tax reform — Trump’s signature bill cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but it did little to bolster the lower and middle classes. This, of course, is just the gazillionth iteration of trickle-down economics that has never worked in this nation and never will. The theory goes that corporations will reinvest that extra money in the community and create jobs and higher wages, etc. Predictably, this did not happen. And why is that? Because corporations, like rich people, are mainly concerned with making more money. So tax cuts only boost their coffers, and there is no particular moral imperative for companies to suddenly turn benevolent and pass along that wealth to their workers. The tax bill did shave the rate for people making less than $200,000, so that is a plus.

First Step Act — This justice reform act was a step in the right direction to address mass incarceration and offer more corrections services and job-training opportunities for inmates. It also reduces mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, among other provisions.

Ending the ISIS caliphate — While Trump did not defeat ISIS, as he continues to falsely claim, he did oversee the military in breaking up the caliphate that was entrenched in Iraq and Syria. In fact, ISIS has been regrouping and expanding its violent operations in Africa.

The judiciary — Trump has seating two Supreme Court justices during his time in the White House and could potentially oversee the installment of a third in Amy Coney Barrett. He has named more than 200 federal justices to the bench.

Space Force — The introduction of this agency was roundly mocked as a “space farce,” but this historic sixth branch of the Armed Forces is supposedly designed to protect U.S. equipment hovering in space.

Unfortunately for Trump, while he could have been pointing out these accomplishments during recent televised events that drew millions of viewers, he has rarely mentioned them, instead preferring to take a combative, defensive tone with his interlocutors.

***

Now to return to the case against the president. Trump, the most powerful person in the nation and the world, is also one of the most incompetent. From the start, he has hired unqualified people to sit in high offices within his administration. More times than not, these people have been woefully inexperienced and uninformed about the departments in which they were charged to lead. So far, as of August of this year, 40 or more former members of his administrations or his associates have been charged or indicted. Dozens of others have been forced out of office because they did or said something that raised the ire of the president.

He has committed impeachable offenses, including abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He has lied to his own constituents on a daily basis, and he has shown an inability to speak or act intelligently on any issue of importance.

In the standard authoritarian style, he has threatened to rewrite the Constitution itself so that he can stay in power beyond his legally-allowed two terms if he was to win in November. This offense, refusing to leave office and refashion the rules in his favor, as if he was a king, is so egregious that it, alone, notwithstanding all the other offenses, makes the man unfit to call himself an esteemed member of a local school board, much less president of these democratic United States, and it makes him unworthy of anyone’s respect or vote.

As a further assault on the Constitution, he has waged a yearslong war against the media and the free press.

He has cast a pall over the upcoming election, refusing to say that he will concede the election if he loses, thus setting up the framework for potential litigation if he doesn’t get his way. He has thrown shade over the mail-in ballot process, during a pandemic, no less, when many Americans are scared to physically go to polling locations. He has installed an extremely pro-Trump director to run the U.S. Postal Service, thus further muddying the waters between what, in normal circumstances, would be a fair voting process and a subtle, but insidious, flirtation with voter suppression.

While he has, when pressed, denounced white supremacy multiple times, he has nonetheless, courted the vote of the KKK, the Proud Boys and other white nationalist groups, and he has stoked racial unrest, which suggests that his denouncement was not sincere and that he was saying what he thought he needed to say in the moment.

He has refused to utter a negative word about Russia and Vladmir Putin, meanwhile almost certainly benefiting from Russian tampering in the 2016 election and no doubt hoping for more Russian influence leading up to Nov. 3.

He has insulted nearly every voting bloc, except rich, white men, in the body politic, including veterans like the late war hero John McCain.

He has, in short, brought shame to the once hallowed institution of the presidency. He has disgraced the nation, and the shame has been laid bare before a mocking and jeering world.

The late author Christopher Hitchens once cited the “ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity” of religion. Those words apply in the case of Donald Trump. Indeed, Trumpism has taken on a kind of religious, cultlike quality, as his supporters, eschewing mounds of evidence for his trespasses on common decency, refuse to acknowledge that the man, brilliant as he might have been in duping half of all voters in America, doesn’t care about them, their god or their country. He is only in it for himself.

Much like the decision of The New York Times, CNN and other news outlets to stop mincing words when it comes to Trump’s dishonesty, it is a moral imperative for those who actually care about the truth, who care about science, who care about freedom and equality and who care about the well-being of other human beings, to fight against anti-intellectualism and dishonesty wherever it rears its head. Presently, the head of the snake sits, probably tweeting out more lies at this very moment, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

After four years of Trump’s presidency and another year before that on the campaign trail, here is what I have surmised about the person and character of Donald Trump. 

He doesn’t care about anything or anyone other than himself and his family (maybe). This first point more or less encompasses all the rest, but I’ll elaborate.

He doesn’t care about the Constitution or the democratic principles of the United States. See these stories: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

He thinks the office of the presidency is his own personal sandbox.

He doesn’t care about Mexicans or immigrants from other Hispanic countries.

He doesn’t care about black people. 

He doesn’t care about the LGBTQ community.

He doesn’t care about the autonomy and agency of women. 

He doesn’t care about poor people, and once called them “morons.”

He doesn’t care about uninsured, sick or disabled people, and even mocked the latter.

He doesn’t care about low-income workers and families.

He doesn’t care about his own supporters.

He doesn’t care about the KKK or all the other white nationalists who support him, only insofar as he can woo them to the polling booth.

He doesn’t care about Christians or any of the evangelicals who support him, nor their theology or conservative social causes.

He doesn’t care about the case for or against abortion. In fact, he changed his position on abortion when he decided to run for president, showing that he has no conviction on the topic one way or the other, but shifts with the breeze to whatever position is convenient. My inclination is that he is, at the core, actually pro-choice. He isn’t religious, and he certainly isn’t Christian.

He doesn’t care about the 220,000 people who have now died from Covid-19, nor does he care about their grieving families. He has flouted basic guidelines about wearing masks, and thus by example, he has encouraged his supporters to do the same, which has resulted in more loss of life. He himself contracted Covid most likely because of this disregard. He knowingly downplayed the virus, whereas if he had taken diligent and swift action, he could have greatly reduced the caseload and death count, thus coming away looking like a strong and compassionate leader who steps up when times get tough. But Trump dallied and never had a comprehensive plan for testing or meeting the challenges of the virus. What did he say about the monstrously tragic death toll in the United States? “It is what it is.” This does not sound like a “pro-life” president to me.

He doesn’t care about those in the White House who are in his inner circle, who almost certainly came into contact with him while he was contagious with the virus, as he insisted on parading around in a car just days after testing positive, to assure his most ardent supporters that he was strong and fighting back against the illness.

He doesn’t care about veterans or their families. He doesn’t even understand why veterans would bother to put their lives at risk because, in Trump’s egotistical mind, there is nothing in it for them.

He doesn’t care about the truth. He doesn’t care about authenticity. As of July, he had issued more than 20,000 lies or misleading claims.

The only thing he cares about his own power and self-preservation. As I have said elsewhere, you can only insult the intelligence of Americans for so long before the gig is up. The sun is setting on Donald Trump, and sadly, in a kind of pathetic way, he will not live to see the day in which he is free of lawsuits and indictments once he leaves office.

***

We stand at the crossroads.

The United States, and particularly the far right contingent of the body politic, has been flirting with nationalism and white supremacy, at least since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, but in actuality, long before that point, going all the way back to the founding. White Christianity, in fact, has always had a strained relationship with black Christianity in this nation — even though their similarities are more pronounced than their differences, which are solely based on skin color — and with the black community in general. In “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” Robert P. Jones said that Christians have traditionally focused on an “individualistic view of sin” and having a personal relationship with Jesus. They have more or less ignored institutional racism that has obviously existed for the better part of 2 1/2 centuries. Thus, the Tea Party and current Trumpists have included a troubling mix of the old “Lost Cause” adherents who are still trying to wage a war that was conceded long ago; Christians who put God and country above all else, including the interests of blacks and Hispanics, and the interests of the gay and lesbian community; and straight up white nationalists, who want to return to a time when whiteness itself was the law of the land. And then, there are simply the traditional Republican supporters who will vote along party lines no matter what because the GOP generally stands for social issues they care about. But when the party and their leader is this far off the rails, it may be time to reconsider this allegiance, just for this once, for the sake of the country.

Since most GOP lawmakers still support Trump, they obviously, by their cowed silence in giving him free reign to lie with impunity, do not care about honesty and integrity, so blind allegiance to this party simply on ethical grounds, makes no sense and is, rightly, causing no shortage of cognitive dissonance in the minds of more than a few conservative voters.

After the election of Obama, the right-wing collective, including FOX News and right-wing talk radio, released the hounds in what amounted to an unrelenting and merciless attempt to disparage the character of Obama and to even delegitimize his status as an American citizen. Trump, who is well known to have waffled between the Democratic and Republican parties over the years, was on board with the so-called racist birther movement against Obama, and thus began Trump’s place at the head of the far-right, white supremacist table. This has been shown to be true over and over by the insistence that KKK and white supremacist voters are casting their lot with Trump.

We have a decision to make as a nation. We can either let Trump win and maintain a sizable foothold for the dangerously racist, anti-intellectual contingent, a contingent that includes the current president; or we can return to the center and to reason, to put our common humanity over party and do the right thing for this land that we call home. We have to get on with the business of improving the health and well-being of everyone. In the year 2020, there is simply no room for exceptions and provisos on that point. That all Americans deserve to be valued as human beings who are on equal footing with everyone else is not a controversial or progressive statement.

Collectively, the only place for us to go at this point is toward the center, our last and best hope for a renewed sense of cooperation and conversation between people in both parties, and we should run there as if our lives depended on it.

Because, frankly, they do.

Assessing the Car Crash: Trump-Biden Debate No. 1

I keep up with national politics because the decisions lawmakers make in Washington, D.C., have real-life consequences for everyone. What they say and do really matters. Political debates, on the other hand, are largely theater, and they always have been since the first one in 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon. They are about perception. They’re about how well candidates can deliver their messages. They’re about likeability, and they’re about how knowledgeable candidates are about domestic and international policy. Obviously, when people vote, they are supporting a certain political philosophy, but they are also voting on the individual they think can best run the nation.

That said, I felt like a masochist watching the debate Tuesday night between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. It was a train wreck of massive proportions, the likes of which I have never witnessed in American politics, and it was painful to watch all the way through. It really did feel like I was watching two professional wrestlers cut competing promos on each other. It lacked decorum. It lacked a sense of mutual respect between the candidates, and it lacked control.

One candidate looked angry and full of contempt the whole time. He was loud. He looked cold and distant. He never once looked at the camera. He was combative, both with his opponent and with the moderator, Chris Wallace. He was void of facts and heavy on lies and misinformation. Trump continued to make unsubstantiated claims about the mail-in voter process and refused to say he would concede the election if he lost. He gave a chilling nod to so-called “poll watchers,” who he thinks should be allowed to stand around voting sites and intimidate people. He was provided with a clear opening to once and for all denounce racists and white supremacists in his own party, and he demurred, telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” whatever that means. A day later, he claimed that he didn’t know who the Proud Boys were. His reference, then, was oddly specific for a man who isn’t familiar with the group. And perhaps, most disgusting of all, he attacked Biden’s son, Hunter, for previous substance abuse issues that Biden said his son had subsequently conquered.

For his part, Biden did not give a great performance either. He stumbled over his words and looked as is he was struggling to get out what he wanted to say at times. He did provide a couple brief moments of substance when he outlined a plan to help the economy while creating jobs in the process and gave some ideas for managing the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s answer to the environment and wildfires seemed to be limited to forest management, as if he didn’t realize that the U.S. Forest Service already has forest managers charged with proper upkeep of the national parks.

Wallace, meanwhile, lost control of the debate in the first few minutes. Trump relentlessly talked over Biden and Wallace and continually flaunted the rules allowing for uninterrupted talking segments. At several points, all three were trying to talk over each other, and it quickly became a complete boondoggle. Wallace should have had the power to cut one of their microphones mid-sentence if one of the candidates went off the rails or violated the terms of the debate. It will be interesting to see how the networks and the debate commission address the rules going forward.

I wish there was more to say from a substance perspective, but there really isn’t. There were numerous insults thrown in both directions — Biden calling Trump a “clown” and the worst president in American history and Trump claiming that he had done more in 47 months than Biden has done in 47 years in government — and the most interruptions and talk-overs than I have seen in any debate. Trump interrupted Biden an astounding 73 times.

In all, Biden had the best performance because he at least tried to offer a little substance, and for that, he’ll probably pull some votes away from Trump, whereas the president, while brash and combative the entire time, which I’m sure his supporters loved, at least didn’t trip over his words. It was more like a continuous stream of bile. I will say that the big plus for Biden was that he repeatedly talked to the camera and directly to us. Trump, by contrast, didn’t address the American people a single time.

In one of the most consequential and crucial times in American history, we needed more substance. While the theater aspect of it was certainly entertaining, this debate was a sad affair of two old white guys — make that three old white guys — bickering for 90 minutes while the nation’s collective jaw stood agape.

The Sins of a Nation

The United States is not the greatest nation on Earth. It’s not a great nation among many. In moral or ethical terms, it’s not even a good one. While there is indeed much that is positive about who we are as a nation and what we stand for — personal liberty; democracy by the people, for the people; hard work; perseverance; and innovation — from the context of history and current events, we are and have been, a failure.

And I am going to elaborate on this troubling reality, not to needlessly slam the country and its legacy, but because I genuinely want us to be better: more compassionate in our societal and political policymaking, more accepting of and loving toward everyone without exceptions and provisos, more open to progress, more concerned with leaving behind a bright future and a cleaner planet for future generations, more interested in science, more welcoming to immigrants and, perhaps more importantly, more embracing of our central axiom, “all men are created equal.”

Is America a Christian nation?

One of the main ideas that bring many to conclude that America is, indeed, a great nation is the set of principles that many hold dear, namely that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and by extension, this must make us inherently good. The idea comes mainly from Christian members of the Republican Party, but plenty of Democrats also believe it. Inherent in this argument, of course, is that the country is, by extension, morally upright because, well, how can a nation be founded on Christianity and not be moral?

I could make a completely different post arguing that the central tenets of Christianity, which include scapegoating, or letting someone else pay for the sins of another; compulsory love, God the father demanding that people love him or be threatened with eternal hellfire; and human sacrifice, are, in fact, hideously evil and come down to us from a barbarous age. You can click the links for more of what I’ve already written on the subject. Take these three evils, along with the Bible’s shameful record on mass genocide and slavery, and powerful evidence to conclude that neither Christianity or its god are a source of goodness. It’s actually the other way around. It is the people who believe in Christianity who are good in spite of what their religion teaches in a holy book. Yes, of course, Jesus supposedly said some nice things, but oddly enough, the Republican Party, which routinely claims for itself the moral high ground, has abandoned most of them.

Our second president, John Adams, rejected the idea that the United States was founded on Christianity, and so did our third president, Thomas Jefferson. And so do I.

The Founding Fathers were a mix of deists, Unitarians, Presbyterians and other denominations. The Declaration of Independence, which is not a legal document and shouldn’t be construed as such when arguing about the religiosity of America, contains only a couple vague references to a deity and has no mention of Jesus or Christianity. Almost every public document in this time period contained similar nonspecific references to God. The Constitution includes one reference to God, the customary “in the year of our Lord” sign off at the end, and anyone who claims this — the vaguest reference of all and the closest one can possibly get to having no reference whatsoever — as proof that we are a Christian nation or that the country was established on Judeo-Christian principles is grasping for straws in the dark.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, outright denied the wonderworking power of Jesus, going so far as to reconfigure the Gospels to his liking, leaving what he considered the good parts and cutting out all references to miracles and the supernatural. The other founders were mostly churchgoers, as was pretty much everyone in the 18th century, but nearly all of them hewed to a rather subdued brand of faith than what has been considered evangelical Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The First Amendment statute to protect people’s ability to worship, or not, as they saw fit was important to Jefferson and the other founders. As Jefferson said in a letter to Elbridge Gerry in 1799, “I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.” Jefferson was said to have rejoiced when a proposal to insert “Jesus Christ” into the Virginia Statute preamble was defeated.

In his autobiography, he said:

(Freedom of religion was) meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s (sic) protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.

It is incontrovertible that we are now, as we were then, a Christian-majority nation, but the United States is obviously composed of many other religions and faith traditions, along with an increasing number of atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people in America who are irreligious has grown from less than 10 percent in the 1970s to 26 percent in the last couple years.

Nonetheless, it is still very difficult for anyone who does not openly profess their Christianity to get elected to public office. Even John F. Kennedy, who took a lot of heat just for being Catholic — in the mind of many evangelicals, he wasn’t the right “kind” of Christian — refused to allow his faith to influence his public duty to the nation.

During a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, Kennedy said:

I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

So yes, Christianity is still the dominant religion in America, and probably will be for decades to come, especially in the Republican Party. To this day, while many Democrats are certainly Christian, they tend to deemphasize their faith when it comes to making decisions, except in vague references to God in speeches or prayers, whereas Republicans usually wear their faith on the sleeves and openly use religion to influence how they govern, even though many of their own constituents do not follow the same faith.

To say that we are founded on Christianity full-stop, however, is to deny reality. Not only were we not established as such — our founding had more to do with the Enlightenment, governing principles from the motherland and political philosophy far predating the Revolutionary Era — we’re not a particularly moral nation either, and we never have been.

Make America … Good Again?

I have outlined why we aren’t a Christian nation or a good nation based on the dominant religion. What about based on history? I’m afraid the nation also gets an F in that category. Here’s a far-from-exhaustive laundry list of our “sins” (The word “sins” is in quotes because the idea of “sin” is a construct of religion, but it has value here in showing the seriousness of our collective crimes).

The United States and the founders protected the extension of slavery for 20 extra years in the Constitution. Many of the founders owned at least one slave. John Adams, bless his soul, owned none.

Our government subjugated native Americans after the colonists arrived and killed off many of them with guns and European diseases.

The nation fought a bloody war over the right of the South to continue the institution of chattel slavery, on which its economy was built, and at one time, the entire national economy, which was largely built on the backs of black folks. The North as well as the South profited from the “peculiar institution.”

After Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Co. crushed the rebellion, slavery by a new name called the Reconstruction was established by which many black people in the South returned to their previous subservient positions.

On Good Friday, of all days, Abraham Lincoln, the man who brought emancipation to 4 million black people, was murdered by a racist named John Wilkes Booth, thus punctuating the fact that bigotry and sympathy for the Southern cause was alive and well after thousands fought and died for four years defending both.

After a brief flicker of democracy in the late 19th century when black men in America got the right to vote, Jim Crow took root. A full 100 years passed — replete with voter suppression, segregation and lynchings — from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when discrimination at the polls and segregation in schools and public places were officially outlawed, much to the chagrin of racists everywhere, like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who would be revered by conservatives in my home state for decades to come.

One of the brightest beacons of love, hope and equality the nation had ever seen was extinguished on April 4, 1968, handing racism yet another victory in the long, frustrating and bloody march toward ultimate emancipation. Martin Luther King Jr. brought a message of peace and solidarity among all men and women, and he was killed for it.

Americans watched and laughed at shows like, “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times,” and perhaps some people secretly thought, “We’re making progress on race” now that all these black folks are getting high-profile spots on television. Meanwhile, systemic racism took hold across the next five decades, no longer the bold, firebrand bigotry of old, but the more insidious, viral kind that seeps into schools, police stations, courthouses and public seats of power. The federal government, state governments and local municipalities were all complicit.

America watched with either horror, vague sympathy or apathy as Rodney King was beaten in the early 1990s by cops in Los Angeles. In the subsequent years, Americans watched as unarmed black person after unarmed black person was either choked out or gunned down by overzealous or racist police officers. Many of us stood with Black Lives Matter and demanded change in the justice system. Many of us, far too many of us, however, did nothing. Many of us, like the current president, stoked racial tensions, and many of us dug in our heels on how our whiteness was superior to their blackness. Many of us turned our backs on our fellow Americans, and we abandoned whatever moral compass we thought we had, and by doing so, we abandoned our own humanity. No less than 21 race riots have occurred in this country since 1978.

At the same time the BLM matter demonstrations have been occurring, we have seen the true colors of a disturbingly large segment of the population, most of them claiming to be Christians and Republicans, yet apparently caring little for their own health or for the safety and well-being of their fellow citizens by refusing to wear face masks. Racism has brought the nation the most shame throughout history, but anti-intellectualism and selfishness is closely behind.

These grievances and trespasses against morality and ethics, among a people who declare so vigorously that faith, which they say is at the very center of morality, is such an important part of our lives and the national conscience, only cover issues related to race.

If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already made sure to take whatever steps necessary to end or drastically reduce hunger, poverty and homelessness.

If we, as a nation, actually care about people, we would have already happily accepted a little more in the way of taxes to ensure that every person has access to free health care. We would have already neutered the unfair and grossly mismanaged insurance industry. We would have already placed stop-gaps on the pharmaceutical industry’s runaway price-gouging practices.

Like Canada and many Western European nations, we would have already put in place a string of provisions that improve the health of well-being of every person in the country, not just white people or privileged people or rich people. If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already rooted out each politician, Republican or Democrat, who did not support the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that every American should enjoy. It is a near impossibility to pursue any of them without fundamental things like safety, health and a fair wage.

That said, imagine Jesus looking out over the multitude of 5,000 hungry people before him, which, if the story even took place, was probably more like 10,000 or 15,000 because women and children didn’t count as people. Imagine Jesus seeing the people holding out their baskets in quiet desperation to sate their gnawing appetite. Imagine that he opens his mouth and says, “I can help you, but I won’t. You will have to fend for yourselves,” as he turns away and leaves them to languish in starvation and destitution. From a political standpoint, by failing to meet people’s basic needs with all the resources in the world to make it happen, this is essentially what we have done.

In ethical terms, we’re starving. We are supposedly the richest and most sought-after nation in the world, yet we routinely fail the most vulnerable among us. We fail the working class. We fail the poor. We fail the sick. We fail the uninsured. We fail immigrants. We fail children. And most of all, we fail black people. And we have failed every single one of these groups of Americans under the leadership of people who say they are Christians. This is even more true with evangelical Republican politicians, many of whom have presided over some of the most callous and harmful pieces of legislation the nation has ever seen in our 244-year history.

How good are we, really? How much do we, as a nation, actually care about people? I don’t mean some people. I mean all people. How has our status as a supposedly “Christian nation” moved the needle? It has not, and in some cases, it has moved the needle in the wrong direction.

I don’t offer any easy prescriptions; I am simply diagnosing the illness. The cure can be found in doing the opposite of all that I have laid out: in continuing to fight systemic racism, firebrand racism and subtle racism; in establishing compassionate economic and sociopolitical policies that raise all of the boats in society; in following the path of science and free inquiry; and in abandoning anti-intellectualism once and for all. When religion in the United States peters out or becomes irrelevant — and it will one day — the path forward toward a more just and ethical society will be found in secular humanism.

[Cover photo: A modified version of “Cross” by DeviantArt user Steinn-Hondkatur.]

‘The Fierce Urgency of Now’

“A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the twentieth century,’ wrote W.E.B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, ‘is the problem of the color line.’ A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world — here, there, or anywhere.” — James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 1962

***

I barely know where to start. As if the grim reality that more than 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and more than 370,000 worldwide, wasn’t heart-wrenching enough, to see the collective pain and racial unrest across the nation after the murder of George Floyd (and many other black victims of police brutality) at the hands of an overzealous, white cop, has left me in a state of despair and, frankly, hopelessness that things will change any time soon.

My feelings on the current state of affairs barely register on the scale of what it must be like I can never know and won’t pretend to know to live in constant fear that your body or the bodies of your friends or family members could be broken in the year 2020, in the “greatest nation in the world.” That line is in quotes because we are, as it has been proven over and over, by our collective apathy, by our arrogance, by our selfishness, by our disregard for the interests and safety of black people in America, by our failure to reform the justice system, by our failure to hold people in power accountable and by our negligence, that we are far from the greatest nation in the world. In fact, I’m not sure we even rise to the level of “good” by the scale and scope at which we have utterly failed to protect our fellow citizens and our fellow human beings.

I’m aware of my place in this as a white male who grew up in the South. I’m aware that I can’t escape my upbringing, and I can’t escape the white guilt that comes with it. A white person growing up in the South in the 1980s could hardly escape the legacy of racism and bigotry that is almost soaked into the soil in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and my home state of South Carolina. The blood and sweat of slaves during the American Civil War and those who suffered and died during Reconstruction is, indeed, literally soaked into the soil.

I’m also aware of the impulse of white liberals to want to swoop in and “save” black people. A white firebrand named John Brown, who was a domestic terrorist for his half-cocked plan to invade the federal stronghold at Harper’s Ferry and for his murderous escapades in Kansas three years earlier, thought of himself as the literal savior of slaves in the run-up to the Civil War, donning the “armor of God” to overthrow the system of slavery. Unfortunately, God couldn’t protect him from the noose after he and his co-conspirators were caught. In any case, Brown’s actions paved the way for the coming war, and he is largely credited with having “seeded civil rights,” in the words of his biographer David S. Reynolds.

A term, “white savior industrial complex,” was coined in 2012 by novelist Teju Cole, who said WSIC refers to the “confluence of practices, processes, and institutions that reify historical inequities to ultimately validate white privilege” and that it includes a “big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

Brittany A. Aronson, in the scholarly essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex: A Cultural Studies Analysis of a Teacher Educator, Savior Film, and Future Teachers,” wrote the following about saviorism:

Ultimately, people are rewarded from “saving” those less fortunate and are able to completely disregard the policies they have supported that have created/maintained systems of oppression (i.e. The U.S.’s exploitation in Haiti has contributed to poverty and corruption, yet Americans can feel good about their charity after the Earthquake). The rhetoric around how Americans often talk about Africa—as a continent of chaos, warthirsty people, and impoverished HIV-infected communities, situates these countries as places in need of heroism. This mindset perpetuates the need for external forces to come in and save the day, but what gets left out of this conversation are the roles settler colonialism and white supremacy have had in creating these conditions in the first place.

So, extending this to current circumstances in America, what’s at play here with the saviorism concept is that white people can feel good about sympathizing with the plight of black people, and even support causes that bolster black lives either physically or financially all the while assuaging their sense of white guilt but the underlying problems that created the conditions of inequality and injustice remain unaddressed, whatever good intentions white people had at the onset.

Some in the black community have rejected the notion of having “white allies” outright if it does not work in tandem with requisite political change and the annihilation of whiteness itself as a construct.

In a blistering critique of white saviorism, Gyasi Lake, for the Black Youth Project, wrote last year:

In a reality where whiteness affords you the luxury of choosing whether or not to leverage your privilege and be revered uncritically, despite glaring flaws, Blackness can never flourish. Until whiteness is dismantled indefinitely, white voices will continue to be elevated and championed above the voices of the most marginalized communities.

The revolution can’t be sponsored and/or acceptable to those we are revolting against.

As a student at Clemson University, I took a course that addressed this very subject called “Whiteness in America.” One of the authors we explored was Noel Ignatiev, whose book, “Race Traitor,” argued that “whiteness” should be abolished altogether and that white people should eschew opportunities to use their privilege to their advantage. Race, for sure, is nothing more than a construct.

As James Baldwin said in “The Fire Next Time”:

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.

We now have a disturbingly long and terrible list of black people who were victimized by police brutality or negligence and who did not deserve to die. They include (far from comprehensive):

George Floyd

Breonna Taylor

Ahmaud Arbery

Trayvon Martin

Eric Garner

Dreasjon “Sean” Reed

Philando Castile

Jamar Clark

Botham Jean

Michael Brown

Freddie Gray

Ezell Ford

Tamir Rice

Laquan McDonald

Michelle Shirley

Redel Jones

Kenney Watkins

Stephon Clark

Compounded with these outright injustices, there is a long list of families in the inner city who live under the weight of a system of housing, justice and welfare that do not serve to make their lives better. In many cases, their lives are worse because of systemic racism that now threatens to rot the core of democracy. Indeed, policies under both administrations, but especially the Republicans, during the last five decades have failed to provide adequate and affordable health care and family support services for low-income families, have failed to make the inner cities safe, have failed to root out drugs, have failed to get guns off the street and have failed to offer compassionate economic policies that lift all of the boats, failures that can not be absolved with a $1,200 check. In fact, policies that prop up the rich and benefit inanimate corporations and Wall Street have been put in place at the expense of low-income Americans. And because we have failed the inner cities and because we have failed black people and because we have failed immigrants and because we have failed to take care of the poor and disabled among us, we have failed as a nation, and we have failed as human beings.

After Barack Obama was elected president, some people were ready to declare that racism in America was a thing of the past, but as we have seen, it hasn’t gone away, and maybe it hasn’t even diminished. The period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was something of a wandering in the desert for black folks. Black men finally got the vote through the 15th amendment in 1870, and some were even able to win public office, but thanks to the Ku Klux Klan and other fireeaters in the South, black people were intimidated and forced by compulsion to stay away from the polls. Ulysses S. Grant left the presidency after two terms, and Reconstruction fell apart. Civil rights would essentially be at a standstill until the mid-20th century, and former plantation owners in the South simply re-subjugated their former slaves.

The civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and many others, including a coalition of white supporters, experienced a watershed moment with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society social reform programs in the mid-1960s. The nation showed promise as we were seemingly poised to finally address poverty, economic disparity and social inequality. Unfortunately, while many of LBJ’s programs remain in place to this day, the project of improving life in the inner city fell by the wayside in the late 1970s and early 80s with the introduction of the supposed “War on Drugs,” the gradual privatization of prisons and tougher sentencing regulations for nonviolent drug offenses. These, coupled with a host of policies by conservative lawmakers that bolstered the rich at the expense of low-income workers led to the conditions by which inner city black Americans not only felt economic pressures just trying to make ends meet, but racial tensions and built-in, generational animosity among white people about new rights afforded to black folks, was a noxious recipe for a gathering storm of racial unrest that has spilled across the last four decades.

So, when Obama was elected as the first black president in the nation’s history, the racists and bigots, who briefly came out of hiding to dabble in the newly formed Tea Party in support of John McCain and Sarah Palin, scurried back into their basements to listen to Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and the myriad other far-right conservative voices on talk radio at the time.

Thus, the legacy of racism and prejudice in America is bound up with politics, and at the core, while some racism may be learned or is generational, some of it comes from white animosity that stems from the Civil Rights Era, animosity that is completely unfounded since America was built on the idea of white supremacy and privilege, ideologies by which many in power still operate. White people have always been in charge and have held all the cards.

Just because I am writing about racial injustice and care about black lives doesn’t mean I’m immune from the perils of white saviorism or privilege. As such, I must continually remind myself that I write from a privileged position inside my white skin.

That said, I, like many white people protesting alongside black people, want to help in the cause of reforming the police and the criminal justice system, ending systemic racism and discrimination and holding malevolent officers accountable for their actions. We need extremely harsh sentences for cops who wantonly kill black people with overzealous, dehumanizing behavior. We need every cop to have a body camera, one that they cannot deactivate. We need to end the militarization of police. Studies have shown that militarized policemen only fuel unrest. We need policies that, once and for all, bolster the inner city and increase educational opportunities for children. And people who display hateful or racist behavior need to be marginalized to the fringes of society. There is no place for them in modern America; for, we, white people, must take the following posture in solidarity: when racists speak ill of black people, they speak ill of me and this nation. There can be no tolerance for racism in 2020.

And at the very least, I want to raise awareness about the problems we face as a nation, provide some historical context and support my fellow human beings. Because of my health situation, I’m unable to get out and protest, but will continue to advocate for black lives, for justice and for equality.

The time for change is now “the fierce urgency of now.”

Conservatism and the History of Voter Suppression in America

“State of Distress” by DeviantArt user cskelm.

President Donald Trump’s audacity apparently knows no bounds.

In a recent tweet, he threatened to withhold federal funding, amid a global pandemic no less, if Michigan did not cease its call to send out mail-in ballots to all of its 7.7 million residents so that, in the words of Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, “no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote.”

The first thing that needs to be said is that, even if Trump doesn’t like the decision — it was issued from a Democrat, so, of course, it would raise his ire — there is nothing illegal about a state mailing out absentee ballots to its own residents. That is lie No. 1. In 2018, Michigan voters approved a “no excuse” constitutional amendment to allow any resident to apply for an absentee ballot for any reason.

Trump’s tweet, which has been liked by more than 120,000 people at present, includes two other falsehoods.

Lie No. 2 is that Michigan’s move has anything at all to do with an attempt at voter fraud. Trump has pushed this dishonest claim repeatedly, but it’s well-documented at this point that, while voting in person is obviously more secure than mail-in ballots, cases of absentee fraud have been few and far between. Michigan’s decision is about ensuring that people stay safe during the virus outbreak while being allowed to participate in one of this nation’s most cherished, and important, democratic processes.

Trump also suggested that he has the power to withhold state funding. He almost certainly does not. That might have been true if this was an authoritative regime, and I’m sure some of the people in power would like to quietly move us in that direction and give Trump all manner of unconstitutional privileges, but here in this democracy, the executive can’t simply invent powers. As The New York Times notes, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, issued under President Richard Nixon, requires the chief executive to get approval from Congress before any money is withheld. In any case, a lot of the recently approved funding to states has already been released.

Trump also threatened, in a similar fashion, to withhold money from Nevada.

Cutting a state’s funding because they don’t do your bidding would be illegal. By threatening to do so, as Greg Sargent, with The Washington Post said, the president is “abusing his office and betraying the national interest.” Not only would Trump’s threat be illegal if put into action, it’s also undemocratic. Not that either of these bother the president.

Trump knows that in the upcoming election, he might be in trouble in Michigan. Attempts to prevent more people from voting is a tried and true part of the GOP toolkit. Current conservative strategies for limiting votes or asserting more influence in elections, including new restrictive laws and gerrymandering, are certainly more subtle in the 21st century than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries, but they are designed to achieve the same result. Republicans, and conservatives throughout American history, have long known that if they can somehow suppress votes, they have a better chance of winning. And why is that? Because conservatives have historically protected the interests of the few — the privileged and the well-connected (and usually white) — to the detriment of the many, including blue collar workers, immigrants, low-income families and those in the inner city.

Trump and his Republican cohorts know very well that the more they can suppress certain voters, the better chance they have of remaining in power. The president even admitted it. During an episode of “Fox and Friends” on Fox News, Trump was talking about measures that were proposed by Democrats to increase the number of people who could vote during the pandemic:

“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

And in November 2019, Justin Clark, one of Trump’s 2020 election advisors, had this to say in leaked audio captured by a liberal advocacy group:

Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. …

Let’s start protecting our voters (regarding Election Day monitoring of polling places). We know where they are … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.

Clark claims this was taken out of context and that he was talking about historic, false allegations that the Republican Party suppresses votes — although the line, “let’s start playing offense” belies this argument — but when you actually do look at the historical record of how the conservative party in America actually is incontrovertibly guilty of widespread corruption at the ballot box, it becomes difficult to believe the president or anyone else in the Republican Party that their intentions are benevolent and on the up and up.

Slow Progress

Before the 15th Amendment became law, of course, the right to vote was more or less limited to white people who owned a certain amount of property. In the early 19th century, this began to change as restrictions were loosened in certain states. The constitutional amendment, ratified in February 1870, only allowed black men to vote. Black folks almost exclusively voted for the Republican Party, which was, crucially, the more liberal party in American politics at the time, while the conservatives mainly inhabited the Democratic Party. These dynamics didn’t begin to shift until around the year 1900 when “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryant, a Democrat, began to champion increased economic equality and railed against the robber baron class. Although he would later take an anti-Darwin, anti-intellectual stance and is known to many atheists and secular humanists mainly as a fundamentalist Christian, he set in motion the populist left movement en route to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” platform, which was a kind precursor to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.

But back in the 1870s with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the issue of voting rights for black people was far from settled. Politicians and former slaveholders in the South, who were reeling economically from the devastating effects of war and attempting to set up a form of slavery by a different name, Reconstruction began to take shape. Some black folks did get to vote, and some members of the black community even got elected to state and federal offices, but in many cases in the South, literacy tests and poll taxes were introduced as an attempt to control the numbers of African Americans who could vote. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were formed to assert white influence in the nation and intimidate blacks and their supporters from participation in democracy and public life. [efn_note]”The Volume Library,” Volume II, Page 2239.[/efn_note]

Interestingly, three prominent Southern statesmen, Lucius Lamar in Mississippi, Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, said in a public statement that denying black people the right to vote was “not only impossible but undesired,” according to “Origins of the New South” by C. Vann Woodward. Whether it is actually true or not, Hampton claimed to be the “first man at (sic) the South” to support enfranchisement for black folks, and went so far as to say that the black man, “naturally allies himself with the more conservative of the whites.” Lamar defended black voting rights and supported a plan to provide federal dollars to local schools “emphasizing the benefits for former slaves,” according to The Mississippi Encyclopedia. [efn_note]”Origins of the New South,” C. Vann Woodward, 1951, Page 321.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”The Mississippi Encyclopedia,” 2017, Page 704.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”Black Reconstruction in America,” W.E.B. Dubois, 1935, Page 443.[/efn_note]

But as Woodward notes, “The century had scarcely ended, however, before the prophecies of these statesmen were overturned throughout the South” as state after state rolled out disenfranchisement provisions through poll taxes and “other devices.”

That would largely remain the situation on voting rights until passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution when women got the vote.

Full Access?

Probably seeing the writing on the wall and how the arc of history was progressing up to that point, and that they were, in fact, losing, white leaders in the South became even more committed to restricting access to the voting booth for black people, and thus, we have the marches, sit-ins and the battle for rights that ensued in towns like Selma, Miss., where civil rights supporters were hosed and beaten with clubs for daring to challenge the status quo. The crucial moment, 100 years after ratification of the 15th amendment, came with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, presumably giving black folks full access to the ballot box in practice, not just in theory. According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the bill was important to prevent some of the more egregious voter suppression offenses.

(The act) included provisions that required states and local jurisdictions with a historical pattern of suppressing voting rights based on race to submit changes in their election laws to the U.S. Justice Department for approval (or “preclearance”). In the ensuing decades, the preclearance provisions proved to be a remarkably effective means of discouraging state and local officials from erecting new barriers to voting, stopping the most egregious policies from going forward, and providing communities and civil rights advocates with advance notice of proposed changes that might suppress the vote.

In the ensuing years, young people were able to vote and new protections were put into place for foreign-language speakers and disabled people.

Undermining Democracy

Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have used the tool of redistricting to their political advantage at various times, it has consistently been the conservatives who have sought to strike a blow for voting rights and make it restrictive for more people to make their voices heard.

The blow came with blunt force in 2013 when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision and with a conservative majority, removed the “preclearance” provision of the Voting Rights Act, to which liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg remarked, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The Atlantic said this decision “set the stage for a new era of white hegemony.”

The Voting Rights Act was only a starting point that was, itself, shamefully, more than 100 years in the making. As Trump is currently predicted to lose the popular vote once again, according to NBC News, we should probably expect more crowing from Trump and Co. about election fraud and additional methods, subtle as they may be, to try to prevent access to the ballot box.

The president may be called a “populist,” but little about the conservative platform or policies suggest that the party cares one whit about the will or interests of the people. They care about obtaining and retaining power. They can more effectively do that by undermining enfranchisement, which in turn, undermines democracy.

[Artwork credit: “State of Distress” by DeviantArt user cskelm.]

The Grand Old Delusion

The latest polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is leading President Donald Trump by a five-point margin nationwide, according to CNN and the research firm SSRS, while Trump has a seven-point lead in battleground states. As we know, battleground states have historically been significant in ultimately choosing the winner in our electoral college system.

The 2020 election, which takes place Nov. 3, could be shaping up as another situation in which the Democratic Party candidate wins the popular vote but fails to garner enough electoral votes. In other words, we could be gearing up for another tight race.

MOBILE, AL- AUGUST 21: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters after his rally at Ladd-Peebles Stadium on August 21, 2015 in Mobile, Alabama. The Trump campaign moved tonight’s rally to a larger stadium to accommodate demand. (Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)

This is stunning to me because Trump has spent four straight years brazenly lying to the public, issuing embellishments and half-truths and just generally talking out of his ass — almost all of it documented and written about repeatedly in the press — as well as insulting nearly every voting demographic in the country and being openly hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet, he seems to have carte blanche free reign to do as he pleases inside the Republican Party, which is full of cowards who refuse to stand up to him, and his supporters in the public sphere either don’t care about his unethical behavior or give him a pass because they like his politics.

Trump bullies and insults anyone who dares disagree or question him. He has shown many instances of narcissistic tendencies and crude behavior toward women. He’s flirted with open racists. He and/or his inner cycle most certainly colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. He has shown little to no empathy during the coronavirus pandemic. He unabashedly refuses to wear a mask and set an example for the rest of the country. In one of the many talking-out-of-his-ass episodes, he raised the question about whether people could potentially inject disinfectant as a potential cure for the virus. And lo and behold, some small percentage of the population took him seriously. Of course, as he has done in the past, Trump covers his tracks on this idiotic idea by claiming that he was being “sarcastic.” I watched the press conference, and it sounded as if it was a fairly serious suggestion.

In any case, one can only imagine why millions still support him, but something close to half of the people who have been polled are still on the Trump train despite everything that I have mentioned.

Do they support him because he has made good on his campaign promises? A quick check at politifact.com will reveal that, of Trump’s five major campaign promises, two were broken promises — repeal Obamacare and build a wall and force Mexico to fund it — two were compromises and only partly completed and one promise — the travel ban — was actually kept. The following is a breakdown of all of his promises from Trump-O-Meter:

Remember that the election is six months away, so the likelihood that many, or any, of these will get done in that short timeframe, especially given the national pandemic crisis and Trump’s ceaseless obsession with “fake news” and how he’s being portrayed in the media, instead of, you know, being a leader and actually governing.

So, what is behind the continued support Trump receives, and no doubt, will continue to receive from conservatives heading into the election? In part, blue collar America sees the president as standing up for policies that will help them, although the Republican Party’s platforms the last several decades have been anything but concerned with the working class. And since at least 2008, the rise of the Tea Party and continued influence of Fox News, members of the populist right have lived in a vacuum, an echo chamber of whatever they want to hear. Obama was the reincarnation of the “antichrist.” The Democrats, liberals, progressives, homosexuals, feminists and atheists are all immoral, ill-begotten people who want to ruin the country, or worse and even more ridiculous, are themselves tools of the “antichrist.” Were these folks to read a book, they might learn that, historically, it has been the liberals, progressives and freethinkers who have largely moved society forward and generally cared for the interests of everyday, working Americans.

Trump’s other main voting bloc out in the public, besides wealthy Wall Street banker types who are willing to support any policy that puts the health of our financial institutions and corporations above the health and well-being of people, are white evangelicals, many of whom, according to Pew, still believe that Trump is fighting for their beliefs, even if some of them question his personal behavior. One of the more telling polls by Pew is the percentage of evangelicals who think Trump is either very religious or somewhat religious (12 percent and 52 percent, respectively) compared with the general public (7 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Sixty-three percent of the general public believes that Trump is not religious. But make no mistake about it, white, born-again Christian evangelicals in 2016, despite already having plenty of documented cases of Trump’s racism, sexism and dishonesty, overwhelmingly voted for him by an 80 percent margin, according to Pew. He was their consecrated leader. Remember this photo?

That Republicans have claimed their party holds the moral high ground in America the last half century, couching it in Christian language when their policies have little, if anything, to do with the teachings of Jesus — care for the sick, the downtrodden and the least among us and meet the needs of the poor — is contemptible. The Republican calling card, since the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 70s and even before, has, in fact, been to address the interests of corporations, financial institutions and, of course, privileged white people. The platform goes like this: leverage power from the pulpit and through The Family, leverage power from Wall Street, leverage power and influence from the halls of Congress and demonize those who actually do care about the underdogs of our society: the sick, the disabled, the blue collar workers, the immigrants and inner city families. “Somewhere I read,” as Martin Luther King Jr. would say, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet, while the Democratic Party certainly contains many Christians, it is the Republican Party that has draped itself in the flag and the cross all the while eschewing the very teachings espoused in the Bible.

The populist right, then, has been duped into believing that Trump and the Republican Party has their best interests at heart. They do not. But despite the reality, and decades of evidence as support and four years of outright lies and unethical behavior from the Child-In-Chief, one of the pettiest human beings I have ever encountered, and certainly one of the most ill-fit to ever hold office, conservatives will, once again, lacking a basic understanding of context or history, foolishly vote against their own vested interests and make this a close race.

Evangelicals and white workers in small-town America believe that the Republican Party cares about them. They believe Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is in any given year, cares about them. All are demonstrably false. This is the great delusion of the last 30 years.

Repairing Our Democracy and a Return to ‘Republican Virtue’

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. — James Madison, “Federalist No. 51”

***

As those who have followed the debate about health care will remember, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts sided with four liberal judges in issuing a majority opinion that the individual mandate behind Obamacare, the key component of a bill that compelled uninsured people to become insured, was constitutional if it was viewed as a congressional tax. This critical moment punctuated decades of failure with regard to health care legislation and positioned Roberts as one of the more moderate, fair-minded judges on the bench in an age when partisanship and compromise were becoming a lost art form in politics. In essence, amid political rancor, when his fellow conservatives were fighting tooth and nail to obstruct Obama and his programs at every turn indeed, the Democrats rammed through Obamacare without a single Republican vote Roberts saved the legislation. Although the law was far from perfect, those with a forward-thinking vision realized that health care reform was desperately needed because of runaway costs and the fact that profit-minded, not patient-minded, insurance and pharmaceutical companies had acted with near impunity for half a century.

Life on the Fringe

Now that Senate Republicans have shirked their responsibility and voted to acquit President Donald Trump, despite most of them being in agreement that he committed impeachable offenses, to hold the man accountable and drive home the fact that no one is above the law, now that we have seen three years of the president of the United States attacking the press, attacking free speech, denigrating women and almost every ethnic group in the nation, suggesting that we shoot migrants and laughing about it, courting the support of white supremacists and further ginning up racial tensions across the country, not to mention the sustained threats to the constitutional rights of all Americans, perhaps now it is our democracy that needs saving. While I certainly don’t agree with Roberts on a lot of issues, repairing what has been damaged by Trump and the GOP will take people like him, conservatives and liberals, stepping up and doing the right thing for the betterment of the nation. We have had scant little of that kind of bipartisan action the last 10-plus years.

One could argue that while the political divisiveness has always been a prominent feature of government in America, it really picked up steam in the mid- to late-2000s with the advent of the Tea Party and the populist, know-nothing movement that began to take over the Republican Party and slowly move it away from the center under people like Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., to the fringe under newly christened stars of the GOP, an “every man” blue collar worker nicknamed Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Almost in lockstep, as the Republican Party turned away from the center, the far left did the same thing.

One really had a feeling that after Palin and presidential candidate John McCain lost the election and with the lofty “hope and change” message of unity and solidarity that Obama brought to his pre-election and presidential speeches, the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, it seemed that the nation may have turned a corner. But what actually happened is that Obama, either because of his liberal values, the color of his skin or some combination of those two, precipitated a kind of conservative backlash, made even more heated and insidious by the 24/7 Republican news cycle that piped in commentary that catered, and still caters, to the lowest common denominator of white, blue-collar fear. (The late John McCain, by the way, whiffed on picking Palin to run with him, but he was another example of a Republican leader with courage and integrity who could have worked to turn the nation more toward the center had he won the election. Before he died, of course, McCain also did not escape Trump’s ire, and Trump could not resist insulting the veteran even in death.)

In any case, the idea that we, as a nation, had turned a corner was an illusion, and when Donald Trump entered the national discourse prior to the 2016 election, the stage was already set. Existing quietly under the surface of all the progressive fervor during the Obama years lurked the prejudiced, anti-immigrant, anti-gay demons of our past. The populist right from the mid-2000s never went away, and in 2016, they found a new hero in Trump, despite having virtually nothing in common with the billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star.

The Republican Party has fallen even further into the mire. As if failing to impeach a guilty president wasn’t enough, the current GOP and their president have attacked the country’s constitutional principles and core values at nearly every turn, from tripping over themselves to nominate Trump’s now-multiple picks after illegally refusing to provide so much as a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court selection, to kowtowing to the president and letting him lie and make outlandish claims without censure, rebuke or recourse, and attempting to roll back protections in the First Amendment and using it as a tool to loosen regulations and increase discrimination.

Ironically enough, shortly before the Senate impeachment trial was about to commence and thus, shortly before Republicans in Congress were about to embarrass themselves again and take another turn away from justice, it was Roberts who offered some instructive words in what has been, by all accounts, a deeply troubling presidential term.

‘Debate and compromise’

In his annual report about the work of the federal courts, Roberts told a “sadly ironic” story about how John Jay, one of the co-authors of “The Federalist Papers,” along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, was attacked by an angry mob in New York and because of his injuries, was apparently unable to continue contributing to the series of essays, which were written as a vigorous defense of the Constitution and the democratic principles of our republic.

Roberts wrote:

… We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.

As Adam J. White, with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about what Roberts had to say, the United States needed to display “self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation” in order to get back to a place of republican virtue,” which, according to the late Irving Kristol, means:

… curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility. We think of public-spiritedness as a form of self-expression, an exercise in self-righteousness. The Founders thought of it as a form of self-control, an exercise in self-government.

And this also includes

probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsch, one of Trump’s nominees, added to these ideas when he said that we should

… talk to one another respectfully; debate and compromise; and strive to live together tolerantly. … (The) essential goodness of the American people is a profound reservoir of strength … cannot be taken for granted (and) … need(s) constant tending. … (We have) the duty of having to listen to and tolerate other points of view … (and) democracy depends on our willingness, each one of us, to hear and respect even those with whom we disagree.

These values have been all but lost in the current political climate, and by quoting conservative sources, I am, as a progressive, attempting to demonstrate that compromise, civility, the sharing of good ideas, no matter where they come from, and, yes, even, virtue, should transcend party allegiance if we are to return to a place where integrity in politics matters.

A Better Way

Integrity in politics matters to Mitt Romney, another Republican who gives me hope that politics in America isn’t a lost cause. Romney, who stood alone among the GOP in his public admission that Trump was guilty, made a stunning speech today outlining why the evidence compelled him to vote to remove the president from office, noting Trump committed “an appalling abuse of the public’s trust.”

If Romney’s actions were just an anomaly and integrity doesn’t actually matter anymore, if decorum and virtue don’t matter anymore, if American politics is just destined to become a vast, wild-west frontier of insults, flame wars and misinformation, then, by all means, we can continue on a path of intellectual dishonesty, tribalism and identity politics, where the national discourse gets more fragmented and where winning an argument for your team is more important than moving the nation forward in an ethical way that benefits everyone.

But if virtue in politics and government does still matter, as I hope it does, then it seems that both our elected officials and the electorate need to walk it back and ask: If this approach isn’t working and it’s not what can we do differently and how can we be better, individually and collectively? How can we compromise and work together to change the spirit of the conversation and make it more positive? Conservatives are not the enemy, and liberals are not the enemy. Partisanship and a failure to compromise. Cynicism and apathy. Cowardice. Dishonesty. Hypocrisy. And intolerance. These are the real enemies that haunt our republic.

[Cover image: “Checks and Balances” by DeviantArt user RednBlackSalamander.]