I am afraid it will take another civil war to finally overturn the evil inheritance that the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution and a civil war will not have any guarantee of doing it. Revolutions as a means of creating utopia are a delusion of the so-called Enlightenment, civil wars are the worst and riskiest of all national plebiscites, the one we had here had a brief effect against the habit and institution of slavery and racism, only to be nullified in the corrupt deal under the Electoral College that brought Rutherford Hayes to the presidency and inaugurated the re-institution of de-facto slavery in Jim Crow, with the full support of The Supreme Court. What we are seeing is the reversion to it under Republican-fascism, with the encouragement of the entertainment industry - with all those feel-good movies about the nobility of our institutions also comes all of the Hollywood provided Neo-Confederate symbolism and propaganda, the stereotype of masculinity that is so much a part of the Neo-fascist resurgence. The list of such evil enabling romanticism could fill pages.
I have mentioned a number of times how, when I heard the cute slogan "the first person to say 'fascist' loses" I realized the primary beneficiaries of such a rule were the fascists. In the United States that rule, which I believe I first heard said on NPR's All Things Considered (yeah, I used to listen to NPR) and knew it must be something that had currency among the college-credentialed media crowd. As long as the word was used in its formal meaning it could retain its protective aura of foreignness, of being something that was alien to the United States and its culture but that was always a self-serving lie. We've always had it here. The genocides against the natives for the purpose of stealing the land they inhabited, the intended extinction of the buffalo so the rail way could solidify the theft of the country through the starvation of people. Slavery was an entire race held in much of the country under a more severe fascist boot than most Italians ever experienced under Mussolini or Spain under Franco and it was hardly a system that was segregated to the Southern States. By the Constitution and under the judicial rule of slave-owners who had a corrupt financial motives in their rulings protecting and extending slavery, the entire country that acquiesced to its existence was implicated in it.
And then there is the long history of American imperialism, in the Americas, starting with the campaign to murder and carve a country out of the continental United States but also in such things as the campaign Jefferson started to ensure Haiti would not have a Black democratic republic, the long history of American imperialism in Latin America. If there was anything in Lincoln's terrible fear that God would take a drop of blood in the Civil War for every drop drawn by the slave masters' whips, consider what a cost is due to us. Perhaps we are also experiencing the debt due in Mark Twain's statement that you could not have democracy and imperialism. Now we find ourselves colonized by foreign despots able to use TV to install their puppet in the presidency.
Evil may not be evenly distributed in the United States but it is present in all fifty of the states in large enough representation to be more than getting on with. And so is stupidity. If Covid-19 doesn't sober enough of us up, it is clearly not a strong enough experience to definitively defeat Trumpism. I now doubt anything but a total disaster will. Appealing to the moral sensibility of a dangerously large, catastrophically indifferent part of the population is not going to do it, the only thing that will work is destroying the institutions that empower them as the slave-owners constructed them to enhance the power of the minority that they were. And that's only two examples of why we are now surprised to find that the United States, which even educated Americans love to see through Aaron Sorkin glasses, how we are shocked to find that even a Trump is acceptable to a dangerously large number of Americans, helped even as a minority to exercise outsized power through the very institutions set up by the slave power and their Northern allies, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, foremost among them, to prevent democracy from happening. That check written in the Declaration of Independence was, in fact, reneged on in that Constitution which we are all supposed to revere and respect even as its history has been as brutal as what we are seeing now and will probably endure for the rest of our lives short of a civil war which goes decisively to us.
In reading the Prophets with the aid of Walter Brueggemann, I see we are reenacting the sins of Israel and as they were given fair warning,the results will be terrible. The "Enlightenment" discounts the value of that huge literature of the consequences of injustice, the conceit of the Enlightenment, of science as an ideology instead of the tool and method that it really is led us to the superstition of human perfectibility or at least close enough to be reliable.
The Electoral College must go, the state administration of federal elections must go, the unequal distribution of power through the anti-democratically apportioned Senate must go - if that can't be done through the power given to states with small populations by the Constitution, those parts of the country which favor democracy over despotism should leave the United States and fortify their borders against what were once our former countrymen. I don't like that but I like living under the tyranny of an evil minority even less.
This election proves that there will not even be a very hard, very hard fought, fix under the Constitutional system of the United States. Until that is altered to take that extra power out of the hands of the minority through the institutions of government this will happen again and again as surely as Jim Crow and the legal-economic regime from before FDR are coming back. I doubt much progressive era reform will stand against this Court which we now know is not likely to be changed.
We are about to reap the whirlwind. Even if Biden wins.
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