How Trump is Killing America

“E Pluribus Unum” (Latin: “Out of many, one”) — once the US’ official motto, which still appears in a wavy scroll near the eagle, in the Great Seal on the back of every dollar bill.

What makes us us? What makes us “America”? What makes us different—fundamentally different—from every other nation on Earth? Shouldn’t we know the answers to those questions before we can even begin to “Make America Great Again”? (emphasis added)

The answers lie not in any political ideology, left, right or center. They lie in how we arose, grew and developed as a nation. They inhere in our nation’s unique history.

Every other nation grew in place. Each arose from strangers and nomadic tribes migrating into its territory, sometimes warring, sometimes coalescing, but eventually coexisting and developing a common language, a common culture and common rules and laws.

I suppose you could argue that every nation, including ours, developed this way, at least in the long run. Science tells us that all we humans evolved from apes on the African savannah and dispersed globally from there to everywhere on Earth (except for the Arctic and Antarctic regions).

But there’s a huge difference in time scales. Other nations took millennia or eons to evolve. Their evolutionary time scales were so long that their growth was partly social and partly biological. Hence the blond hair and blue eyes in Sweden, the slanted eyes and dark hair in China, and the brown skin and curly hair of most people in Africa.

In contrast, we Americans became a nation on paper only 149 years ago. If you count from the Pilgrims’ first arrival in New England, less than 4.25 centuries have passed. If you count from the first arrivals of “Native Americans” over the land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age—maybe 20,000 years ago—that’s still far too short for biological evolution. Natives’ common Asian-like features and dark hair attest to that.

So every single group now constituting “Americans,” including the “Natives,” came here on a time scale far too short for biological evolution. And if you consider the terrible treatment of the Natives, even to this day, it becomes clear that the more recent “newcomers,” from England, Europe and elsewhere, created the dominant culture and most of the laws and customs, all in the last four centuries. This is a mere microsecond in human evolution.

So we Americans, or our ancestors in living memory, all came from somewhere else. We did not evolve in place, whether culturally, socially, linguistically, politically or (of course) biologically. As FDR once proclaimed in a speech to the Daugters of the American Revolution, “all of us . . . are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.“

We came here and, on time scales of individual perception shorter than a single human lifetime, learned the dominant language (English) and fit in, often changing the dominant culture in the process. Many of us tried to “fit in” by working hard to change existing laws and customs to be nearer to our heart’s desire. This is how the values of the “Enlightenment”—a social, political and philosophical movement then less than a century old—figured so strongly in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and our earliest laws.

All that we are as a nation—all that distinguishes us from other nations—flows from these simple facts and their corollaries. We are indeed a “nation of immigrants” in the most fundamental sense.

The first corollary is simple but profound. People don’t pick up all their stuff, permanently sever all their social and family ties, and move to another continent, or across the Darien Gap, if they are already happy where they are. Our ancestors who came here gave up everything they had and knew to seek a better life in an unknown land. They were risk takers and innovators at their cores.

Is it any wonder, then, that the vast majority of technological inventions that define “modern” human life came from our people, from us “Americans”? Count ‘em and wonder: the electric light, the phonograph, modern submarines, the telephone, television, airplanes, high-altitude flight (with cabin pressurization), and the first workable solar panels, nuclear reactors, lasers, and robotic surgery devices. If we are a nation of risk-takers and innovators, it’s because all of us, or most of our ancestors within living memory, were willing to give up everything they knew to seek a better life.

The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, all by himself, made three of the inventions on the foregoing list . He famously said that “Invention is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” People who took six to eight weeks to cross the Atlantic in sailing ships, or who now take weeks to get to and cross the Darien Gap on foot, and make their way up north on foot or by any ride they can hitch through most of Mexico, have that sort of pioneer spirit.

Now Trump wants to stop all that. If allowed, he would stop all immigration cold and claim a great victory. To make that seem desirable, he tells innumerable lies about “foreign” immigrants, especially those who are not from the British Isles, Scandinavia, or Northern Europe and who don’t have white skin. He would limit immigrants to those people who make him and his class of tired, lazy, corrupt, and conniving plutocrats comfortable.

Trump would thus bring back the same kind of declining aristocracy that our Founders and their fiercest supporters fought so hard and risked their “lives, fortunes and sacred Honour” to overthrow. Almost every day, he demonstrates by action and by word his preference for a nation where wealth rules, regardless of Reason, the law and even consistency. And he uses lawyers and the law in an often vain but wearing attempt to do so.

He vigorously defends suits of laborers and contractors that his businesses have stiffed. He prosecutes public officials, including his once loyal subordinates, for expressing adverse political views and for trying to maintain political neutrality and impartiality in the application of law. In an agenda of revenge, he uses our law and courts not as a reasonable means to prosecute lawbreakers, but as a cudgel to grind his personal enemies down. And his recent machinations with cryptocurrencies and “modern” finance make clear his ambitions to use his political power to multiply his personal and family wealth and overcome a lifetime of individual business failure. What sort of incompetence and ineptitude in business does it take to bankrupt several casinos?

As for racial and ethnic equality and “Equal Justice under Law” (the motto on our Supreme Court’s building), Trump has taken a riff on Adolf Hitler’s approach. Instead of committing genocide on 6 million Jews, gypsies and others, Trump has waged a verbal war against several different identifiable groups, including black Haitians, Muslims, Mexican and Central American immigrants and alleged black “criminals” (a broadly defined group!) generally. At the same time, he tries to avoid a “racist” label by making over-to-top accusations of “antisemitism” against people protesting international grievances for plausible reasons.

If this list of Trump’s failures and flaws has more than a passing resemblance to the list of “whereases” in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence from King George III, that resemblance is hardly coincidental. Trump has, in his semi-literate and semi-grammatical public statements, impugned or violated almost every principle set forth in that Declaration and our Constitution, especially our Bill of Rights.

The longer he stays in office, the more precarious and fleeting our once-great Republic will be. For he has created and is trying to entrench an aristocracy of wealth and crude “business” supremacy every bit as meritless and oppressive as the English aristocracy of royalty and land that we immigrants and descendants of immigrants on this Continent threw off by force of arms 149 years ago. If it’s not yet time for an entirely new declaration of independence, it’s certainly time for more faithful adherence to the original.

Endnote on our Supreme Court’s Malfeasance

In his catastrophic presidential-immuniy opinion in Trump v. United States, Chief Justice Roberts used the word “energetic” five times, the word “vigorous” three times, and the word “efficiency” once — all in referring to our American president or his office. But none of these words describes the core values of America’s political and legal system that made it great.

Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror in Nazi Germany was nothing if not “energetic,” “vigorous” and efficient. He exterminated 6 million mostly innocent people without even the ghost of a trial to determine what, if anything, against Germany’s interests they had done.

If you want to exterminate people like cockroaches, poison gas and ovens are “energetic,” “vigorous” and efficient ways to do it. But that is hardly the earmark of a just or good society. That’s why, at the end of World War II, Germany’s capital had been reduced to rubble resembling today’s Gaza, and few outside Germany mourned.

If we are to “Make America Great Again,” we should not import the values of Nazi Germany. The better way to do it is to make sure that the humblest citizen feels he or she is getting a fair hearing and a just disposition of complaints, not to make our chief executive more energetic and efficient.

Self-evident justice, not energy, vigor or efficiency, was what made America great and can again. That’s why Roberts’ horrific decision was roundly condemned not just by me, but by a host of legal minds and scholars, including a distinguished judge retired from a federal circuit court of appeals, a self-described “conservative.” Permalink to this post