“WE” THE PEOPLE?

Something in today’s letter by Heather Cox Richardson especially provoked me.

She was writing about the move by Netanyahu and his right-wing-zealot collaborators to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its oversight role so that there are no longer any checks against their power to act as corruptly as they want. (It also provides Netanyahu the power to quash pending criminal charges against him — shades of Trump’s dream of regaining power to pardon himself.)

Evisceration of effective judicial oversight is a critical step in turning functioning democracies into autocracies. See, e.g., Poland and Hungary.

HCR wrote:

[T]he administration has repeatedly emphasized that the U.S.-Israel relationship is “ironclad,” although White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that “the core of that relationship is…on democratic values, the shared democratic values and interests.” In the Daily Beast today, David Rothkopf argued that Israel has abandoned those democratic values and thus has ended “America’s special relationship with Israel.” That damage “cannot be easily undone,” he writes. “A relationship built on shared values cannot be easily restored once it is clear those values are no longer shared.”

When I listen to MAGA adherents going on about book banning, LGBTQ shaming, asserting a right of the government to substitute its judgment for that of medical providers to women and trans people, whitewashing (literally) the history of enslavement, using migrants as political pawns (Florida) or treating them as sub-humans (Texas), loving guns more than murdered school kids, and paying absolutely no attention to the environmental catastrophe we’re experiencing, I have to ask myself, “What shared values do Americans have to bind us together?”

Capitol Rotunda, February 2019

In the early days of Trumpism, many of us would go on social media to engage in debate with some of Trump’s followers. Needless to say, it was an exercise in futility. Before we became too “woke,” we were “liberal snowflakes.” Incoherence and inconsistency matter not at all.

When the Founders used the phrase “We the People of the United States” in the Preamble to the Constitution, they were inescapably speaking of common bonds between us. We were in this together, “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .”

Putting aside who counted as “people” when the Constitution was ratified, until recently, there were at least a few sacrosanct values we shared:

• There used to be a general rule that politics ends at the water’s edge, so that members of Congress would not engage directly with foreign powers while the President was involved in international negotiations.
• There used to be an understanding that the First Amendment guaranteed not only the free exercise of religion, but also prohibited using governmental power to impose religious doctrine on others. Implicit in this was an overarching tolerance of ideas that we disagreed with.
• There used to be a reverence for the free press as the forum for opposing views. There were standards of objectivity so that apart from the editorial page, there were reasonably knowable and verifiable facts. Debate was welcomed, to be resolved, if necessary, at the ballot box.
• There used to be consensus that some forms of effective gun control were permitted under the Second Amendment.
• There used to be a judicial system where the ethical integrity of judges was taken seriously. This included an understanding that the Rule of Law requires respect for precedent. It included an understanding that SCOTUS nominees would be truthful when testifying under oath.
• There used to be respect for the constitutional role of other branches of government. When a president nominated someone to the Supreme Court, the nominee was entitled to at least hearing and a vote in congress.
• There used to be, above all else, an understanding that when an election was held, and the results were verifiable, the will of the people would prevail and the loser would not only concede but offer support to their opponent.
• There used to be a judicial understanding that the rights of minorities needed protecting. Our racist history had to be corrected, not hidden away so that white kids wouldn’t feel “uncomfortable.”
• And there used to be an understanding, by leaders of both parties, that for democracy to work, there had to be constraints on political spending by corporations and other lobbying groups.

Mitt Romney declared that “corporations are people, too.” Apart from the legal fictions involved in the incorporation process, it’s become increasingly clear that in the wake of Citizens United, corporations are more “people” than many humans are. Couple that with the Roberts Court’s approval of “political” gerrymandering, and the idea of equal protection under the law becomes a fantasy.

I’m not naïve. It took the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to put some teeth into the constitutional amendments enacted after the Civil War. Bigots have always been a part of the American fabric. Police misconduct — against Blacks and others — has been around forever; it took citizens’ cell phone videos to document its currency and extent. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the military-corporate alliance. Teddy Roosevelt acted to break up corporate monopolies. But all of these things were the product of the political process envisioned by the Founders.

Now, we no longer have political opponents. When McConnell said that his only agenda item was making Obama a one-term president, he was defining and declaring an enemy. While he didn’t succeed in limiting Obama to four years, his chicanery with SCOTUS nominations more than made up for that.

I do not understand the MAGA mindset. When politics becomes a blood sport — as it surely has now — common bonds no longer matter. I get that right-wing media feeds its audience a steady diet of fear and stereotyping. The diversion is horribly effective, so that people who do not see what the oligarchs are doing, numbly follow along believing that they are part of some “in” crowd. They are told to ignore “woke” people. They are told to ignore the “mainstream” media. They are told to ignore science. They are told that Donald Trump is a Christian.

I do not think MAGA adherents want things to get better. Both parties have failed for decades to enact realistic immigration laws. Rather than fix that, or any other, problem, they fix blame. Crickets on climate change. Crickets on gun violence. Racism was such a 60’s thing.

We sat on our butts when McConnell pulled his tricks with the Garland nomination. We wrote letters and Tweeted but compare our tepid reaction to the protests going on right now in the streets of Israel. I suspect our passivity was driven by the misplaced confidence that Hillary Clinton was a sure winner.

As with any broken relationship, whether we can get it back together is impossible to know. I don’t know what the political equivalent of couples counseling might be. The fact that Governor Wokey-Woke (DeSantis) is struggling at the polls despite boatloads of corporate funding is a tiny ray of hope. He is saying all the right awful things. He’s just not as charismatic as Trump.

Trump is facing a formidable number of criminal charges. For now, it’s a fund-raising bonanza, but the prosecutors will provide substance to counter his blather. Will that help to break the spell?

Maybe the paradigm is cult-deprogramming. How do you incorporate that into the political process?

“We the People” may depend on figuring that out.