The Fragility of Democracy

When I was young I became aware that in this nation I could say anything I wanted, ask any question I desired and did not have to agree with something if I did not want.  I knew the extent of free speech was nearly unlimited.  I determined the nature of the culture in which I lived as one that would always protect one's right to free speech as well as the right to read anything I chose.  I thought I was lucky to have been born in a nation whose very foundational documents I would learn were enshrined in the Constitution since 1789 by the nation's prescient Founders.

As I matured and attended a university I learned to question everything including all those things which power mandated I must accept as truth.  I became smitten with many of the protest events of the late 60's because they provided me an insight into many of those things I later learned to be untrue.  I first then became acquainted with the history of persons of color in this nation and the so called Jim Crow laws a person of color in the south was required to follow.  I was shocked and revolted when a black professor told us that he fought in World War II only to return unable to sit at a lunch counter with whites or that he was mandated to sit at the back of the bus giving up a seat in the front because only a person of white privilege could sit there.  I became aware of poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests as a tools whites in the south used to deny persons of color the right to vote.  If one thought in the north those discriminatory practices would not happen one need only look to de facto segregation in the northern cities, or in the many schools which were separate and still unequal. 

My experience told me, too, that in war this nation was always right.  I then, however, read books like J. William Fulbright's "Arrogance of Power" or listened to lectures by Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky only to learn that the US was not always on the side of right but was often on the side of international political self interest denying rights to those who were too weak to resist.  Vietnam, for example, or the removal of the Iranian democratically elected and beloved Mosaddegh replacing him with the US friendly Shah and his brutal repressive police force Savak were examples of US power mandating results it did not have, in my opinion, the right to make.

Maturity dictates, though, once strongly held beliefs need from time to time to be reassessed.  If I have learned nothing from this evil Trumpian time I have learned to value what this nation had before his corrupt rule and how easy it can be to subvert democracy.  Edmund Burke, the 18th century philosopher said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" and so good men in our Republican Senate have snipped at their own balance of power rights bestowed constitutionally on them to allow this corrupt con man, charlatan and malignant narcissist to keep his seat when they could have removed this cancer from our body politic when they had the chance. 

Trump has subverted our democracy, placed in power other men who are loyal only to him and not to the Constitution.  Our Founders would be aghast. He is vicious in act, word and deed locking up children in cages, polluting our once pristine waters, denying climate change and articulating all manner of vicious appellations on many innocent others whose only crime is possessing a brain to think and question all that he does. He has maligned our allies, turned his back on our friends and advocated for our enemies.  He has become a Russian asset in that he has allowed Russian power in Ukraine to go unchecked even conducting a hot war in the Donbas section and annexing Crimea.  He refuses to release his taxes leaving us to question why.  The worst subjugation of democracy, though, comes with his annihilation of the Congressional balance of power by the attorney general declaring in jack boot agreement with Trump that the president can do anything he wants, subvert any principle of a free state because the president has the Article II right to do it.  He is emulating a banana republic by firing all those who do not agree with him and replacing those eliminated with so called "acting" authorities giving him the freedom to remove and replace them at will.  Moreover, he interfered in an ongoing trial to lighten the sentence of his pal Roger Stone found guilty on seven counts of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction. It is the first time a president with the attorney general's blessing has interfered in an ongoing trial.  This is unconscionable.

The latest most egregious action came by his firing of the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, because Maguire did the right thing by briefing Congress about 2020 Russian election meddling on Trump's behalf.  Trump was livid at Maguire for doing the right thing, fired him and placed in that vital-to-national-security position Richard Grenell, a man of zero intelligence experience but a loyal Trump supporter nonetheless.  There are, of course, so many more examples of Trumpian usurpation of powers he does not have.  The founding fathers put in order of importance the legislative branch as Article I and the executive branch as Article II.  The Founders did not want a king but Donald J. Trump does and is using his acquittal of impeachment by the Republican majority Senate as a permission slip to do anything he wants.  Acquittal does not mean innocence and he is, indeed, not innocent.  The House found enough guilt to impeach him for asking a foreign power to investigate his presumed election rival, Joe Biden. 

Donald J. Trump is creating an authoritarian despotic tyranny before our very eyes and God forbid is poised to have the electorate give him four more years.   Benjamin Franklin when a woman asked what form of government the Founders had created said "a Republic if you can keep it" because he feared the fragility of a democracy and man's proclivity to be seduced by power and subvert it.  Donald J. Trump is doing just that!