Does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave?

A recipe for choosing civic unity over political division

I want to take a break this week from the arts and other related topics I usually write about and say a few things about the political moment we are living through.

America, whatever its faults, shortcomings and failures, has made a sincere effort throughout the two and half centuries of its Republic to also be a true Democracy. Perhaps we fail more than we succeed, and most notably so in those eras when the self-enriching ambitions of men who have gained their power through tremendous accumulations of wealth have worked to deny or otherwise whittle away the rights and opportunities of everybody else.

The powerful have always found ways to make their greedy overreach look like something positive and patriotic — to drape it in the flag or dress it up as progress, growth, rugged individualism and economic strength. But no country can truly be strong when its most vulnerable citizens are made weak, and even less so when the economic stability of the majority is stripped away in order to enrich the few. And make no mistake, that is exactly what is happening right now. We have fallen short of our ideals many times in the past, but at no other time in our history have we seen a government, or a cabal of business leaders, so blatantly dedicated to the intentional dismantling of democracy. Never before have we had to face such open and public declarations by the powerful of their intention (and indeed of their feeling of entitlement) to legislatively fix a form of explicitly authoritarian oligarchic control over the rest of us.

The Trump Administration and its MAGA enablers and supporters, along with a tiny minority of tech and finance mega-billionaires, and the cadre of religious fanatics who authored the hugely unpopular tenets of “Project 2025” collectively represent ideas and values that the vast majority of our citizens (regardless of party affiliation) simply do not believe in or want.

Instead, we wish for the rights, freedoms, opportunities and services traditionally guaranteed by our always aspiring democratic system to remain in place, and — if anything — to be refined and improved rather than torn apart and burned to ash like a pyre of objectionable books at a Nazi rally. Resisting that kind of authoritarianism is not a Liberal, Conservative, Democrat, Republican, Left or Right proposition. It is an American proposition, and an American duty.

Trump and his sycophantic henchmen, both in his administration as well as in Congress, the Supreme Court, and in the “base” of the MAGA faithful, are doing everything in their power to take away our right as American citizens to say a resounding no to their poisonous agenda. They are doing this by dismantling and rigging the electoral process to cement their minority rule and silence the peoples’ voices forever. One of the most effective means to this nefarious end lies in their fomenting of division, by persuading a huge number of Americans that we are the enemies of each other.

WE ARE NOT!

I am a life-long Democrat but I don’t hate all the people who voted for Trump, or believe that they are all my enemies. I don’t always agree with my self-identifying Republican friends, but they are in fact my friends, and I respect and like the best of them for who they are, and judge them by their deeds rather than by how they choose to identify themselves politically. I also don’t approve of everything that my political party does. I have watched with increasing concern and growing disgust over the past thirty years (as a great many of my fellow democrats have) as my party has hypocritically abandoned the working people it once championed, and played as vital a role as any Republican in enabling the concentrations of tech and corporate wealth and power which now threaten the very democratic principles it claims so passionately (and fatuously) to defend. In government today, the so-called Left and Right wings are far closer together in their mutual practice of rigging the system against the peoples’ interest than they are apart. And as to those wild-eyed “Liberals” that commentators on right-wing talk radio and Fox news so love to characterize as some monolithic red menace, they are, far more often than not, people like me, and even much like you. For us old-style Democrats — as was true for so many old style Republicans — being part of a liberal democracy only ever meant believing in the democratic principles on which our nation was founded. We may disagree at times about how best to preserve or champion those principles, but I would hope we can all agree that tearing them down is not what any of us who ever truly believed in them wants to do.

But in order to give voice to what we actually want, we must be able to protest, speak, write, and most of all to VOTE for what we believe in. Yet all these rights are in jeopardy today. At the same-time that they are taking a wrecking ball to the agencies and services that every American citizen relies on for our safety, health and economic wellbeing, Trump and his cronies are also doing everything they can to strip away our right to choose who governs our lives and who decides what we are, and are not, allowed to do, to say, and even what we are allowed to think.

We still have a chance to stop them, but it isn’t going to work if we all hunker down in our separate politicized bunkers and hurl rocks at each-other while the biker gang in the White house, Congress and the Courts gleefully loots and lays waste to this town we all have to live in together.

In order to stop them, we have to stop being Democrats or Republicans only. America isn’t Hungary (population 9.5 million) or Russia (population 143.5 million). There are 340 million of us here, all quite different from one another, but all interested, one hopes, in being something better than a mere mass of peasants yearning for a dictatorial feudal overlord. We can express that preference with our votes, but they will only have power to bring change if we all show up and all vote together to ride these snake-oil peddlers out of town on the proverbial rail of our unified rejection and contempt. And any politician who is not vigorously standing up with us to fight this existential threat — regardless of which party they claim to represent — needs to be thrown out right alongside them. The sad reality is that our entire political system is now corrupted; so only a unified vision of how to root out that corruption across the whole board will turn this tide and create an opportunity to build something better.

So I’d like to propose a simple and effective acronym by which we can rally and fight back against MAGA and all its authoritarian and theocratic fellow-travelers.

R.I.D. stands for Republicans, Independents and Democrats. We can beat them back and rid ourselves of these meddlesome autocrats, but only if we work together. You know the old saying:

United we stand, divided we fall.

It’s time to live by that.