I CAN'T SAY it's the first time I have been glad that my parents, both of them WWII veterans, my father having been permanently disabled in battle against fascism and Nazism, are dead and are not here to see what has happened to the United States. Trump I made me feel that way.
With this we can see beyond any doubt that America's liberal democracy, our 18th century system has broken or been destroyed or died. This is proof, positive that the compact that was warned about by some of the original anti-federalists during the manipulated and dodgy and, let's face the history of it, anti-democratic adoption of the Constitution needs to be looked at very seriously. I'd especially recommend the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips' The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact (download it from the Library of Congress before it's suppressed) in which he detailed the many ways in which white supremacy, slavery in his day, was inserted into the very mechanisms of the government. It's those mechanisms, up and running, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically staffed Senate, and many others that have been the cliff up which those who wanted a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy, have had to push boulders up again and again, including the Civil War and the great Civil Rights struggle of the 19th and 20th centuries, only to see them pushed back by the Supreme Court, by the states securely to marginally controlled by white supremacists and anti-egalitarians.
If you think what I just said is radical, I will guarantee you that something like that is going to be what scholars around the world will be analyzing this disaster as, the utter failure of America's democracy due to its inability to do what Lincoln tried to do, appeal to the better angels of our nature. He did that in his first Inaugural Address, as the white supremacists, always our indigenous form of fascism, were breaking out of the Constitutional system because they sensed the privileges that slave-power had been granted by the fabled idols, the framers of the Constitution, were in danger. Clearly the worst of them ruled over an enormous part of the country then, ruled by pretty much the same mechanisms that their descendants, the actual losers of the Civil War and their more modern forms in what turned into American apartheid used, which the Republican-fascists have been trying to bring back from about the second the best laws ever passed into law, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were signed into law. The best hopes of the Civil War, a long and effective Reconstruction of the Confederate states was ended by the corrupt bargain made to bring Rutherford Hayes to office under the goddamned Electoral College. Whatever civic piety you've been fed about the better angels winning that one, in the scope of the century and a half after that, no, no they didn't win, at all.
As I have never stopped pointing out, the American "free press" and the ACLU and the short-sighted and rather stupid Warren Court all played their part, the latter two by getting the mass media the "right to lie" from the Court and the "free press" by using that to lie in a series of progressively worse Republican presidents and congresses who appointed progressively worse Supreme Courts. The stupidity started with the vague, b-grade 18th century poetry of the Bill of Rights, especially the First and Second of those. The idolization of James Madison, as dedicated a white supremacist as we've had in the presidency or in the Congress, is one of the proofs of the failure of American history, both the study and teaching of it. The fake historical song and dance of Hamilton, promoted to death by the New York Times and Disney is proof of that.
America's corporate media has been the engine that brought us to the death of America's democracy. They have been all-in on that since the Sullivan Decision was handed down, starting with the 1968 election - it was the foreign policy and military disaster of the Republican encouraged Vietnam war that they used then, we will see the extent to which President Biden backing the Israeli government's Gaza invasion has played in killing it off right now. I think it's well past time that Americans have given unconditional support for that experiment. I think history will prove the anti-zionist Jews were right about it all along.
What do we do now? I don't know. I am tempted to do what Wendell Phillips proposed to do, leave the failed compact and try for a regional democracy. I'd suggest joining Canada, a country with a somewhat better Constitution - they learned something from our mistakes, but I don't expect its democracy will not be destroyed even if they manage to avoid an actual invasion and takeover by American fascism. Having said that, I don't think we will get out of this without major violence, the kind of violence that, under America's Constitution has been carried out against Native Americans, Black People, Latinos, other minority groups and, let's not forget WOMEN not only with impunity but holding the very mechanisms of power. I don't think we are going to get out of this without serious, very serious violence and oppression. The billionaires, who I am entirely convinced are all in on the evolutionary psychological belief in the "selfish gene" are going to be ruthless. When you read some of the most insane ideas feeding those like Peter Thiele (the co-owner with Elon Musk of the immunized presidency) they will be all in on death camps. I have every reason to believe that Trump will be a temporary thing, he will be pushed aside by Vance and his gang, who will have the billionaires resources behind him.
America's liberalism has failed, I am entirely certain that failure is tied to the failure of mainstream Protestantism and liberal Catholicism under the regime of materialism, secularism and the fascist heresy of "Christian nationalism". As you, no doubt, know I include the current members of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops among those most culpable, along with the multi-millionaire-billionaire Catholics who have funded some of the most unhinged theorists of their movement, some of them sitting professors at the likes of Harvard. The goddamned Ivys and their equivalents have been all in on this too, under the slogan of "intellectual freedom." You can't allow the enemies of equality, of justice, of democracy to flourish and expect that those will survive. America has never had more robust promotion of equality, justice, democracy, etc. in our history and the fascists have won. 1960S-70S STYLE FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTISM HAS FAILED AND BROUGHT DEMOCRACY DOWN WITH IT.
Anyone who favors justice over injustice, the least among us over the billionaires, the truth over lies, reality over Hollywood created fantasy, democracy over fascism is not only in for a long, long dark and sleepless night, we are now at a kind of risk we have never before been in. I think the best thing to do is look to those who have survived and progressed under American fascism in the past, Black People and other People of Color, Women, members of other targeted minorities. One thing we must never, ever be suckers for again it is the laissez-faire, libertarian concept of "freedom" "liberty" that provided America's fascists the "right to lie" their thriving. All of those legal niceties that the liberal pundit lawyers have voiced, endlessly, on TV, MSNBC, NPR, are moot. The institutions that operated under them have failed us, most of all the American legal system and the elite lawyers of the Department of Justice have failed us. The Supreme Court has certainly failed us because the majority of them never intended equality to survive and never intended for anything like a real democracy, the egalitarian democracy that the only good part of American history has struggled for, to succeed. The elite, Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League lawyers on the Supreme Court have done this to us, including all of those who nullified the disqualification of an insurrectionist to run for office.
American democracy is dead, the survivors have to face that squarely. Right now. The surviving democracies had better face that fact and I'm sure they will, they shouldn't smugly figure this is an example of the stupidity of Americans because not one of them has all that good a record, either. Learn from our mistakes or you will find the very vulnerabilities embedded by a written Constitution in your systems will be hacked by the axis of billionaires, domestic and foreign (XI, Putin, etc.) that have done America's democracy in.
I intend to keep this up as long as possible, I can't say that I'm not seriously considering buying a gun and learning to shoot it. I may take Ida Wells Barnett's advice to Black People in the face of lynch law to heart,
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
The law won't protect us, the time of the lawyers and courts as a protector is gone. They have failed us and were never a reliable source of security.
But I may not, I will believe what the Psalms, what the Gospel and the Prophets said over and over again, God is the only source of protection, more secure than life, itself. America's democracy won't be revived until the bases of it in the economic justice of the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus are believed in by an effective majority of Americans. As Jurgen Habermas did actually say, those are the only sources of nourishment for what we took to be decent governance.