Benjamin Franklin was asked, while leaving a meeting with this nation’s founders in Philadelphia’s state house: What kind of government have you given us? He famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
America now faces its biggest challenge in that regard since World War II. In fact, the test may be far harder and the ramifications greater.
Donald Trump is a man with longstanding attraction to strong men who squelch their opponents and brook no opposition. He has, in his very public past and the present, praised dictators such as Saddam Hussein, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin as strong leaders. He is the right candidate for what is an age of deep division, where compromise is seen as defeat.
The age of technology has meant that the more information at voters’ disposal the less they know because so much exists that it’s easy to let human nature take its course. Too many people take in information that confirms their opinion and reject that which doesn’t. Facts, for tens of millions, no longer matter, not if they disagree with already held views.
Democracies die from within. Attacks on nations, especially this nation, have traditionally led to unity in the face of a common foe. That’s less true of our modern wars, which are launched amid disagreement and fought by volunteers from a narrow segment of society. That separation has weakened democracy. But now, as in the Civil War, the enemy is not them, it is us.
The nation has not been as divided by economic class since the age of the robber barons. Those with more education have generally prospered; those with less have fallen behind and lack hope that their lives, let alone those of their children, will be better than the lives enjoyed by their baby boomer parents.
The stagnation of the middle class parallels the demise of unions and the ability of workers to join together to lobby for better conditions. Ironically, those who rely the most on government assistance, residents of the nation’s South, were the most supportive of Trump, who favors cutting those benefits.
Polls and pundits predicted a relatively easy win for Hillary Clinton. They were obviously wrong. Let’s hope other predictions, a major slide in world stock markets, trade wars and recession will also be wrong. Tax cuts for the wealthy, the end of Obamacare, an abrogation of trade treaties and a rejection of climate agreements, all Trump promises, would guarantee the worst.
The biggest threat, other than the possibility that Trump will be too quick to respond with military force when provoked by foreign leaders, lies with his ability to determine the composition of the Supreme Court for a generation or more. A more conservative court could mean an end to a woman’s control of her reproductive future and less rather than more protection for the rights of minorities and workers. A failure to act, by the United States and thus the world, to take steps necessary to slow global warming could lead to the drowning of major cities, famine, drought and the mass migration of hundreds of millions of people. Trump believes climate change is a hoax. The Pentagon calls it the biggest national security threat.
It is difficult to find hope in the shocking outcome of the 2016 election. It’s there somewhere, in the fundamental goodness of the American people, but it will take time to see it.