The Real American Tragedy

 

Supposedly, the number of pandemic deaths have exceeded a million. But who’s counting. While the Wuhan virus killed Americans, it cannot kill America. We’ve been through worse, and it looks like we got through this one. The pandemic appears to be burning itself out. They all do. It’s tragic, but the Wuhan virus is a transitory crisis. The real American tragedy didn’t suddenly spring at us, it’s been building for decades.

The real calamity is that we’ve lost trust in our government and in our institutions.

Whoever is in power, roughly half the people view government as malevolent. Not just Americans with different political approaches, but malicious actors out to utterly destroy opponents. The amount of hate and distrust has been illuminated by this pandemic. Governments are supposed to govern, especially during a crisis. It’s beyond difficult to implement a consistent national policy when everyone is screaming that the other party is a pack of tyrants set on stripping opponents of all their rights. There has always been tension in our system; it was designed that way. Creative tension. The kind of push and pull that kept the nation moving ahead without veering off to the extremes, but that creative tension has been twisted and engorged until it threatens to pull the nation apart. American politics have become fierce, unseemly, and harmful to our wellbeing.

Americans used to pull together in crisis. Now we bicker and argue until we amplify the damage any adversary tries to inflict on us. This level of intensity is new, or at least unknown since our Civil War in 1860.

How did our national unity disintegrate before our eyes? Three big reasons: 1) identity politics, 2) embezzled elections, and 3) judicial usurpation.

Identity Politics

Relying on a political philosophy, such as traditional liberalism, requires selling something that doesn’t excite busy people trying to get on with their lives. With identity politics, a party merely figures out a group’s foremost grievance and promises to resolve it. The Democrat Party has used this strategy to enormous success in states with major urban populations. 

Unfortunately, as long as Democrats adhere to identity politics, they will viciously attack any attempt at reconciliation. Identity politics mandates tribalism. Identity politics destroys unity.

No special interest is large enough to comprise a majority, so lots of differing and sometimes conflicting groups are gathered up. For a person to be welcomed in this supposedly big tent, they must join a tribe, never diverge from the group’s narrative, remain unquestionably loyal, and encourage other like-minded people to join. The party leadership then picks at scabs, set opponents up as the oppressors, and appeals to emotions instead of reason.

This is a formula for raucous disunity.

Embezzled Elections

Our republic functioned for almost two and a half centuries because we had faith in our Constitution, free elections, and way of government. Whichever side lost got another chance in a few years. But that trust is waning due to increasingly rigged elections and the unwillingness of Democrats to abide by our election process.

Democrats push every change making registration and voting easier, fight every check against voter fraud, support every change that opens a new path to fraud, push to legalize vote harvesting, and fight the cleansing of voter rolls. Democrat states and cities provides sanctuary, benefits, and driver licenses to illegals. They fight to eliminate the electoral college. But skewing elections goes beyond fraud. It also includes using the permanent government bureaucracy and supposedly independent enterprises to tilt elections.

If after all this, Democrats lose, they deny the legitimacy of the winner. This started in earnest with Al Gore refusing to accept defeat and has escalated to blatant attempts to overturn elections. An unrelenting string of assaults were aimed at removing President Trump from office. Examples include Russian collusion, Pelosi directing non-stop committee investigations, the Mueller probe, Ukraine as a ruse for impeachment, and politicizing the Wuhan virus as a platform for unrelenting and ever-shifting attacks.

Manipulating elections erodes confidence. None of this is by accident. The brazenness is meant to demoralize the electorate. Voting ceases to be an exercise in citizenship and instead becomes a nasty fight to prevail by any means necessary.

Judicial Usurpation

Judiciary usurpation may seem like an outlier, but in fact it is elemental to our current disarray. The Supreme Court now dictates much of our American life and social norms. It overrules Congress and the president, but no one overrules the Supreme Court. The selection of a Supreme Court Justice has become a highly charged emotional event. It’s instructive that political movements spend inordinate resources influencing nominations. They relentlessly advocate for their entrants and hyperventilate fighting a disliked nominee. Everyone knows that these are enormously powerful individuals with life tenure. Everyone also pretends their candidate is an impassive judge who measures decisions based solely on law. If that were so, no one would care who sat on the bench. 

It’s not so … and everyone knows it.

Democrats believe they own the courts and distrust any jurist who doesn’t espouse a progressive bent. Nothing illuminates Democrat duplicity more than a Supreme Court confirmation. When substantive arguments fail, Democrats infallibly turn to character assassination. Bork’s nomination started combative hearings, civil restraint was abandoned with Thomas, and the Kavanaugh hearings were downright slanderous.

The tribunal nature of the supreme court destroys confidence in elections and our system of government. It is no longer balanced, and checks seem impotent. When raw political power emanates from the bench, trust in the system deteriorates.

Americans used to set politics aside during a crisis. Those days may be gone. Now everything is a political battle, political theater, or political sabotage. Distrust, the order of the day.

Will we emerge from these dark times with our American principles reinvigorated? Can a rebirth occur? I’ll leave with the words of Abraham Lincoln.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”