Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not
only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not
cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
- Abraham Lincoln,
Gettysburg Address, 1863
Trumpland was born in the
context of a house divided. America was more divided right before the 2016 election
than it has been since the American Civil War whose destructiveness Lincoln had
come to mourn at Gettysburg 153 years ago. And it remains deeply divided in this
run up to the inauguration with no healing of divisions on the horizon.
Whatever else the new czar of
Trumpland might be, he’s not a healer.
Quoting the
words of a Jesus of Nazareth in a highly polarized 1st CE Judea
occupied by Romans, Lincoln presciently observed that the antagonistic divisions of any country
cannot continue indefinitely. Houses divided against themselves inevitably fall
even as they tell themselves their reigns will continue indefinitely. His own
Judea would eventually be sent into exile by the Romans. And the divisions of
the Lincoln’s time would be resolved in America’s bloodiest war.
The same is true today.
Trumpland is a brittle construct. Its tendencies toward authoritarianism are
pronounced. The sense of its legitimacy among the general populace is limited
at best. The mutual antagonism whipped up by a demagogue enroute to Trumpland’s
rise to power contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The phenomenon of a descent
into chaos and conflict prior to the rise of a new incarnation of the American
republic is hardly without precedent. Social historians William Strauss and
Neil Howe have observed the same pattern, a Fourth Turning as they called it, cyclically recurring in US
history all the way back to its beginning.
The last Fourth Turning prior
to this one began with the fall of the NYSE in 1928, escalated through a Great
Depression and concluded with a second world war. The Fourth Turning before
that began with the Dred Scott Decision, escalated with the election of Lincoln
and ended with the Civil War. In each case, a new America arose from the ashes
of the old, yet another First Turning.
Strauss and Howe believed that
the current Fourth Turning began with the twin disasters of the Bush era - the invasions
of two Arab countries - which promptly imploded into ongoing civil wars - followed
by a virtual depression at home. The Fourth Turning escalated with the election
of its first non-white president bringing a
pernicious racism to the surface that had largely laid dormant for
about four decades. This misanthropy has since played out in a number of directions with multiple candidates for scapegoats for America's woes .
Where it will go from here is
unknown but history suggests a grim period lies ahead for all of us. Indeed, as
the authors warn us in The Fourth Turning,
“the darkest hour is just before dawn.”
Was Trumpland inevitable?
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make
violent revolution inevitable. – John F. Kennedy, Address on the first
Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress (1962)
From a long range perspective,
the rise of Trumpland may ultimately come to be seen as inevitable. The rate of
demographic change which marked the electoral success of Barack Obama has frightened
many white Americans who had presumed that their white privilege was always going to be a given.
The failures of American
foreign policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan with protracted armed occupations have
served to incite terrorist atrocities around the world. The inability of the American
fighting machine to clearly and convincingly win wars it has repeatedly sold the public called upon to fight them on any number of scurrilous grounds has deeply disturbed
the soul of its people. We are accustomed to making vague but passionate assertions
that our nation state is Number One even as we selectively ignore the growing
number of aspects which fall far from that standard.
Pre-Trump America was being
pressured to evolve in a number of
ways. Its economic system had largely proven to be a failure, an extractive
economy which has resulted in modern history’s highest levels of inequalities. An
entire generation is entering our work force with crippling debt from student
loans and salaries that are 10% lower as a whole than those their parents made
at a similar point in their lives. All of this is thanks to the ability of the
business quadrant to stack the deck of everyday business dealings through its
control of the political quadrant and the internalization of this state by most
Americans as expectable if not normal. Habermas’ grim vision of the colonization of the lifeworld is realized.
One the eve of the election, relations between police
and working poor communities of color were turbulent and the sense of
legitimacy of America’s justice system was at an all time low. No doubt trust will
be at a premium in the daily lives of residents of Trumpland.
The federal government whose
lofty goals are listed in the Preamble has proven almost catatonic for the last
half decade. For the last two years, the least productive Congress in history has done nothing but obstruct
its President whose hopeful agenda for change went largely onto the cutting
room floor. A seat on the US Supreme Court went unfilled for a year as a
Republican Senate refused to live into its Constitutional duties to advise and
consent in that process.
The FBI director, our nation's chief law enforcement officer, engaged in a
blatantly political and legally questionable intervention into the election. This occurred even as the agency ignored the
warnings of the CIA that Russian hackers had intervened into that election on
behalf of a monster they felt more accommodating to Russian imperatives. In the
days of my childhood with its ongoing Red Scare, this would have readily been
seen as the stuff of treason.
At the state level, governors and legislatures
continued the cannibalizing of state and local public education and health
programs and the implementation of barriers to voting disproportionately
impacting the working poor. The operation of prisons and schools began to be
sold to the highest corporate bidders shutting out public input into that
process entirely. And state after state sought to pass laws targeting LBGTQ
people and immigrants creating a climate of fear driven persecution in those
jurisdictions.
Giving Birth to a New America
At a very basic level these
are the death throes of an old America about to give up the ghost. But amidst
the wailing of lamentation for the passing of the old, if we listen closely we will also hear the birth pains of a New America already beginning to comeinto
existence.
The old ways of being America
with its shining, noble ideals and the glaring contradictions of its behaviors can no
longer work. The late America had already begun to realize it no longer had the
luxury of denial regarding those contradictions. We knew that the “evolving
standards of decency” articulated by Justices Brennan and Marshall in striking
down the practices of state killing in 1976 had a wide application to virtually
every aspect of our collective lives together.
Ironically, while we Baby
Boomers were the first to see and articulate this vision in the 1960s - drawing
America’s social, economic and political ills into critical focus - our generation has ultimately become one of the chief
obstacles to that evolution. The lures of mammon proved too strong. With the
remnants of our parent’s era and a substantial portion of the Gen X cohort we
helped spawn, a slim majority of Boomers joined in
leading the Trump charge this past election.
In short, many of us sold out.
No doubt the late Tom Hayden
is weeping in heaven.
The Millennials now see that
vision and can readily articulate the critique of the Boomers from a new perspective. But this new cohort
must overcome its own handicaps - notions of instant gratification and
entitlement and a naïve if not cynical tendency to disregard all that has come
before them - in order to engage the challenges their generation will yet face in
building a New America.
The first step in that battle
will be rejecting the constant distractions of social media and cell
technologies to be fully present. It will be tough. The poisoned kool-aid of a
mindless consumerism is often quite sweet.
Those of us who voted for
Bernie Sanders had hoped a peaceful revolution was possible. Bernie articulated
a vision of America’s growing edges while appealing to our most noble values.
But America was not ready for a peaceful revolution and when that did not
happen, many of us sought to bite the bullet, vote for Hillary Clinton and
avoid digging the wounds on our national soul any deeper, buying ourselves some
more time for that evolution to occur peacefully.
But that was not to be.
Even so, those changes are coming.
I am not a psychic but I sense
that the evolutionary pressures on America on the eve of the 2016 election have
only begun. But they will not come fully to the fore until the current period
of Kali
Yuga that is Trumpland has run its course. Like a healthy tree, the old
leaves must die, fall and be raked away before the new can begin growing.
What will emerge on the other
side is unclear. If the collapse
of Trumpland is as severe as I believe it could be, there could be a great deal
of destruction and death in its path. Moreover, I have no great amount of
confidence that the New America arising from the ashes of Trumpland will be the
same as the America which predated it.
For a long time I have had the
sense that Americans no longer saw themselves as a single people. The
polarization of red and blue America is so intense now that families would
rather their children marry a member of a different race or religion -
historical barriers to marriages in America - than a member of another political party. It seems entirely possible that the New America might well
resemble post-partition India with its Muslim realms to either side and its
Hindus sandwiched between the two.
In all truthfulness, that
vision breaks my heart. I do not wish to see my former country rent asunder
even as I recognize it has been so on a de
facto basis for awhile now. It also keeps me up at night to imagine a
Texas which has inherited the nuclear arsenals of the former United States.
Whatever coastal blue New America that might emerge in such a context would be
born into a matrix of existential danger.
Challenges for a New America
The New America will have a
number of challenges in front of it. If democracy is to continue to be the root
of its self-governance, the following must be dealt with:
- The right to vote must be a given.
Voting must be seen as a right, not a privilege, and access to the ballot must
be universal and unquestionable for all of its citizens every time. Anything less
will continue to be exploitative and cannot meet the demands of true democracy.
- Multi-parties must be made possible.
This will mean opening primary elections or perhaps going to non-partisan races or alternative (second
choice) voting. It must mean national debates with all parties represented. It must mean universal ballots open to all
candidates and parties. The days of two party domination have failed us. This must
end.
- Big Money must be eliminated. The results of Citizens United clearly show that the role of unlimited dark money
on the electoral process has been profoundly pernicious. A tsunami of negative ads
not only prevents an accurate picture of candidates and their positions from
being apprehended by the electorate, it also dampens voter participation and
ultimately draws the legitimacy of elections into question. Publicly funded
elections may not be the only possible solution but they have a proven track
record in many democratic societies who simply do not tolerate the sewer of
negativity that the 2016 election proved to be. However it happens, the gathering of the candidates at the trough of corporate moneys must end.
- Campaigns must be shortened. Most democratic societies limit their elections to between six
weeks and a couple of months. There is a good reason for this. On the one hand,
demanding the undiverted attention of the electorate over an extended period of
time is an unattainable goal in a constantly distracted culture. Hearing ideas
being discussed in an intentional manner over a brief period allows for
thoughtful comparison of ideas and informed voting. Extended, media-driven
campaigns complete with the flood of dark money advertising creates a carnival
of grotesque caricatures of candidates and a confused electorate. Elections
must never be seen as means of entertainment. Their results are far too
important for such a superficial approach.
- Electoral College must be changed. Perhaps
ended. The elitist concerns of Framers protecting their own interests three
centuries ago reveals one of the shortcomings in the creation of their
otherwise post-conventional moral reasoning Constitution. But the Electoral College
demonstrably fails to serve the common good. It has not protected the rural majority
from the tyranny of the urban elite. In an age where most Americans live in
cities or suburbs, it facilitates the tyranny of a rural plurality over the
larger urban minority. Indeed, it has allowed the loser of the actual
democratic process to accede to power twice within two decades. If democratic
self-governance is to be assured, the people must be able to decide who their
leaders will be. All of them.
- National office of elections. The
past half century has seen the rise and fall of legislation and court oversight
to insure equal access to the voting process. It has now run athwart of a new
set of state restrictions designed to suppress minority voting. A national
office of elections is needed to insure universal voting, to prevent
gerrymandered Congressional districts from producing leadership which does not
reflect the electorate, and to insure that the process of voting and its
results are certifiably valid. The current handling of all of those duties by
the states has simply proven to be a failure.
That’s just the
self-governance piece of the challenge. The government of a New America will face a number of
challenges that begin with adequate responses to
climate change that threatens to make us extinct and the resulting waves of
refugees it will produce. The coming flood of immigrants will no doubt make dealing
with the current trickle of human beings we mistakenly call “illegals” seem
like a picnic.
The New America must find a
way to give birth to a new form of public education that is capable of insuring
a united citizenry critically aware of its history and committed to the common
good. Schools must be dedicated to the developmental needs of every student,
not the instrumental imperatives of the business world. And they must develop
the means of fostering care for our earth, an awareness of the natural realm, from which we get our food, and the cost to the earth and its living beings our lifestyles impose upon it.
The New America must find ways
to accommodate a multi-religious population and religious bodies competing for
souls as well as control of the society in which they live. It must find ways
to use technology in life-giving ways and reject its atomizing distractions.
And it must find ways to insure that those who prepare themselves and work hard
will receive a living wage and that medical and legal care will be available to
all when they need it.
These are no small challenges.
But the success of a New America in meeting them will likely determine whether or
not this experiment in “government of the people, by the people and for the
people shall not perish from the earth.”
The New America is already being born
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first
heaven and the first earth were passed away…”
The Apocalypse of St. John 21
The New America that is coming
will have to rise in the face of overwhelming challenges and crises. It is my
hope and my prayer that its creators will find the courage to meet those
challenges, withstand the crises and the wisdom to respond productively just as
its predecessor Americas did in Fourth Turnings past. And I have no small amount of hope that will
happen.
Here is why.
For the past three years I
have taught as an adjunct at the Osceola Campus of Valencia College. Formerly a
two year community college, Osceola-Valencia serves a predominately working
class community which serves the attractions to our west.
I believe the New America is already
being born there. It is a minority-majority campus much like the county in which it is located in a state demographically headed for the same. When I toss out ethical dilemmas to my
students, much as I have done in this series of blog posts, I am amazed at how
seriously they take them and how creatively they respond to them. When there is
no common sense to defer to, the creativity and wisdom that can be evoked from
a group of thoughtful people seeking the common good is endless.
My students give me hope for a
New America - a new heaven and a new earth – in my own lifetime. I pray that I
will be permitted the privilege of playing some role in the midwifery process
of this New America. And I hope that my words here have provided my readers
with some considerations of what their own role and responses will be when the
time comes for them to act.
Let us mourn the America we
have lost, survive the monster to whom we have given power and resist the
regime he will lead that bodes ill for the whole world. And then let us build a
New America together in which “liberty and justice for all” will mean more than
a mere perfunctory ritual. I wish you well in that struggle and I pray we will
meet on the other side of it as we work together to reclaim a dream squandered
and rebuild a nation lost.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined
belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston, 2016
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As I got out
of my car, I instinctively looked up. The number of stars one can see in the woods,
particularly on a cool winter night, is amazing. The night sky always captivated
me as a child. I’ve almost forgottten what it looks like. It is one of the
things I miss most about living in a city. 
He squinted
at the azaleas and a look of sadness crossed his face: “I want to go home,” he
said. “Daddy, we’re working at getting you there as quickly as we can.” “No,”
he said, “I want to go home. NOW!” 
