I'll start with a little bit of armchair history:
If George Washington embodied the character necessary for the Republic to take
off - turning down the opportunity be a King, setting a precedent of two
Presidential terms that was maintained into the 20th century - James Madison
embodied the brains. He advocated for and wrote the Bill of Rights, which, by
virtue of the 1st Amendment, contains what I consider to be a really powerful
idea. I've said before that guaranteeing freedom of
speech and preventing a state religion can have a unique protective effect for
a good society. It's the only dogma that protects against dogmatism as the
basis for oppression. A regime can't punish heretics if heresy is protected by
law.
Madison seems to have also claimed that factionalism
posed the greatest threat to the Republic. And it looks to me like
he was right about that. In combination with ignorance about how our country
works and what is valuable about it, I can only think that out-of-control
factional polarization made it possible for the sitting President to even have
a shot. He pursued a strategy of indulging and fomenting hatred for the other
faction. His campaign was based on spite, and I can only believe that many of
his voters voted out of spite of a hated symbol of the other faction. If they
knew better, they might have voted for lower taxes. If they didn't know better,
they might have voted for a return to better economic times. But they had to
have known or had a sense that they were putting the United States - and the
world - at great risk by allowing such an unstable and ignorant character to
conduct global and military affairs on behalf of the U.S. at such a dangerous
time. Particularly when the other candidate was an established figure with very
little mystery as to what she would do in office (i.e. do things pretty much
like her husband did in the '90's.) They were willing to risk this country's
well being out of spite for the more prudent option and the social and cultural
baggage that went with her.
One could argue that the Republic has been on life support since
9/11, from the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security - a name
reeking of authoritarianism - to the hysteria about a non-threat to our
sovereignty that reached its greatest pitch in geographic areas facing the
least threat from terrorists. It was sad to see how little it took for
Americans to throw away Bill-of-Rights values. Fox News airs what makes them
money. Politicians do what gets them elected and sets them up for comfort once
they leave office. These are not valid excuses. But it highlights how the
people, to paraphrase Adlai Stevenson, get what they wish for or deserve.
***
I wrote the above a few days ago. Didn't know how to end it and had work to do
so I let it marinate.
The changing feeling I was channeling was from "the senselessness of it!
Even with the FBI kneecapping, a few thousand more votes in the right places could
have averted this catastrophe" to "well, the Obama administration was
just a nice, feel-good facade - a great embalming job on the corpse of this
country." But neither feeling/view represents my own. I'd guess at this
point I'd say we're living in Schrödinger's Republic. It's both dead and
alive right now. Whether it ends up definitively dead or alive, to me, requires
not just the removal of Trump as soon as possible. It requires all Americans,
from the trigger-warning-microagression-young-left to the
personal-relationship-and-periodic-conversations-with-Jesus-right, to accept
that being American means accepting that heresy and blasphemy don't apply here.
We will always, as Americans, have assholes to deal with. We currently have the
ultimate asshole in our highest office. But we must not confuse assholes with
heretics. As long as we understand and cherish the First Amendment as a
something that defines us, and this understanding both cuts across the
political spectrum and, yes, trumps the impulse to spite the other faction at
the expense of our defining values . . . the Republic still has a chance.
