Created July 30, 2021
“America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.”
–Ronald Reagan
The world is waiting to see how this unprecedented drama comes out. Billions of people had high hopes that America would lead the world to a fair break democracy for all. Now it’s looking like the whole idea of democracy is failing and the brutal bosses are restoring their clutches on the whole planet. The tyrants who used to wear masks as monarchies now wear different masks but they still get their way, one way or the other. They buy it, or threaten, or kill, but nothing stands in their way. Apparently not even the legal government of the USA. Because that legal government is no longer one thing, it’s two things:
- People who truly believe in what America is all about.
- People who only care about themselves and are betting on the Republican party, led by a splinter arm, to take over the country and maybe one day the world by using perfectly legal means, through their cleverness in gaming those legal rules.
It’s my best estimate based on studying survey results from Pew, Gallup, Dynata and others, that at least 86% of Americans do not back this splinter sub-party within the Republican party, we back America, democracy, equality, freedom, justice, truth, science, and perennial human values.
However, some of the 86% are loyal to the Republican party, it is deeply ingrained, all joining-group phenomena build upon the primal human need to belong, and simply out of loyalty these people have been giving their support to the individuals who are driving this bus.
The tools the drivers are using were not in the U.S. Constitution, but introduced a long time ago by politicians anyway, and now filibuster and gerrymandering are treated as American as applesauce. Filibuster being in place, it stops legislation which could otherwise depose both of these tools. In the next midterm elections coming up soon, prognosticators believe that the Republican party, although a minority, will take possibly permanent or at least multi-decade control of the U.S.A.
We have already seen how, at a time which was premature for a successful coup d’etat (voter restriction laws not yet in place, gerrymandering potentials not yet fully exploited), Trump attempted to remain president and got dangerously close to doing it, and retains his freedom to continue to translate the Trump-Republican sub-party ideas for popular allegiance. How much harder will such people fight to keep their control later on if they manage to ever lose an election again despite the use of false stories through all the media, filibuster, gerrymandering, State level voter rights restrictions, sponsored militias (possible but not proven yet), infiltrated police departments and armed services, and local intimidation.
How can we get back to being the beacon for righteousness for the world? It is not by standing helplessly by and allowing it to continue to be driven by a very small minority that prove by their actions they don’t care at all that they are breaching their oaths of office:
“I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.””
The Constitution contains the 15th Amendment:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The people who have proposed voting restrictions, blatantly designed to disenfranchise minority voters, have clearly breached their solemn oaths. All of these conspirators in a coup d’etat plot, anyone who stayed in a room where words were heard conveying this plan to sufficiently game the system and pack the courts and use every foul means available to gain and retain absolute power over a free people despite knowing themselves to be a minority, are traitors to the American Dream.
“Seditious Conspiracy” has already been mentioned by prosecutors in the cases against Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Florida 3%ers who are known to have coordinated their insurgency at the Capitol. We have to open our minds to wider consideration of such charges as investigators continue to trace the causes of the insurrection, from low places to high.
In this citizen’s opinion, they are traitors, guilty of treason; this is not intended as hyperbole. The indications of treason, to me, are disseminating false information in the media, undermining Americans’ self-belief and the world’s belief in us and in our elections, our Constitution, and our vaccines, causing large scale deaths and encouraging authoritarian foreign governments to escalate cyberattacks on the U.S. and other threats to the security of the world. We ought to overcome our hesitation to call a spade a spade and a traitor a traitor. If this is not treason, nothing is treason. They have lowered our chances to lead the world to democracy. Severely lowered them. They are not only traitors to the U.S.A., they are traitors to the human race.
If evidence is found sufficient for legal action, alleged conspirators ought to be removed at least temporarily from Federal and State office until the court decides what outcome is right and proper on a person-by-person basis. In Congress, these suspended lawmakers must be replaced by someone in the Republican party who has not disseminated false information or in any other way evidenced failure to keep their oath of office.
We should welcome people who have been acting solely out of loyalty, when they rediscover where their true loyalty lies, to the true America, the bastion for freedom and truth, for telling it like it is, for brotherhood and sisterhood, for practical idealism, for working together and reaching the best decisions under majority rule as the major principle that makes all the rest possible.
After the true conspirators have been weeded out and it is once again possible to function under the U.S. Constitution without filibuster, gerrymandering, or any other loopholes that can be gamed by traitorous actors, we can decide together how to refine the Constitution itself so as to ensure majority rule prevails, such as by elimination of the Electoral College (or by means of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact), and by some adjustment to the equality of States in the Senate. Both of these Constitutional rules are evidence that our Founders were worried that unbounded democracy could lead to bad outcomes, given the fact that most people at the time lacked education (still true today). So they built in rules to provide a cushion: the Electoral College and States’ equality in the Senate. However they did not fully visualize how those cushions could undermine the entire structure of the World’s Greatest Most Daring Experiment. In this century two presidential elections were won (by George W. Bush and Donald Trump) despite the popular vote going the other way (that also happened three other times in U.S. history). In 1776 the difference in population between the most and least populous States was only 12 to 1; today it is more than 62 to 1. A person in California’s vote is worth only 1/62nd of a person in Wyoming in terms of Senate voting. If the Founders had been even more clairvoyant than they were, there might have been codicils to adjust for the uneven growth of the nation.
So many great heroes gave their lives to give us this, the greatest and realistically ONLY hope in the world for a fairer society on this planet. In a short time we have managed to smear ourselves with the excrement of falsity, fascism, paralysis, racism, sheer lunacy, hate, violence, power madness, unmitigated greed, abject stupidity, and a taste level that even P.T. Barnum would sneer at. We can rebound as quickly as we plummeted. We lost every battle in WWII for years but in the end our victory with our allies was inevitable. We are supposed to win. It’s in the cards, in the heavens, in the script. Good triumphs over Evil. Always preceded by a dramatic rise in Evil which seems to be winning and the odds of success seem miniscule. Here we are again.
OVER THE TOP! (What Americans and allies said in WWI before leaving their trenches to face almost certain death. But we won. And we will win this one too. It is our Mission.)
That these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
–Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, November 19, 1863
Best to all,
Bill