A Republic, If You Can Keep It

It’s been pretty easy to take our democracy and its constitutionally-guaranteed rights for granted. Unlike our Western allies, we have never seriously been threatened or occupied by a foreign power. So, there’s a sense of security -- invincibility, really -- that other countries don’t share. Moreover, we, as a nation, have long bought into the myth that we really are the land of the free and home of the brave. We have never come to grips with our wholesale denial of human rights, much less civil rights, to wide swaths of our population for most of our existence. Obviously, and most egregiously, is the utter resistance to a meaningful reckoning -- through a truth & reconciliation commission or any genuine consideration of reparations -- with the genocide of native peoples and the fact that our country’s wealth and power were built -- literally -- on the backs of enslaved people, whose descendants continued to be brutalized and denied equal rights. There was the imprisonment of anti-war protestors during World War I. There was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. There was McCarthyism. There was the FBI’s infiltration of the civil rights and anti-war movements. There was the widespread wiretapping after 9/11. The list goes on. But when our government has overreached, we routinely refuse to ensure accountability. The assumption has always been that there’s no need -- that our constitutional democracy is resilient enough to be pulled back from the brink. So, Ford pardoned Nixon. Bush I pardoned those responsible for Iran Contra. Obama determined not to hold Bush II accountable for torture and the aforementioned wire-tapping. 

And so here we are. We keep hoping that somehow, this time will be different. It feels different.  Trump’s unrelenting malfeasance has been so blatant, so utterly indefensible. Unjust enrichment. Financial fraud. Rape. Insurrection. Stealing classified documents. Surely, in a democratic nation such as ours justice will be done.  

Yet despite multiple indictments, it looks increasingly likely that Trump will be able to hold off going to trial on most of the cases against him until after an election that, if he wins, will empower him to make it all go away. We can thank the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. But also, there’s Biden’s ill-fated appointment of the ponderous Merrick Garland as Attorney General, who predictably slow walked the investigation of January 6. There are, of course, Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party, who rely on minority rule, and therefore believe they must cling to his coattails to stay in power.  

And, critically, there are the Democrats – with their fetish for bipartisanship and compulsion to stay above the fray, who have completely abdicated from exposing and highlighting Trump’s past perfidies as well as the existential danger he poses if he returns to power. As always, they have ceded the narrative to the Republicans. Which is just fine with the mainstream press, which has yet to grapple with how to cover politics where one of the two candidates is a demented fascist, and one of the two political parties is facilitating a Christian theocracy. It maddeningly continues to focus on the odds, not the stakes, obsessing about Biden’s age, while ignoring Trump’s incoherent rambling and his all-too-coherent plan for mass deportations, the replacement of civil servants with loyalists, and taking revenge on his political enemies. 

It is long past time to recognize that our democracy has always been fleeting and fragile, and that Trump and his Party are eager to sweep it all away.