“The history of the US is riddled with leaders betraying in practice the laws sanctified on paper….”
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The history of the US is riddled with leaders betraying in practice the laws sanctified on paper. Centuries-old injustices over race and class are frequently glossed over in textbooks that seek to inspire with tales of heroism instead of to scare with the truth of the disregarded. But in the past and recent present, US leaders struggled to hide or justify their misdeeds, afraid of public accountability. They did not always uphold the values of our founding documents but they knew they were supposed to try. They knew there could be penalties if they were caught in immoral or criminal behavior, such as humiliation, a lost election, or even impeachment.
In contrast, bigotry is blatant; laws are broken; patriotism is sham that seems to amuse them. What is unprecedented is not that a president is doing bad things, but that he does not bother to pretend to be good. This malice is not an indicator of liberating honesty, as contrarians have framed it, but a signpost on the road to humanitarian catastrophe. Policies Trump has embraced include eliminating healthcare for millions of Americans, using nuclear weapons, supporting Russian imperialism, rounding up ethnic and religious minorities, and making lists of federal employees who study climate change or gender equality, in seeming anticipation of a mass firing and an attack on science and freedom. These authoritarian moves do not benefit any US citizen, including those who voted for him. That these policies are being proclaimed openly, and in several instances blatantly favor Russian interests over those of the US, implies that traditional penalties for betraying the electorate are gone.
As anyone who lives in an authoritarian state knows, once authoritarians get in, it is very hard to get them out. Politicians looking at 2018 and 2020 fail to comprehend that authoritarians rewrite rules, that laws are only as good as the people who uphold them, that the constitution is a piece of paper unless it is honored in practice. So long as the majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to cower to the new administration, it becomes increasingly unlikely that democracy will hold.
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– Our kids may never get the chance to know America
(via dendroica)
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2juBUfp.
