Without Trust, Can the United States Survive as a Democracy?

 

Without Trust, Can the United States Survive as a Democracy?

"If you do it cavalierly, overrule precedent just because you think it’s wrong, then the whole system begins to suffer." 

 US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by former President George W. Bush, seemingly addicted to leading the court to reverse precedents and encourage partisan rulings.

We live in a pick-a-side nation where many individuals believe they have a right: to impose their faith/views on everybody, to demonize anyone who disagrees with them, to outsource their opinions to cult leaders, to harm others (or allow designed categories of people to harm those) who are not on their page, to apply different laws to different classes of people, to ignore fundamental constitutional rights they do not like, to disenfranchise voters who are likely to elect people they do not like or disapprove of, to judge entire groups of people based on traits they cannot change (like race, ethnicity, religious upbringing, family wealth or status), to deny scientific or medical facts that benefit others, and that they have a right to repeal or reject judicial decisions they do not like, etc. These factions do not even trust these designated minorities to have a vote. And no, Donald Trump, as a majority of young American Jews believe, disagreeing with our giving Netanyahu’s Israel a blank check to pursue their goals against Iran or Gaza civilians, where these goals are not US objectives, is NOT ANTISEMITISM!

Most of all, trust in general has left the United States, undermining the possibility that democracy simply can function. The last time we saw this trend so extreme was our Civil War, and as many historical scholars are noting, many of the issues that divided our nation during that four-year inferno of hatred seem never to have been resolved. During Reconstruction and well into the Jim Crow era, mostly southern states, defeated in the Civil War, simply could not accept former slaves and their descendants having the right to vote, entitled to equal protection under the law.

Racial discrimination has been institutionalized since the Constitution established that slaves were 3/5 of a human being (Census determination). The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943) lasted 61 years. Segregation in our military did not end until after WWII. Emancipation under the 13th Amendment required repeated additional amendments to implement the citizenship rights accorded to former slaves, and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and beyond was necessary to continue the movement that the Civil War, a century before, was intended to normalize.

Underlying these trends well into the modern era are (i) fear of being “replaced” (out-voted) by racial and/or ethnic minorities and (ii) racial/religious arrogance. The latter grouping usually is driven by mostly white American evangelical Christians (who constitute fewer about half the 53 million US Roman Catholics). As the above chart of major religion membership, only a small minority of members of any major religion globally are US evangelicals, the MAGA core.

Still, the religious right battles to push their values everywhere, like their fight to ban all abortions. Since the repeal of Roe v Wade (in Dobb vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in 1922), KFF tells us; “In the three years since the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, the total number of abortions nationally has slightly increased. The most recent data from the Society for Family Planning’s #WeCount project show that the average monthly abortion volume during the first half of 2025 was higher than the monthly average in 2024. From January to June 2025, there have been more than 590,000 abortions compared to 1.14 million abortions in all of 2024 and 1.06 million abortions in 2023.” For the most part Democrats oppose the ban, and Republicans are split.

But on May 1st, a unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi) ruled that the mifepristone abortion pill be distributed only in person and at clinics, overruling regulations set by the federal Food and Drug Administration. That ruling is now subject to a temporary stay from the US Supreme Court. With a majority of Americans opposing this abortion ban, surveys “have found that the majority of abortions in the U.S. are provided via pills and that about 1 in 4 abortions nationally are prescribed via telehealth.” Associated Press, May 1st.

But this effort to impose religious beliefs on our secular nation stretches, in several states, to forcing Christian biblical mandates (like the Ten Commandments) to be posted in all public classrooms, that the Bible be included in instructional materials and that books that counter Christian teaching be banned from school and public libraries. What’s worse, the good faith efforts of governmental agencies, including courts (including the US Supreme Court), to right historical racial wrongs has now been deemed to be actionable racism, entitling white Americans to redress against diversity, equality and inclusion programs designed to give minorities suffering from rather obvious multigenerational discrimination access to opportunities denied them for decades. And no, Donald Trump, as a majority of young American Jews agree, disagreeing with our giving Netanyahu’s Israel a blank check to pursue their goals against Iran, where these goals are not US objectives, is NOT ANTISEMITISM!

The US Supreme Court has stated that racism is no longer an issue, even though after their recent final nail in the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana vs Callais, that assumption was conclusively proven false: Most of the red states immediately thereafter invoked legislative action to redraw their redistricted maps to carve out and exclude Black and brown voters – typically a strong Democratic constituency – before the next elections. Racism defines the Trump administration and its appointees. We can and must stop that vicious anomaly!

So, we live in a land where the President lies to contradict the Pope on the correctness of his Roman Catholic teachings, Major Pete Hegseth proselytizes our troops in his wildly misinformed white Christian nationalist belief that not only is God on our side, but He favors the vicious military saturation bombing of civilian targets as a legitimate tool of warfare… even if such actions are pretty clearly war crimes under various international statutes, treaties and conventions. Is this the America that generations of brave American soldiers fought and died for? Is this the true spirit of the United States? Can we ever even trust ourselves to let those who might oppose our views vote in a fair and un-gerrymandered election?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems clear to me that the policy vectors needed to keep democracy alive and well are not going to be made by rightwing incumbents totally beholden to Donald Trump’s MAGA minions; so we must hope and pray that a grassroots majority, tired of nasty divisiveness, will overwhelm the partisan gerrymandering and remake a democracy based on the rule of law our American truth... again!