It is very clear that what is happening now is the president sowing chaos and, he hopes, global instability mounting to a world war, so that he can either stay in power or put forth the case that he should be able to be elected again. He will no doubt use the example of FDR being reelected on the eve of WWII in 1940 and again in 1944, despite the fact that these elections took place before official term limits were adopted in a constitutional amendment of 1947, limiting presidents to two terms. Ironically (or perhaps not so), many Democrats in FDR’s party were against term limits at the time because their man was in office, a defining moment of American liberalism whose chief political strategy has always been to wait their turn.
I am not in favor of the continuance of the United States of America. It’s been a racist, violent, genocidal country from its inception, and I cannot bring myself to be a champion of its future as a governing body. I recently finished Nicholas Boggs’ new , and so I've been thinking a lot about Baldwin's prescient warnings to white Americans about unlearning the racial hierarchy baked into their identities. If there was to be any hope for the United States as a moral project, Baldwin says over and over, then the great lie of white supremacy must be overturned in the souls of white men and women. But it seems that the warnings have passed their date of expiration. A warning can only warn for so long. This long protracted alarm over the the decline of this country’s “morality” is merely an echo. We live in a morally bankrupt nation, and have for some time.
At the same time, I was reading , the recovered autobiography and scathing critique of the US constitution founded on preserving slavery by John Jacobs, brother to Harriet Jacobs. Originally published in an Australian newspaper in 1855 after Jacobs escaped America, it lives up to its bombastic title (the despots are the 600,000 slaveholders with immense political power in the US.) Jacobs is clear in his assessment of the USA as having given away any claim to equality and democracy from the very day its constitution was written, and its failure at having effectively greenlit slavery from day one.
What I keep looking for is someone out there who is keeping a tally. Someone who in a year can say, ‘fine, Trump has done away with the department of education. Here is what was wrong with that institution in the first place. We will learn from our mistakes and make something better.” And the same all the way down from abortion to the EPA to the Voting Rights Act. But I only look around and see politicians coming out with receipts and empty statements and tweets. Where is the vision?
The truth is that the vision has always come from those who believe in the US the least, who are not and never have been blinded by patriotism or patriarchy. They rarely want to seek out power for themselves. They disdain power. As do I. We suspect power as soon as it announces itself. It is the only way to stay sane in this country. Where are the anarchists saying ‘you think we represent anarchy? A loss of order? Look around you. What we demand is compassion and a slate wiped clean of the miserable failed American experiment to learn from our mistakes and try again.’
Something can fail only so many times before it should be replaced wholesale. There will be those who claim revolution will be too violent, and that reform brick by brick is too slow; I think we just need to start somewhere and adapt as time moves on.