I Am an Ashamed American
We have institutionalized our worst cultural traits
I was having trouble getting out my next article. Not anymore. The United States Supreme Court handed writers everywhere subject matter that is so disgusting, so atavistic, and so injurious to the progress of our nation that sadly we will be writing about it for decades. The decisions handed down since Dobbs, and especially in the last couple days have institutionalized and stamped approval on the very worst aspects of historical American culture. Their decisions cause me to believe we will never overcome our most horrific cultural instincts. I’ll take a look at all of it here, not from a legal viewpoint which I am not qualified to discuss, but from a cultural one which we are all qualified to discuss.
There’s no avoiding offense here — I will offend 45% of the population — but this must be said. From the beginning of his candidacy those who supported Donald Trump have accepted and promulgated the most despicable aspects of our culture and of human nature. His grievance politics have always been about embracing, revelling in, wallowing in our culture’s white male heterosexual Christian American dominance, subjugation, and outright hatred of everyone who differs. It is the antithesis of loving thy neighbor that American Christians profess to believe but have seldom practiced.
Trump’s full-throated venomous expression of our historical national worst instincts gave permission to the dark minions in hiding to emerge from the shadows and openly walk the streets. Our culture, based as it was in colonization, genocide, enslavement, and mistreatment of all who are not white and male, has returned now to its inherent lowest common denominators: racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and aporophobia. In Trump those unthinking masses who inherited these attitudes built into our national ego found a champion, a guy who released our blackest demons and gave them permission to do their worst. Now because he had power to appoint an abhorrent high court to represent these hateful views, we have full institutional approval of our most repugnant cultural instincts engraved in the stone tablets of our legal system.
Photo by Liam Edwards on Unsplash
The Supreme Court has reversed a century of progress, a century of learning to accept our different neighbor. The clock has now turned back to 1923 when the Ku Klux Klan by the millions rode and hated with impunity. We now have no affirmative action except for rich white kids, no protection for LGBTQ+ (or anybody else) against discrimination, no reproductive health freedom for women, no forgiveness for poor students forced into indentured servitude in order to obtain an education.
These are horrible results, but what’s worse than the actual decisions is their enshrinement of our worst cultural attitudes for the long term. That enshrinement of hatred and discrimination into law ensures we will have the greatest difficulty advancing beyond them into a more enlightened and positive future. Supreme Court decisions tend to hold for at least a generation, even when they are dead wrong. I fear we will now be thrown back into repeating the same struggles for growth and progress that were fought during and after the Civil War and again from the 1960s to the present day. Whatever hope many of us had for our nation’s progress during the Obama era when it seemed we were finally emerging from an ugly cultural legacy to something brighter and better for everybody has been crushed. In a column about transformations, I am left with mostly despair and only the tiniest glow of hope. How do we recover and find our way back to the light when we have given ourselves over so completely to our darkest national demons?
