Today marks the 245th anniversary of America's independence. Today, I wonder where will America will be on July 4, 2026.
It is said that empires last an average of 250 years. The United States might not have been founded as an empire and one can debate if it is an empire in the sense Rome or the Mongols were. But it has been the most powerful country the world has ever known and will remain that way unless it collapses from within.
Alas this collapse has been well underway with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016 and his refusal to accept his defeat in 2020 with claims of voter fraud made out of whole cloth. Unfortunately, there is a critical mass of the population that accepts his word at face value and does not brook any criticism of him. This made itself apparent on January 6th of this year when Trump supporters attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to a Biden presidency.
With the subsequent passage of voter suppression laws in Republican states, I fear this is only the beginning. For starters, I fear the possibility of violence at the polls especially in Democratic strongholds. Notwithstanding such a possibility I can easily see a scenario where Stacey Abrams defeats Brian Kemp and is elected Governor of Georgia only for Republican loyalists handpicked by the Georgia legislature to overturn the results. All of which would serve to undermine faith in democracy as our form of government which is exactly the objective and would please those in Moscow, Beijing and a hundred other dictatorships - petty and otherwise.
There is every reason to believe that Trump will run in 2024. He doesn't need to ask for the GOP nomination. The Republican Party has become just like one of his properties - something which has lost its value except as a tax write off. Should Trump run in 2024 and lose yet again to Biden his screams of fraud will be ten times as loud. If there is a Republican majority in the House of Representatives then they will not certify Biden's re-election. Should that happen and the Supreme Court upholds it then all bets are off. We will cease to be a democracy. We might still be called the United States of America, but this would be in name only.
While I place the majority of the blame on Trump's toxicity and the quislings in the GOP for our current state of affairs, I do not hold the Democratic Party or the Left blameless. While I like Joe Biden, he leads a party where a critical mass of its members view American with disdain and claim the country was founded on racism. Biden, who has spent his political career unifying people, will be a relic of the past by the end of this decade possibly sooner. Meanwhile, the people in the Democratic Party who believe America is inherently racist will soon have the prevailing point of view.
Of course, racism has and will always be a part of America's history and must be condemned when it arises and efforts must be made to prevent it in the first place. But if Frederick Douglass could both mourn the Fourth of July and yet forgive Thomas Jefferson and forgive the man who enslaved him. Unfortunately, a critical mass of Democrats can no more distinguish between hating the sin and loving the sinner than they can between those who sought to preserve slavery and those who sought to end it. Democrats won't get very far if they cry, "You're all a bunch of racists, please vote for me!!!" If America is to survive people have to see the good in it. If Democrats claim America is inherently racist then how do they expect people to stand up for our democracy against Trump's authoritarianism?
I look at the America of five years ago and see what is now despite President Biden's best efforts and shudder to think what America will be like five years from today if our present course is not altered.
Happy Fourth of July! While we still have it.
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