Democrat versus Republican
Nixon, Reagan, George W Bush: for me, a lifetime Democrat, all of their elections were disappointments. I can remember each well. In 1968 it took until Wednesday morning to determine the winner between Vice President Humphrey and Nixon. I was sitting in my seventh grade history class on the second floor of Van Buren Junior High School in Kettering, Ohio. The Principal came on the PA and announced Nixon’s victory. Kettering, a suburb of Dayton, was overwhelmingly Republican back then, and the whole school burst out in wild cheers and applause. All I could do was put my head down on the desk in sadness.
One of my early professional political jobs was as a field coordinator with the Carter/Mondale campaign in 1976. I remember the joy of walking across Cincinnati’s Fountain Square at four in the morning after that election night, exhausted from the efforts, but ebullient in the victory over Gerald Ford. Four years later, I was a teacher in Pataskala, and could do little but despair as Carter became as trapped as the fifty-two Iranian hostages, unable to free himself to wage a serious campaign against Reagan. And the Reagan era had all of the horrors I anticipated. Reagan destroyed labor unions, armed America with expensive and outlandish weapons, and “freed” public education by taking away Federal funding.
Thumb on the Scale
And then there was 2000. I was still in Pataskala, but Mom and Dad were “snow-birds” in Florida. I spent Thanksgiving week there, watching the desperate ballot counts, eyeballs on the hanging chads, over and over. Clearly, Florida was within any “margin of error”, and the Gore and Bush legal teams both went to great lengths to support their candidate. Bush was willing to pull any lever, push any button, walk across any line; his team would do whatever it took to win.
It didn’t hurt that the Florida Secretary of State was a Bush campaign chairman, and the Governor was his brother. But what really threw me, was that the Supreme Court took a side based on partisan lines, five Republicans out-voting four Democrats on the Bench to put Bush in office. I didn’t foresee the Justices putting their thumbs on that political scale.
Only on December 13th, when Al Gore went on national television to tell us to let it go, did I even tolerate the results. And it wasn’t until the weeks after 9/11 that I finally accepted George W Bush as the “true” President of the United States.
America’s Creed
Nixon, Reagan, Bush: each of their elections “hurt”. But I never thought that any of them, even Richard Nixon, represented a threat to our American democracy. We were of different political parties and different ideologies; but we were all still a part of the American experience. While I often disagreed with what they did, I could see that we had a common interest in the process of making “a more perfect union”, the American Creed. It was sometimes the only saving grace of those years.
American Creed – 1917
I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.
Republican or Democrat, Clinton or Dole, even Dukakis or Bush; we all still had that common creed. We were all Americans, “…Dedicated to the proposition that all men (and women) are created equal”. Sharing that belief, we could sometimes reach out beyond partisan differences. When Bush spoke on the “pile” in New York the week after 9-11 he said:
“I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
We weren’t Democrats or Republicans then; we were Americans.
Trump’s Acceptance
Thursday night I watched most of Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech at the MAGA-Republican Convention in Milwaukee. There is a new “vibe” in Trump’s World. Trump implied that he is now “anointed” by God, who directed the bullet, or Trump’s head, away from certain death. The MAGA crowd looked up at him in religious awe. Trump called on America to unite with him, his unsaid statement; “this is God’s will”.
That portion of his speech was beautifully choregraphed and written. He laid a gentle kiss, a blessing, on the helmet of the firefighter who died in the attack protecting his children. And then it was off on the campaign rant, everything about our horrible economy (the day after the Dow Jones set a new record over 41,000 points); unbelievable inflation “like no one’s ever seen” (except for the late 1970’s, when inflation was over 10%); and raging crime from immigrants (violent crime has dropped 15% this year alone). And, we also got to listen about “…The late and great Hannibal Lector”, a fictional character who ate people. Trump implied that it is the Hannibal Lector’s of Central and South America that cross our borders illegally.
His Will
My final take from Trump’s hour and a half speech (at least the first hour I could stand to watch) is that he wants an America of “us” and “them”. It isn’t about unity, it’s about submission. Submit to the MAGA vision of modern America as a “hell-hole”, and 1950’s America as a “paradise”. Submit to the loss of freedom for all but those who match the MAGA model; no room for the migrant, or the LGBTQ, or those who aren’t Christian Nationalists, or are looking for “black jobs”. It’s a unity of conformity, not a unity of spirit or the American Creed.
Take Trump’s rhetoric, and add to it the structure of the 2025 Project (or the 47 Project) and there’s a formula for the radical alteration of America, into some different Nation, with some different Creed. For that reason, this election is much more critical than Nixon versus Humphrey, or Reagan versus Carter, or Bush versus Gore. This one will determine the path of Americans for generations.
There may be no turning back; it’s Trump’s will.
