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A Clarion Call
Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s message in her daily posting of April 17 is memorable. I was about to include a link to it but decided to print it in its entirety on the blog. Her daily ‘Letters from an American’ newsletter is free. Check it out by CLICKING HERE. (If you wish to make a comment and read the many comments others make, Substack charges $5 a month for that option.)
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| Richardson |
I suggest you share this historian’s vision. Here is what she wrote. Please read it. Several times, until it sinks in, and pass it on. Now, here’s an oxymoron: Quietly, it is a clarion call! Read on!
“Today, political scientist and member of the Russian
legislative body Vyacheslav Nikonov said, “in reality, we embody the forces of
good in the modern world because this clash is metaphysical…. We are on the
side of good against the forces of absolute evil…. This is truly a holy war
that we’re waging, and we have to win it and of course we will because our
cause is just. We have no other choice. Our cause is not only just, our cause
is righteous and victory will certainly be ours.”
Nikonov was defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in
which Russian troops have leveled cities, killed thousands, kidnapped children,
and raped and tortured Ukrainian citizens.
The intellectual leap from committing war crimes to
claiming to be on the side of good might be explained by an interview published
in the New Statesman at the beginning of April. Speaking with former Portuguese
secretary of state for European affairs Bruno Maçães, Sergey Karaganov, a
former advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin, predicted the end of the
western democracies that have shaped the world since World War II. Dictators,
he suggested, will take over.
Democracy is failing and authoritarianism rising, Karaganov
said, because of democracy’s bad moral foundations. As he put it: “Western
civilisation has brought all of us great benefits, but now people like myself
and others are questioning the moral foundation of Western civilisation.”
Karaganov’s statement says a lot about why white
evangelicals in the U.S. are willing to toss democracy overboard in favor of a
one-party state dominated by one powerful leader. They deny the premise of a
system in which all people are equal before the law and have the right to have
a say in their government.
Putin cemented his rise to power in 2013 with antigay laws
that supporters claimed defended conservative values against an assault of
“genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance,” which “equals good and evil.”
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, an ally of Putin’s, has been open about his
determination to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with
Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian
culture, and reject “adaptable family models” for “the Christian family model.”
The American right has embraced this attack on our system.
In October 2021, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum
denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the
audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks
to the three justices Trump put on the court. Next month, the American Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest, Hungary; Orbán
will be the keynote speaker.
Increasingly, Republican lawmakers have called not for the
U.S. government to leave business alone, as was their position under President
Ronald Reagan, but to use government power to crack down on “woke” businesses
they insist are undermining the policies they value—meaning companies that
protect LGBTQ rights, racial justice, reproductive choice, and access to the
ballot. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and his supporters have threatened
Disney for its mild defense of LGBTQ rights, insisting the company grooms
children for sexual abuse, and Texas Republicans are considering barring local
governments from doing business with any national company that provides
abortion coverage for its employees.
To achieve such control in a country where they are a
minority, they are skewing the electoral system to install a one-party
government. Just like Orbán’s government in Hungary, and Putin’s in Russia, the
one-party government they envision will benefit a very small group of wealthy
people: witness the Russian oligarchs whose yachts worth hundreds of millions
of dollars are being impounded all over the world. And, just like those
governments, it will be overseen by a strongman, who will continue to insist
that his opponents are immoral.
But here’s the thing:
Democracy is a moral position. Defending the right of human
beings to control their own lives is a moral position. Treating everyone
equally before the law is a moral position. Insisting that everyone has a right
to have a say in their government is a moral position.
This moral position is hardly some newfangled radicalism.
It is profoundly conservative. It is the fundamental principle on which our
country has been based for almost 250 years.
In 1776, the nation’s Founders wrote in the Declaration of
Independence that all people “are created equal…[and] are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness….” They asserted that governments are legitimate only
if those they govern consent to them.
The Founders did not live these principles, of course; they
preserved the racial, gender, and wealth inequality that enabled them to imagine
a world in which white men of property were all equal.
But after World War II, Americans tried to bring these
principles to life. It is this attempt for America to realize its ideals that
the radicals on the right want to overturn.
After World War II, the Supreme Court began to insist that
all Americans really do have a right to self-determination and that they must
be treated equally before the law. Using the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee
that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws,” it began to upend longstanding racial, gender, class,
and religious hierarchies.
It said, for example, that the promise of equality before the
law meant that people of color had a right to a jury that was not made up
exclusively of white people, that Black and Brown kids had a right to attend
the same public schools as their white neighbors, and that white Americans
could not kill or assault Black Americans without consequences.
It decided that states could not privilege one race or one
religion over another and that people have the right to marry whom they wish,
across racial and gender lines. It decided that people themselves, not the
state, had a right to plan their families.
Then, to ensure that states were truly democratic, in 1965,
Congress protected the right of all Americans to vote, giving them an equal say
in their government and bringing to life the concept in the Declaration of
Independence that governments are legitimate only when they derive their power
from the consent of the governed.
Americans who had seen the horrors of the Holocaust—which
was, after all, the logical and ultimate outcome of a society based on
hierarchies—saw their defense of equality as a moral position. It recognizes
the inherent worth of individuals without privileging one race, one gender, one
religion, or the wealthy. It works to bring the principles of the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution to life, stopping the violence that
certain white Christian men in the past visited on those they could dominate
with impunity.
Those radicals who are now taking away the right of
self-determination, the right to equality before the law, and the right to vote
because they are “questioning the moral foundation of Western civilisation” are
launching a fundamental attack on our nation.
In his day, responding to a similar attack, Abraham Lincoln
noted that accepting the idea of inequality was an act of destruction that
would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.”
Arguments based in the idea that some people are not
capable of making their own decisions “are the arguments that kings have made
for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said in 1858. “I
should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which
declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it[,]
where will it stop…. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute
book, in which we find it and tear it out[.]”
It is Up to You.
The political parties active in this country prior to 1856 consisted of the Democrats and the Whigs. The Whigs, who tried to be all things to all people, just so long as they opposed the Jacksonian Democrats, disappeared in 1856. Anyone who wanted to vote for a Whig had to then decide whether they should become Democrats, where the pro-slavery and anti-immigrant Whigs usually chose to identify or throw in their lot with a brand-new party calling itself ‘Republican.’
That party, the Republicans, has reached the end of its line too,
and just as differences over slavery destroyed the Whig Party, differences over
the role of government in a democracy, is destroying it.
The difference today is that there is no place to go to for those
Republicans who still believe in Lincoln’s ‘republican’ philosophy of government
of, by, and for the people, other than joining with the Democrats, which is
anathema to many of them, particularly at the local level.
The remaining Republicans, those who believe in white supremacy
and the absence of any economic or social role for government, having lost the
votes of the departing Republicans, would then die on a barren limb. That would
leave us with just one party and that isn’t a good idea.
There are three directions open to the country: (1) A Democratic Party split into two parties, one
centrist and one progressive, (2) a recapture of the Republican Party by the
forces of sanity, or (3) a failure of the United States to be able to continue
to remain a democracy.
What happens is up to you.
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| Henry Clay led the Whigs for many years, never getting to the presidency. He did inspire Abraham Lincoln to that role. Few remember Clay today. Will that happen to the Republican Party as well? |
Whether or not we get to keep our democratic republic is up to what you do on November 8, when we elect a new Congress, and the days between now and then.
It is up to
you. You know what must be done, locally
and nationally. No one needs to tell
you. It is up to you. It is up to you.
You!
JL
Covid Update
Keep your masks
and home Covid testing kits handy.
The original and current variants of the coronavirus which cause the
disease still exist and continue to mutate.
Generally, deaths and hospitalizations are decreased in the more recent
variants, but the virus still spreads.
The latest variants may be milder from morbidity (illness) and mortality (death) standpoints, but they seem to
be more easily spread. They will
continue to provide a breeding ground for potentially more dangerous variants,
so keep your masks and home Covid testing kits available and as vaccines become
available, use them.
Our concern should
not be for those fools who choose not to take these measures and suffer the
consequences. It should be for those to
whom future variants might be spread,
even occasionally ‘breaking through’ the precautions they may have
taken, by those who feel they have the ‘freedom’ to ignore medical facts and
discontinue taking precautions. They
include politicians and even physicians who ignore science. Having a medical degree does not necessarily
impart intelligence to the ignorant and of course, the credibility of
politicians is tissue-paper thin.
JL
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Another Letter from Yours Truly Published
The Palm Beach
Post published another letter of mine on April 18. They captioned it ““Some ‘Freedoms’ need fixing” A letter writer had maintained the political issues making the headlines in Florida were brought here by liberal Northeasterners who had moved here. So I answered him. The text
follows:
”Re the letter
published on April 11 about ‘liberals’ bringing their politics with them when
they move, they might merely be addressing problems that were there all along
but which existing residents were ignoring and which their ‘freedoms’ allowed
them to do.”
Good thing to remember. Brevity in such letters gets them published!
JL
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