Three Ways America is Fundamentally Broken That Probably Can’t Be Fixed
America is broken. Donald Trump didn’t break it, but he’s doing a good job of trying to polish it off. America was broken long before Donald Trump, but he is now seriously compromising the institutions most critical to American democracy. He probably won’t destroy the nation, but it’s going to be interesting to see how close he can get to doing that before he is done. However close he manages to get will not change the fundamental dynamics of this one simple thing: America is broken, and broken in such a way that it may be impossible to fix in my lifetime or the lifetime of anybody who is reading this. America is irrevocably broken for three reasons that are probably unfixable, and where the possibility of civil discourse is all but impossible.
Let’s start with the one nobody is talking about and that there has not been a real and sustained public debate about because it is probably not able to be fixed: the Electoral College. Your eyes roll and/or glaze over. See? Who the hell wants to talk about the Electoral College? Who the hell even understands the Electoral College? But here is the thing. In just about any country in the world you can think of, if one presidential candidate got three million more votes than their opponent and still lost the race, everybody would cry foul. Fraud. Fake election. Not in the United States, because in the United States that kind of stuff doesn’t happen (Right, and President Kennedy’s father didn’t buy him the presidency by stuffing the ballot boxes in Chicago, but I digress). America does not have a “one man, one vote” system at the executive level; it is an indirect system beyond the comprehension of average Americans. Has the news media actually explained this to people? Do people even care?
Whether you like Hillary Clinton or not, in any other country in the world other than a banana republic (Zimbabwe, Venezuela) or an authoritarian dictatorship (Russia, Venezuela) she would have been elected president (ditto for Al Gore). The Electoral College may have sounded like a good idea at the time but it is now antiquated and all but unworkable, a terrible way to elect the president, but resistant to any kind of short-term reasonable fix. Nonetheless, it’s time to do away with it and go with what we dismissively refer to as “the popular vote.” Nobody wants to talk about this because the only way to fix the Electoral College is to have a Constitutional Convention or a majority vote in both houses of congress to amend the U. S. Constitution, and anybody who thinks that such an amendment could actually pass in congress and win the approval of enough states to make it into law in our lifetimes can dream on.
The second simple reason America is broken is because America is a very racist country. Many people will stop reading now. See you. Nobody wants to talk about this either, certainly not in a public forum. Few Americans who are not people of color want to admit that the United States is festering in a stew of racial hatred (as obvious as that is) primarily directed towards African-Americans, but but also Mexican-Americans, and most recently, immigrants from Muslim countries. Nobody running for president, or pretty much anything else, is going to get elected saying that, but it’s true. Racism is enshrined in the very birth of the nation, signed into our most basic document by prosperous land-owning, slave-owning white men who did not intend that black people (or Native American/Indian people whose lands would be stolen while they were slaughtered) have the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (and the right to vote, which women were denied as well) that they were giving to themselves.
Racism was built into the U.S. Constitution by the Founding Fathers. Racism sustained the Atlantic Slave Trade and the system of American chattel slavery for hundreds of years. Racism was at the root of the U.S. Civil War, destroyed post-Civil War Reconstruction in the Deep South, and subjugated black people for years after that through Jim Crow laws and voting disenfranchisement, red lining in housing, and segregated school systems. Racism gave rise to discrimination against people of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican descent — any population of color you can think of really — that occurs to this very day. That’s hard for people to talk about. Racism was responsible for the rise of a deeply conservative Republican Party taken over by whites who fled the Democratic Party because Lyndon Johnson decided black people should be treated the same as them.
Both of these fundamental defects in the foundation of America have been exploited by the current occupant of the Oval Office, the kind of fringe extremist the Electoral College was likely intended to keep out of the White House. Trump and the current GOP, which has been taken over by other social-political extremists, are quickly moving to overturn decades of social progress on a range of critical issues before the next mid-term elections while they are in full control of the country. If he gets his way, Trump and the GOP will further rig the American electoral system through voter suppression in crucial states to ensure that the three million people who didn’t vote for him won’t get the opportunity to do that again. Race-baiting and nods to white supremacists (racists, fascists, Neo-Nazis, apologists for the traitorous Confederacy) and deeply conservative Christian fundamentalists who think their religious views should be imposed on everybody else (which does not make them the Taliban, but puts them in the same ideological ballpark), ensure Republicans will hold onto their power base, which brings up the third reason America is broken: deep and hateful political partisanship.
Where this really and truly begins in our lifetime is with Ronald Reagan, because Reagan became the first president to openly attack Democrats only because they were Democrats, or as he vilified them — Liberals. He didn’t really fully explain what exactly was wrong with being a liberal. He just started throwing it around with such disdain that Republicans started hating Democrats for no other reason than that. Not that Democrats hated their country or that they were unpatriotic or didn’t love the freedoms all Americans enjoy or that they disagreed with Republicans on a range of policy issues. They were castigated because they were liberals, and it stuck because Democrats didn’t bother to come to their own defense. It stuck and it festered.
The pus-filled wound broke open most profoundly with the election of Bill Clinton. Republicans hated him even before he took office because he was a Democrat and a liberal. You would have thought the election of Barack Obama was a sign that things had changed (which would mean you missed the steady drum roll of anti-liberal sentiment during the eight Bush years) but partisan animosity actually got worse under Obama, who Republicans hated because was a Democrat, a liberal, and black. Actually he is only half black, but because of the lingering effect of the Jim Crow policy tool known as the “one drop rule” that was used to disenfranchise African-Americans in the early part of the 20th century (most egregiously perhaps, the free Creoles of Louisiana), any person of mixed black/white ancestry is seen as black, nothing in between, which is a deeply racist sentiment.
Today, Republican hatred of Democrats runs so deep and vitriolic that the entire electorate is filled with a poisonous venom Trump was able to exploit for his own ends, and continues to exploit: White racism. Anti-Democrat/liberal anything. A disdain for the U.S. government itself and American institutions unless they can be made tools of right-wing, conservative, post-Tea Party, so-called Reagan Republican ideology. This last has come to such an ironic point that even when America’s own intelligence agencies tell Americans that Russia actively sought to disrupt the U.S. political system for reasons of its own, Republicans in power largely don’t want to hear it. When Obama wanted to go public with what the intelligence community knew about Russian interference before the election, Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell fiercely opposed him. They were more interested in winning the White House than defending the American electoral system.
Now there is a growing chorus of Republican attempts to undermine the credibility of a respected former head of the F.B.I. because he might turn up information critical of Trump and people on this team during the election cycle and in the run-up to the inauguration. They would rather denigrate and go after Robert Mueller than seriously consider whether or not Russian President Vladimir Putin (a former KGB agent who has a deep hatred for America because of the fall of the Soviet empire) may have compromised the president of the United States either by blackmailing him or bribing him or, for all anybody knows, brainwashing him.
Trump’s base is lining up behind him because they are in his political party and they will be loyal to him even as he screws them over and sells American ideals down the river because they won’t believe anything that’s not on Fox News or other conservative media. Americans are battling for control of a ship that is quickly beginning to sink, fighting each other to the death for whatever will be left. It’s now only all about winning (a campaign theme Trump kept hammering), a zero sum game that in America will be won by corporations and the rich. And Putin is laughing, because in the end, when American influence is diminished around the world and its democracy weakened at home, the big winners on the world stage will be Russia and China.
Goodbye America. We hardly knew you.
