When Mara, Joe, and I embarked on this Civil Conversations Project in the wake of the murder of George Floyd almost four years ago, we had been concerned with what we were then calling ‘racial justice’. My childhood had been blissfully free from racism - at least as far as I know - but I’d seen racism beginning with my time spent in the Marines and then for the entire rest of my adult life. All my life I’d heard the national narrative. America is the greatest country on earth…a beacon of democracy for the entire world. The land of opportunity. A place where anybody with the right work ethic has an equal chance at ‘making it’…usually interpreted as getting rich. A place where anybody could become president.
When I was in school, American history was taught as a series of triumphs over wrongs that belonged to the past. We portray that we are an honorable country always marching towards good. Slavery was evil, sure. But the Civil War ended that. Then the civil-rights movement ended segregation. There was no atoning for the near elimination of Native Americans, but somehow it didn’t invalidate America’s story of progress and equality. Abroad, the U.S. led the cause of freedom against fascism and communism; Japanese internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam were mistakes but they didn’t erase the larger picture of our greatness. That’s a pretty optimistic narrative. And false.
But the longer I’ve lived the more clearly I’ve seen the falsity in this American narrative. Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, ableism all got in the way of America being America. Mara and Joe and I saw racism as being particularly hard on Black Americans and we set about to change that.
I’ve never been particularly patriotic, but when the country was at war with the dreaded Chinese-backed Vietnamese communist…when the scariest challenge to the American way of life was the ‘Great Domino Theory’ - which envisioned that if Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of SE Asia would topple like Dominoes and then somehow the United States would be next. “Better dead than red” was the refrain of the times. So when I was asked to go to war, I volunteered for the Marine Corps and off I went without giving it much thought.
But the truth is, the fall of Vietnam was never a threat to American democracy or the American way of life, just as the harm of racism was never a threat solely to Black and Brown Americans. Mara, Joe, and I had it right four years ago, but only partly right. As we’ve said many times in these pages, America’s long Thing With Race harms American democracy. It harms you.
“For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today. We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it.
People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsanaro, whose approval rating in late August was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.” … it is worth noting that they are not simply talking about Critical Race Theory or Texas’s so-called heartbeat bill. We are in a larger struggle over the nature of human governments.” [1]
Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo has deepened our understanding of the right-wing attempt to impose Christian nationalism on the United States through support for Trump and the MAGA movement. On March 9, he explored the secret, men-only, right-wing society called the Society for American Civic Renewal, whose well-positioned, wealthy, white leaders call for instituting white male domination and their version of Christianity in the U.S. after a “regime” change.[2]
I lean left. But I believe in our democracy. To have a democracy the system has to have at two strong parties. What the system and the country does not need and cannot abide are extremist who envision a faux-democracy that works only for them.
33 new election laws in 19 states, were enacted almost instantly after the Supreme Court beheaded the Voting Rights Act in 2013 that had guided and protected voting rights for 58 years in the United States. Designed to restrict and suppress voting to the few in order to replace the idea of democracy of, for, and by the people with a democracy in name only in which a minority will rule to their exclusive benefit - seem unlikely to fail.
As famed author Maya Angelou, recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer prize, once advised, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Trump and the extreme right wing that he commands have said who they are and how they intend to govern. Trump may not be a racist. He may just be an opportunist using what he sees as America’s longest term and most expedient and proven way to generate fear - “Some are rapist and murderers…some of them are not even people…from shithole countries.” But a real racist or just opportunistic…it doesn’t matter.
This is a real fight and in our own way - whatever that may be - we all need to be in it.
Believe him.
[1] Heather Cox Richardson. Letters from an American. October 26, 2021
[2] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/inside-a-secret-society-of-prominent-right-wing-christian-men-prepping-for-a-national-divorce