WE'RE AMERICANS. WE GOT THIS.

Our greatest power to change things lies in our ability to rethink them

tirc83

Many clergy, psychotherapists, healers and social workers these days are seeing in the people they deal with a high level of anxiety, much higher than usual. That’s in stark contrast, of course, to the MAGA enthusiasts celebrating what they think of as the beginnings of a marvelous Golden Age. As one woman told a friend of mine recently, she feels like “America is back!” To many, however, it feels like the America we knew is shutting down.

Our democratic republic is taking a serious beating as our President, Attorney General, the director of the FBI, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and the rest of their gang participate in a daily shredding of the Constitution. I admit the one that perplexes me most is Marco Rubio. Looking at old videos of Rubio, it boggles the mind how much he has sacrificed his principles to serve the con artist he once described so perfectly. Yet at this point I’m done trying to analyze their personalities. I’m on to analyzing the rise of fascism.

The President and his minions are not rewriting history as much as they’re repeating it. Like authoritarians before them, they have used the tools of democracy to get hold of our democracy….in order to destroy it. Now it’s the dictates (note that word!) of one man, one dear leader obviously sent by God, who alone should be trusted with the fate of the nation. Congress? Nah. Judges? Nah. The Constitution? Nah. Ethics? Nah. Facts? Nah. Human decency? Nah. While a basic principle of American liberty is that our path is to the law, not to a king - that’s not how it works with this crowd. To hear them tell it, patriotism means allegiance to the “Trump agenda” more than to the Constitution, much less to the dictates of one’s own conscience. And their goal is to purge the system of whomever and whatever would get in their way.

The ethical and legal transgressions of the Trump administration are described in detail by many: Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Jessica Yellin, Senator Chris Murphy, Monte Mader and others. I read such content and pass it on. But we need to do more than reveal what’s happening, as important as that is. We’ve heard enough already to recognize the emergence of authoritarianism…no longer looming, but actually occurring. On any given day we might be shocked by TrumpWorld’s newest incursion into democratic governance and values, but we’re no longer surprised. What we need now is a plan to overcome it.

We’ve been checkmated and we know it - thus the anxiety and fear so many feel. But behind the anxiety lies a much more powerful, and in this case positive, emotion: fury. Moral outrage is not born of anger, but of love. Millions of us are morally outraged, and that’s exactly the power needed to create the momentum to push back.

There are distinctions to be made among the words authoritarian, totalitarian, and fascist. It’s incorrect to call this administration either totalitarian or fascist. They are authoritarian, however. And that’s the first step. In the near century since its inception, fascism has never sprung on a country in one surprise leap. It almost always begins with a charismatic leader who at the time of his first appearance “didn’t seem all that bad.”

This is exactly why our Founders sought to protect us against any one person, no matter who they were, having absolute power. Having seen what they had seen, they knew the dangers of despotism and wrote a Constitution meant to provide enough guardrails that it couldn’t take hold in this country. That is why protecting the Constitution is a way we protect ourselves.

Douglas Sacha

Today, given the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore Constitutional strictures - and the unwillingness of the Supreme Court so far to stop him - we are largely unprotected. Legislators, Governors, Attorneys General, everyday citizens and most particularly (and courageously) federal judges, are forming an impressive wall of resistance, but no one can say we’re yet winning the struggle. Those who would be Constitutional Protectors have to dig very deep now to find the source of our victory, and that source is within ourselves. We have to really, deeply think this through. Our greatest power to change things lies in our ability to rethink them.

First, there is our checkered history. It’s not up to us, as individuals or as nations, whether we will learn the lessons of history. It’s merely up to us whether we learn them through wisdom or through pain. The United States had many opportunities over the last 80 years to be wiser, more economically just, less militaristic, and more democratic. Our political system, quite frankly, veered too often and in too many ways in less enlightened directions.

Given that the Law of Cause and Effect is inviolable, how anyone ever thought we were going to escape the consequences of our misuse of power is beyond me. Be that as it may, we are where we are - definitely in an emergency situation. Our deliverance from the scourge of authoritarianism lies in learning what we refused to learn before, and being who we refused to be.

More than anything America is a set of ideals, and generations have risen or fallen according to our adherence to them. Political “issues,” as we usually think of them, are projections of those deeper dynamics. They are symptoms that reflect our dedication - or lack of dedication - to the principles on which we purport to stand.

That is why a nation’s ideals - ours most notably established in the Declaration of Independence - are so important; they keep us internally aligned with adherence to our nation’s mission. “All men are created equal” is not just a political concept, it is spiritual. The idea that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is not just a political precept, it is philosophical. One of the reasons the alt-right has been able to succeed at promoting Big Lies is because Democrats have been loathe to proclaim our Big Truths.

MikRoman6

Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere. He’s a predictable consequence of a philosophical plague that has led us over the last few decades to put financial greed and corporate profits before the health and well-being of people and planet. We’ve allowed financial principles to replace democratic and humanitarian values as the governing principle of our society. Political and media systems marginalized any voices that warned of the price we would pay for this.

Given that a certain kind of thinking got us into this mess, it’s reasonable to suggest that another kind is required to get us out of it. New paradigm politics starts from a different premise than the mechanistic, values-neutral attitudes and beliefs that now dominate Washington. Looking to that system to provide the answer to our current plight has its limits. Working within it is necessary for addressing the immediate symptoms of the challenges that now face us. But traditional DC-think has no listening for, nor understanding of, the ideas necessary to dissolve their cause. A morally hollowed out system has been blind to the roots of evil, gave no thought to how to prevent it, and of itself has no ability to override it now.

We the People have to take it from here.

Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. articulated principles of non-violence in ways relevant to their respective circumstances. We can learn from their genius and apply it to ours, creating a new paradigm in American politics today. We can non-violently upend in our time the forces of injustice and domination that plagued them in theirs. It’s important to note that they employed the principles of non-violence not because they were avoiding violence, but because they were intent on overriding it.

The power we need lies in that new paradigm of politics. Its principles are more philosophical than overtly “political.” They are the foundations of a political forcefield powerful enough to defeat fascism, repair our wounded democracy, and initiate an era of sustainability and justice. One of the tenets of political non-violence is that who we are is as important as what we do: the end is always inherent in the means. Our process for achieving a goal is as important as our desired outcome, because ultimately the former determines the latter. Most of us need a lot of clean up work, a vigilant monitoring of our own souls, if we’re to become the people we need to be to do what needs to be done to create the miracle needed now.

Taking a personal inventory sounds like an odd concept to the modern political mind, but then again the modern political mind got us into this mess. For those seeking a way out of it, the work begins within. Our complacency, pathological self-reference, lack of responsible citizenship, dearth of critical thought, surrender of our best thinking to people and systems that did not earn or deserve such trust, willingness to compromise with what we knew in our hearts to be unethical systems - all such things formed the political equivalent of a wounded societal immune system. Trumpism is an opportunistic infection; if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone. The infection occurred because our immune system was weak, and we will be healed when we repair it.

Each of us should think of ourselves as an immune cell dedicated to healing our body politic. Politics as usual provides often critical but temporary external remedies; the immune system actually heals. The healing begins with a mental shift. Recognition is an interesting word. It means literally to re-cognize, even things we thought we understood before.

Grant Faint

Five principles that form the basis of a new American politics:

1. HUMANITARIAN - We recognize the God-created Light within every person, even those with whom we disagree. Our compassion must extend as much to our political opponents as to our political allies.

   In the words of Nietzsche, “He who fights with monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.” We practice the ways of non-violence not in weakness but as strategy. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “You have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt.”

2. COMMUNITARIAN - We recognize that the needs of the community, the Common Good, are as important as the desires of the individual. It is a First Principle of American liberty that a role of government is to broker a balance between individual liberty and a concern for the common good.

   In the words of President Jimmy Carter, “It is difficult for the common good to prevail against the intense concentration of those who have a special interest, especially if the decisions are made behind locked doors.” He named the problem; it’s our task to solve it. We live at a time when any stand for the Common Good is mischaracterized as an attack on individual liberty, yet it is anything but. To love thy neighbor is ultimately the way to best love ourselves, for now more than ever we are living in an interdependent world.

3. RADICALLY IMAGINATIVE - We recognize our need to radically re-imagine the world, based not on what has been but on what could be. It’s a responsibility of citizenship to pursue a more beautiful world: to imagine a world of justice and peace, then reverse engineer from there.

   The lure of the status quo, particularly in a country where it can appear so attractive and seduce us with such beautiful toys, creates a dark magnetism tempting us to fortify the old more than generate the new. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it."

4. VERTICAL, NOT HORIZONTAL - Alliances built among groups are not necessarily genuine solidarity. Even thieves have alliances. No amount of traditional political organizing can compensate for a lack of ethical relationship between individuals, no matter their politics or points of view.

   The work we do on ourselves is a prerequisite to effective political activism. Our temptation to hold others accountable always, but ourselves too rarely, is the biggest obstruction to creating a forcefield of Light that can overcome Darkness. Hatred cannot stand in the presence of love, but it’s the barriers to love within ourselves - not just in public policy - that we have the responsibility to remove. Gandhi called this dedication to harmlessness “ahimsa,” and the political power it creates “satyagraha,” or soulforce. The breadth of our alliances is not as important as the depth of our character in forging a new beginning.

5. COURAGEOUS - The new American politics calls for more than talk, more than positioning, more than fundraising, and more than voting. Whether it’s to speak up in public or on social media, to attend protests or Town Halls, or in any other way resist the new authoritarianism in our midst, we must do it.

   Trump’s forces have already demonstrated their willingness to punish those who do not adapt to their wishes. But our refusal to give in to their tyrannous threats - those which are overt as well as those which are implied - will make a tremendous difference in the days ahead. “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave” makes an interesting point. They wouldn’t be free if they weren’t first brave.

Liberty is not a lack of fascism; fascism is a lack of liberty. We will not be able to override one without being willing to uplift the other. We’re learning from the current storm that freedom isn’t something that can be entrusted to others, taken for granted, or simply handed over to institutions to secure. Institutions, we now know, can be gutted.

The midterm elections will be telling, of course, and there is valid reason to be concerned about the efforts of TrumpWorld to suppress the vote through such travesties as the SAVE Act. No matter who you are, where you live, or how much you think you’ve got it covered, get your birth certificate now.

Despite it all, we are hardwired for freedom. Remember, this nation was born as a rebuke to tyranny. Somewhere deep within us we know this. If you forget, recall these words from Abraham Lincoln: “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis.” We do have the truth, and now we must meet the crisis.

We the People means we the people, not we the government, we my political party, or we-but-that-doesn’t-really-mean-me. Only we as individuals, contributing our best thinking, ethics, wisdom, and willingness to do our part, can form the collective power to cast from our midst the forces of totalitarianism now gaining ground. We and only we are the last line of defense against their encroachment on and ultimate destruction of our democracy.

And we will. We’re Americans. We got this.