Alan Zendell, June 29, 2023

Recently, I’ve been reaching out to people with differing points of view. It’s been enlightening. I’ve found general agreement on two points. One is how badly divided we are as a nation. The other, surprisingly, given the wide range of views I sampled, was that America is likely past its peak as both a thriving nation and a world power. Although I didn’t anticipate the second point, it makes perfect sense because the two are closely inter-related.

Looked at from the perspective of today, our sharply divided politics have resulted in two drastically different outcomes, which seem contradictory until you look more closely. Legislatively, our country was stuck in ever-worsening gridlock since the Bush-Gore election of 2000, until President Biden was able to break the logjam, getting his Bidenomics legislation approved with a razor-thin majority in both the Senate and the House. With the majority in the House flipping last year, the gridlock has become worse than ever.

Judicially, while Congress has largely been delinquent in codifying laws supported by large majorities of Americans, the cumulative effect of right-wing efforts to pack the courts at all levels has been the revocation of many things Americans have taken for granted for decades. We’ve seen this happen across the board, in women’s health, abortion policy, campaign financing, disregard for well-established rules of ethics, gerrymandered elections, a pullback in voting rights in more than half the country, and today, the end of the era of affirmative action.

The courts, including the U. S. Supreme Court, do not make laws. Their greatest impact comes from providing interpretations of areas of existing laws that are vague or deliberately gray, or that have existed for so long that their original intent may no longer be relevant. Particularly with respect to issues like gun control, abortion, freedom of speech and religion, LGBTQ rights, and entitlements, the Court’s positions in rolling back provisions based on decades of precedent, have basically been a rehash of the centuries-long debate over federalism. The Court has consistently said, in recent years, that those issues should be decided by individual states rather than having a national policy governing all.

States with extreme political views, especially those that achieved legislative supermajorities through gerrymandering and restricting the voting rights of minorities, have jumped into the void left by the Court invalidating long-standing precedents. At the same time, Congress remained frozen with respect to codifying the rights being lost into federal law. As a result, the process of checks and balances which are the core of our Constitution no longer work effectively, if at all. We are seeing an avalanche of laws and policies, a stampede from progressivism to elitism, from inclusion to exclusion, and from providing for the general welfare of Americans, as the Constitution clearly states, to concern for preserving the wealth and power of a very few – in short, from defending democracy to drifting toward authoritarianism.

How did we get here? The simple answer is that Americans have lost focus on the things that really matter if our nation is to survive. One is education. Math and reading scores for American children have declined steadily for many years and are now at dangerously low levels. But within those poor performance numbers are a different story. Throughout our school systems, the children who work hardest and learn best are immigrants, largely Asians, yet we are daily bombarded with propaganda aimed at restricting immigration to people who “look like us.” This negative outcome, too, is a symptom of how divisiveness is slowly destroying us.

If it’s not clear yet, this is all occurring because we are victims of two relatively recent developments: the sociopathy of Donald Trump and his ability to tap into every negative emotion of his supporters, and an out-of-control technology that enables them to replace truth and facts with lies and alternate realities. Recently publicized fears over the growth of artificial intelligence mask the real dangers we face. With no regulation of internet content, or more specifically, the flood of information on social media, combined with a frightening change from fact-based reporting to influence-peddling among our major corporate media, we no longer have generally accepted standards for evaluating what we see and hear.

It’s not surprising that there is so much agreement among people who normally don’t see eye-to-eye on anything that America is in decline. It’s also not surprising that there is so much disagreement about why. If Americans want our democracy to thrive it’s time we all got our priorities straight. An excellent first step would be exposing Donald Trump for what he is in terms no reasonable person can ignore, and assuring that his influence on our politics and our lives ends as abruptly as it began.