End of Days

There are currently no continuous political systems on earth that existed 500 years ago. History.com notes: “The title of oldest continuously functioning democracy is … hotly contested. Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the Isle of Man all have local parliaments founded in the ninth and 10th centuries, when Vikings pillaged, plundered and set up legislative bodies on the sea-islands of far northern Europe. Iceland’s national parliament, the Althing, dates back to A.D. 930, but it spent centuries under Norwegian and Danish rule. Man and the Faroes, meanwhile, remain dependencies of the United Kingdom and Denmark, respectively.

“The United States is among the oldest modern democracies, but it is only the oldest if the criteria are refined to disqualify claimants ranging from Switzerland to San Marino.” At 242 years of age, the United States certainly looks as if it qualifies on the surface as the longest contiguous democracy on earth… if you accept that the United States remains a representative democracy. As pointed out in my September 27^th blog, Excluding Voters: How to Make America Grate, recent trends seem to be rapidly denigrating American democracy, moving rapidly into a plutocracy where large segments of less-affluent, minority voters are purposely pushed out of the electorate.

As I wrote, the “Economist’s 2016 Democracy Index (released in January 2017) removed the United States from that category of nations living in a ‘full democracy’ (9% of the global population) and pushed us down into 45% of the world population who live in a ‘flawed democracy.’” We have an autocrat as a President who is frustrated at constitutional and statutory barriers that were designed specifically to counter such imperious tendencies.

We also have an incumbent controlling political party, the Republicans, who are acutely aware that they are a contracting minority, that their presidential candidate could not muster a popular majority vote and was victorious only because of a highly gerrymandered configuration of voting districts. They have moved to embrace the autocratic plans of their President without challenge or question. Yet younger voters, leaning away from old world conservatism, are rapidly replacing those older conservative voters who are simply dying off. We are now a nation of a majority of minorities, also leaning against Republican values. Hard statistical realities. Desperate conservatives know that.

Those white traditionalists, heavily Christian, know that without twisting democracy into something much less, their days of calling the shots are numbered. Digging in their heels and taking advantage of the distortions they have fostered in the political system, they have forced their view of social and economic conservatism as the guiding principle for the entire nation, most of whom are diametrically opposed to this effort.

Nothing screams of this effort more than the GOP machinations on that one branch of the federal government where its power is handed to individuals for life: the judicial system, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court. Appointing conservative traditionalists, making sure that any nominee of a contrary view is denied consideration, is the clearest path to ensuring social and economic conservatism will continue unabated for most of this century, even if such conservatives eventually lose control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.

Merrick Garland, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, never even got a hearing before the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, while Brett Kavanaugh got a freight train through the Committee/Senate voting process to beat any possible change in Congressional control that might be determined by the up-coming November mid-term elections. What was particularly interesting about highly credible claims, with multiple claimants and lots of extrinsic supporting evidence, of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assaults and his inability as a younger man to control his sexual aggressiveness while highly intoxicated (admitted and widely witnessed), is how they were simply rendered meaningless by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s own process.

Simply, if they could cast this as a “he said, she said” stalemate, each side willing to state that he/she was 100% sure of their position, such equal assertions would simply cancel each other out. The Committee made sure that this could be the only outcome (a 50-50 deadlock) by only allowing the two parties (Brett Kavanaugh and one of his accusers, the highly credible Dr. Christine Blasey Ford) to testify. They specifically rejected allowing any other evidence, other claimants or other witnesses to testify and, with Kavanaugh’s support, rejected an objective professional investigation. They literally forced a stalemate with no other possible outcome absent Kavanaugh’s open admission of an attempted rape, which was never going to happen.

Women anti-abortion conservatives across the land cheered, even as women were generally crushed in the rush-rush process, as many other women in the land were simply shocked that such a result could be possible in a representative democracy.

Just about every argument made by Republican members of the committee in support of this negation of the obvious avoided a discussion of supporting a process to find the truth and focused instead simply on timing issue. Several Democrats literally walked out of the Committee meeting, calling the process a sham. After meeting with several sexual assault victims, retiring Arizona GOP Senator Jeff Flake suggested a one-week (one week?!) delay to enable an FBI follow-up investigation (which only the President could authorize), but still voted with his GOP comrades to approve that the nomination move on to the full Senate.

Knowing that unless there were a further FBI review of the latest facts the nomination would probably lose two or more GOP votes in a Senate floor vote, enough to kill Kavanaugh’s appointment, Trump reluctantly authorized the FBI to look into the new evidence against Kavanaugh. The outrageous comments from Republican committee members Orin Hatch and particularly Lindsay Graham, even though they were the ones barring corroborating witnesses, decried the “uncorroborated” unfairness they perceived was inflicted on a good and noble man. Truth? Their stance, drawing massive support from the conservative “base,” tells us how close to the edge this country has moved. Should Kavanaugh still get confirmed, I suspect we will have irretrievably gone over that edge.

We are now beyond highly polarized. Urban modernity laced with diversity has hit a wall of irreconcilable differences with the rural-values white traditionalists who run Washington today. As our nation becomes increasingly urbanized, as the real economic values that fuel our nation are generated in cities and not in the hinterlands, the efforts of the contracting minority to call the shots at the expense of everyone else, the complete absence of possible compromise on key issues and the amplification of intransigent name-calling intolerance bring me back to the opening paragraphs of today’s blog. The main issues: abortion, religion in government, gun ownership and control, environmental and financial regulation, globalization, immigration, government-provided healthcare and education. There is no middle ground anymore.

These momentary conservative, rural-value victories come at a price: the seemingly now-inevitable breaking up of the United States of America. We have already lost most of our global influence, built up particularly since World War II, and are considered by most other countries as a rogue nation no longer truly committed to representative government by the people. Simply, America is no longer a sustainably governable nation.

As Abraham Lincoln so aptly put it, “A house divided cannot stand.” We are probably witnessing the end of our nation, the end of our democracy, in a way that just could devolve into a real shooting civil war (we’ve been there before!). Remember there are as many guns as there are people in this country, including tens of millions of semiautomatic assault rifles in civilian hands. Will this be our path?

Sure, our rising younger generations could unite and pull us back together, but these plain facts sear through my brain: the United States no longer works, no longer represents its people equally, and is so deeply polarized that there is no path to a compromised future where we can live together in peace. I thought we had more time to try and work this out. I fear that time has just run out. Now that Kavanaugh has taken a place on the highest court in the land, we will all be a lot less for the effort.

I’m Peter Dekom, and, between the shame I feel at our government and the thought of how my son and his family will endure the likely violence and upheaval that seem now unavoidable, I am deeply saddened and terrified.