By Michael Pates, Editor
Before Election Day 2024, the oft-told tale had nearly become cliché:
On September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin — printer, publisher, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, signer of the Declaration of Independence, most famous and admired American alive (if not George Washington) — had just left Independence Hall in Philadelphia after co-framing what would become the U.S. Constitution, and was stopped by a woman on the street eagerly awaiting word.
“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” he replied. “If you can keep it.”
Fast-forward through that republic’s nearly 250 years’ worth of sometimes existential struggle — including, among other pivotal tests, one civil war, two world wars (with a Great Depression in-between), and several transformative civil rights movements — and the old yarn has life yet:
A bare majority of American voters has just elected Donald Trump — malignant narcissist, insatiable grifter, rapacious misogynist, sketchy billionaire, “reality show” host, shocker US president, impeached US president, pandemic-response botcher, would-be wrecker of the constitutional republic he’d sworn to “preserve, protect, and defend,” twice-impeached US president, jury-confirmed business fraud, court-declared sexual abuser and defamer, and multiple pre-trial criminal indictee who’s promised more of the same — to a second term as president of the United States.
If you can keep it, indeed.
While all the Democratic post-election navel-gazing and recrimination is understandable and inevitable, the practical result renders it largely irrelevant. What we once took for granted as a quadrennial political exercise in setting a national direction is now an existential crisis to resuscitate a moribund republic.
But, we were warned.
How
The ostensible reasons for this second, even more perverse electoral outcome are manifold, whether stated or implied: Inflation. Wrong track. Wokeness. Sex. Race. National Security. Nostalgia. Just a feeling. But the perceived answer to these ills isn’t Trump alone — most of this electorate also gave him a majority of House and Senate enablers to get that MAGA agenda cookin’ — a roiling stew chock full of mass deportations, transgender shutdowns, and entitlement rollbacks to go with the first-term legacy appetizer that was the Supreme Court’s revocation of reproductive rights.
Yet, important as they are, these issues and proposed answers are as old, in basic principle, as the republic itself. (Economics. Controlling immigration and national borders. Civil rights. The proper role of government. Equality.) They precede Donald Trump. The question for saving the republic is how a person of Trump’s manifold and manifest deficiencies got within a mile of the Republican presidential nomination again, never mind the White House.
That answer is pretty simple, really, though also convoluted and long in coming. The people who were elected to operate and maintain the system that the Framers framed, failed. As did We the People who elected and re-elected them, puttering along on democratic muscle memory — muscles built-up by the blood, sweat, and tears of prior generations — until, distracted by the baneful baubles of modern technology (another facet of our national strength, or so it seemed), we let the body politic wither to the point of defenselessness.
Enter Donald Trump, opportunistic political infection — twice impeached, twice tried, and twice acquitted; later convicted of 34 counts of criminal fraud in the hundreds of millions of dollars; found civilly liable for sexual abuse (really, rape, said the judge) and defamation to the tune of $80 million; indicted for serious national-security crimes; and, now, twice elected — and rest in peace, republic. Its immune system kept screaming “NO!” but, with too few exceptions, its built-in infection fighters — elected representatives, life-appointed jurists — rallied with anemic deflections and academic innovations.
Why
We’d been unwell for awhile, though. After the therapeutic infusions provided by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, the racists who’d resisted such medicine fled to the Republican party to recoup. Soon thereafter, the upheavals of assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate would be national body blows, to be sure, but the system finally responded and seemingly rebounded, returning to equilibrium.
The first truly insidious bug was the attack Newt Gingrich unleashed on our political culture. Finally elected, on his third try, to the US House of Representatives, in 1978, bent on becoming speaker, and seeking some way to break the Democrats’ 40-year dominance of the House, Gingrich resorted not to inspired argument and determined organization, but to relentless character assassination of Democratic leaders until, once their moral authority was sufficiently weakened, he could use the system to pry them from office.
It would finally work, forcing out the sitting speaker and, in the process, shifting our fragile political culture from one of studied comity to brazen confrontation, lighting a proven path of least resistance for raw ambition. Gingrich became speaker and let his minions impeach President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about adultery (despite his own lechery, later revealed). In a note of Machiavellian justice he, too, was ousted in short order by his party colleagues, not for his affair but ostensibly for being insufficiently conservative — hardly a noble rationale but arguably another case of systemic self-correction, albeit by the increasingly radical forces he’d nurtured.
Yet the pox was established. It would flare with growing intensity and widening partisanship through the early aughts until “hope and change” made what, in retrospect, would be a last stand. When Barack Obama became the first Black man elected president, on an inspirational, “yes we can” platform (premised on the “hope” that bipartisan cooperation could be restored), Gingrich, now a high-paid lobbyist (naturally) and his savvier Senate counterpart, Republican leader Mitch McConnell, huddled in secret to hatch a ‘hell no’ counterplot, with the overarching purpose, as McConnell later avowed, of rendering Obama a one-term president.
It largely failed. The hell-no happened, but Obama and the Democrats, with virtually no Republican cooperation, rescued the US economy from the Great Recession, propped up the cratering auto industry, revolutionized health care, and re-established American prestige globally. And Obama was re-elected by yet another popular majority.
But all the while, the political culture kept withering. The once-inchoate Gingrich legacy finally found form in the so-called “Tea Party” of far-right Republicans, who opposed anything “Obama” and “Democratic” and were buttressed, bolstered and, ultimately, became beholden to an ever-sprawling “conservative” media machine — first to Rush Limbaugh on radio, then to Fox News on cable television, and, now, to a seemingly boundless online hellscape of mis- and disinformation cynically stoked by unchecked social-media barons in the name of “free speech.”
It was this toxic environment, brewed of unbounded ambition, that would finally combine to break the Great Republic. For all their personal fallibilities, the Framers had recognized the arrogation of power as fatal to human freedom and flourishing (their own most of all). So, rather than rationalize or yield to the faults of human nature, they acknowledged and built defenses against them by dividing power so that institutional jealousies would compete, not conspire, and thereby avoid tyranny. Operationalizing this system with an ethic of basic comity and presumptive (if skeptical or interested) good will, these separated powers, through struggle and strife, internal and external, would build a nation that, in the historical blink of an eye, became the most diverse, innovative, self-reflective, adaptive, profitable, powerful, supportive, and admired that the world had ever known.
But then one day, having stripped it for political points over a couple of decades, Mitch and ilk finally broke it. The Senate majority leader tore down the few dangling shreds of comity and good will remaining for a Supreme Court seat that his side didn’t deserve. He refused to schedule a hearing for Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, ostensibly because the eight months then remaining in Obama’s second term was “too close” to the next election to appoint a new justice. (You see, “the American People,” a clear majority of whom had already re-elected Obama to a full four years, “deserved a chance” to vicariously pre-ratify his new nominee the following November, when Obama would be off the ballot and the Republican candidate, whomever that might be, might win, and might not choose that nominee.)
Thus, in another triumph of raw ambition and unbridled power of the kind the Framers had sought to prevent, the officer responsible for shepherding the long-established process for populating the Supreme Court of the United States abrogated the United States Senate’s constitutional duty for simple (yet profound) political advantage.
That one hurt.
Descent
Meanwhile, in a vaudevillian perversion of Dickens, Donald Trump had infamously mounted and descended the peach & gold escalator at his Trump Tower in New York City the previous June to announce his run for the Republican presidential nomination.
At first dismissed as laughable, Trump and his excoriation campaign, featuring diatribes against undocumented immigrants (“rapists”) and other declared undesirables, caught on, plague-like, with the Republican primary electorate. But then that electorate, too, had been disfigured well before Trump, a lifelong putative Democrat, had ever thought about exploiting them politically.
As young Gingrich and McConnell were plotting their climbs, the Republicans then in leadership, along with their newfound step-brethren of defector-Democrats, adopted the so-called “Southern Strategy” in reaction to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement. A key legacy of that race-based strategy was to gerrymander right-leaning districts into evermore secure congressional seats, thereby guaranteeing future victories and diluting hard-won minority power. It, too, worked brilliantly through the Reagan era, strengthening Republican representation to dismantle or discredit President Johnson’s Great Society social programs and blunt the political and economic influence of African-Americans and other minorities.
One of the strategy’s side-effects, though, was that Republican candidates, in order to secure their party’s nomination, had to outflank their opponents to win-over the die-hard primary voters they’d gerrymandered into concentrated, iron-clad districts, thereby fomenting a race to the radical right for virtually every elected office, whether local, state, or federal.
Grift
This radicalizing effect, which Gingrich would later fuel and rocket to power, was only intensified further by the flaming media cesspool that Donald Trump cannon-balled into in June 2015. As he barked his trademark ignorant arrogance and picked off, one-by-one, the dumbstruck, slack-jawed, old-guard stalwarts in the Republican primary race, right-wing media, catching on to Trump’s act, joined the carnival, trumpeting his supposed ‘tell-it-like-it-is authenticity.’
It was in-keeping with their business model. Though he wasn’t the only progenitor, Rupert Murdoch was (and remains) the quintessential mogul of the modern ‘conservative’ media market, be it radio, cable television, or online social media. Starting in his native Australia, Murdoch bought a major newspaper and converted it to a successful tabloid rag; then tried his hand in the UK and did well there; then jumped to the US, founding the Fox cable network in the early 1990s and, in 1996, launching Fox News, billed as the conservative alternative to “liberal” mainstream media.
The model features both straight news (with a rightward slant) and, in primetime, a series of one-hour shows starring smug, snarky hosts who lay into liberals and/or yuk it up with right-wing fellow know-it-alls. The key, though, is to provide that news, opinion, and information only in ways that ratify viewer prejudices and stoke their grievances — facts and context be damned. In short, they’ve recognized, captured, and cultivated a market of angst, preying on their audience and profiting spectacularly from it, even as they settle massive defamation lawsuits. It’s tabloid journalism and market capitalism harmonized, buyer and body politic beware.
Shirk
The practical, symbiotic effect of the generational Republican power grab and right-wing media hack today has been to make any confronting of Trump fatal to Republican incumbents and challengers alike, to the detriment — and now to the demise — of our shared republic.
First, it gave Trump an electoral college victory in 2016 against all conventional odds. Even then, the character flaws had been unmistakable; the destruction-lust, deafening; the slogan, “Make America Great Again,” Orwellian. But it could be dismissed (and often was) as purely rhetorical. And besides, if worse came to worst, the Framers framed a system tested over two-and-a-half centuries. It’ll hold.
But then the Muslim ban, as promised, yet contrary to freedom of religion under the First Amendment; family separations at the border, as planned, yet offensive to constitutional due process of law (not to mention the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Statue of Liberty’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — never mind); pandemic response, ruinous yet characteristic — so as to “keep my numbers down” and deflect blame (just plain evil). Yet even these and other monstrosities, too, could be rationalized as grotesque policy and generalized incompetency and not a threat to the republic per se, and which a Trump defeat in the next election could start to resolve and prevent from recurring. Let the voters handle it.
But wait. Even before the pandemic, there was that first Trump impeachment for attempting to bribe a head of state to help fix the next election. Most Senate Republicans voted to acquit: Again, if it’s truly a problem, the American people can say so in the next election. Let them take care of it. Meanwhile, we have primaries to consider.
Finally, the next election. Trump is defeated. Naturally, he tries to manipulate the judiciary into somehow reversing the result, but judges aren’t having it. Whereupon Mitch congratulates Biden on his victory.
There. See — the system held.
Collapse
Until it didn’t. Trump, simply unwilling to accept defeat, then used radicalized media to rally his radicalized supporters to Washington on January 6, 2021 — the day that the electoral college votes were to be formally counted and approved — whipped them into a final frenzy, and set them upon a near-defenseless Capitol, where his own vice president was performing his constitutional duty. People died.
Even Mitch blamed Trump. But, after order had been painstakingly restored, there were Republicans who still challenged the legitimacy of the process, which concluded nonetheless. And when the Democrats organized a hurry-up impeachment to disable Trump from ever running for federal office again, Mitch and ilk opposed that, too. Let the courts handle him, he said. What he didn’t say, but everyone knew he meant, was that the risk of Republican defeat in the next primary elections by voting to convict was just too great.
And so, at every turn, the constitutional officers most responsible for defending the republic from a rogue president, failed — not only in defending it from actual assault by that president, but in preventing the potential of it. Both the spirit and the letter of the legal framework the Framers had erected, and which had withstood two-and-a-half centuries of trial and tribulation, was weakened from within by a mere three or four decades of unrelenting, petty ambition, withering rhetorical assault, and leeching moral commitment until, on November 5, 2024, Trump knocked it down with maximum, sustained invective, leaving The People alternately cheering or mourning and, in either case, without a constitutional republic: Two branches of government, once resolutely separated, have now collapsed into one; and the third, with its recent executive immunity decision, teeters precariously toward the pile.
Power, once divided to secure liberty, is now effectively consolidated.
If We Can Reclaim It
We find ourselves, then, back at Franklin’s challenge: It was a hell of a run but it seems that, ultimately, we couldn’t keep the republic the Framers gave us. Indeed, the essential reason for this failure may be summed up by another observation Franklin made before the American revolution: "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." In our case, the people we elected to safeguard our liberty-preserving Constitution sought instead to safeguard their careers; and We the People, whose liberty was in the balance, failed to hold them accountable for it.
But, within our history, hope yet resides. On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln, then a young lawyer and member of the Illinois House of Representatives, in what would become his famous “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” picked up Franklin’s then-50-year-old “if you can keep it” thread, and held forth on how the United States might lose its constitutional republic, which he revered:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. . . .
Then he considered how to keep it. The Founding Fathers, he said,
were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those be molded into general intelligence, morality and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws; and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last[.]
A generation later, on December 1, 1862, grappling with the shared responsibility to save that republic, President Lincoln, in his Second Annual Message to Congress, elaborated his Lyceum advice:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.
Americans today are not locked in armed combat. But we are in locked in a conflict whose implications are just as existential. They concern not to whom our system will apply (as in the Civil War) nor whether that system is operating as it should (as in 1968 and other tumultuous eras), but whether the people elected to operate it, and the people who vote for them, and the people who inform the people, have simply left it to die.
Four years from now, we’ll know.