The Perilous State of America’s Republic

The Perilous State of America’s Republic

If the United States cannot, in Lincoln’s words, «bind up the nation’s wounds,» and re-emerge as a strong democracy, the end of Western Civilization is in sight. Americans should know how perilous their democracy has become. The majority of Donald Trump’s voters already believe the presidential election was rigged, and there is no doubt that suspect voting changes, attributed to the requirements of voting in a pandemic, have created large anomalies in five states that made a great many such votes impossible to authenticate. The numbers of votes involved in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are undoubtedly adequately numerous to have influenced the election.

Some of the responsibility rests with President Trump’s counsel, who often have demanded remedies out of all proportion to the complaints alleged. Where the courts don’t exercise their jurisdiction, a vacuum arises which is likely to be filled by lawlessness, and potentially, even violent lawlessness. Crime rates are skyrocketing across the country, and last summer «peaceful protests» against civil rights abuses tore apart cities across the country, killing approximately 50 people, injuring 700 police, with looters, vandals, and arsonists committing billions of dollars of property damage. Again, the clear trend is to lawlessness.

The treatment of the controversy surrounding the financial relations of presumptive President-elect Joe Biden and his family with Russia, China, and Ukraine in particular, raises further disquieting questions. The severity with which practically all of the media and social media denounced and ignored suggestions of potential misconduct by former Vice President Biden and his family, including suspending the Twitter account of the New York Post, the country’s oldest newspaper, and of the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is indicative of the undemocratic tendencies of the media and it helps to explain why professionally conducted surveys uniformly show that fewer than 15 percent of Americans trust the media. A free press is an indispensable pillar of a functioning democracy, but is now in the United States a despised, corrupted, and shriveled facsimile of the reliable and fearless media a vibrant democracy requires. There is certainly room to question the conduct of Attorney General William Barr in unilaterally deciding that no mention should be made of the grand jury criminal investigation that has been conducted into these matters for over two years, enabling the media barely six weeks ago to suppress the story in a manner replicative of dictatorial regimes.

There was widespread concern prior to the election that whatever the result, there could be a violent response. This has been a farce of continued recounts in Georgia of unverifiable ballots, of courts eagerly declining jurisdiction, disputing standing, pusillanimously addressing process, or in the numerous instances provided for them by the president’s under-prepared counsel, dismissing less than rigorously composed complaints from the Trump campaign. Such a treatment of such a well-founded concern about the functioning of the electoral system can easily lead to violence. In this case, President Trump will continue to focus his entire effort on encouraging his 74 million supporters to concentrate on reforming the election laws of the delinquent states, strengthening the Republican Party in midterm and state elections, and carrying the country against a thoroughly discredited opponent in four years.

All through this election year we heard spokespeople for both parties repeating the tired pieties about the «greatest country in human history.» By some measures it certainly is, but it now appears not really to be a functioning democracy and not really to be a society of laws. It is almost chaos, and not a chaos produced by this president, though he has not been a source for serenity. Americans will have to do more than sing their magnificent anthems, repeat patriotic platitudes, and ignore the threats of minority groups to burn society down, while they «reimagine law enforcement.» Those conservatives who shared most of Trump’s views but became irrational in their hatred of him, and those nominal Republicans who have worked like termites to undermine him, will bear a heavy responsibility for the spectacle of incompetence and venality and of indulgence of national self-loathing that the present Democratic party embodies as it returns to office. If the United States cannot, in Lincoln’s words, «bind up the nation’s wounds,» and re-emerge as a strong democracy, the end of Western Civilization is in sight.

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Source: Conrad Black | American Greatness