In the United States there are four traditional patriotic holidays, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving Day. All the other national holidays, Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day, Columbus Day, and Veterans’ Days are not celebrated in all states or on the same day. What is important about these four patriotic holidays—as well as the others--is that they underscore the allegiance that Americans have to fundamental democratic values: freedom, love of country, gratitude, and work.
For over a decade now and especially since 2016, these values appear to be slipping away. In fact, they have been replaced by the values which would be much more appropriate for an authoritarian regime and not a democracy.
The last few months have underscored the fact that the behavior of President Donald Trump and his followers was not merely a temporary aberration. In fact, unless the Democratic Party can buck the tradition that the sitting president’s party cedes power in the off-year election, the 2022 congressional elections clearly would favor the GOP. If that were to occur, all the anti-Biden rhetoric that has been spewing out of Congress and from Mar-a-Lago will only grow louder and be more disruptive to American democracy.
Not since the days of the Civil War has American democracy been as challenged as it is today and this is not exclusively Donald Trump himself, but his sycophants, Republican congressional leaders, and his mass followers. The analogy with the pre-Nazi period is stark.
One needs to consider only these issues:
1. The leadership of the Senate of the United States did not consider it in the vital interests of the nation to establish a bi-partisan independent commission to investigate the attack on January 6th on American institutions since 1861. While the measure passed the House, the Republican leadership also opposed having an independent commission determine the facts concerning the insurrection. Republican leaders were more concerned that they and the former president might be implicated by a commission, than they were interested in insuring that all Americans would recognize their commitment to restoring the integrity of democratic values that were challenged by the rioters.
2. Republican controlled legislatures throughout the country are determined to enact legislation which will encumber not enhance the ability of American citizens to exercise their democratic right to cast votes in elections. Efforts are being made to reduce the locations, the hours, and access to voting. These proposed laws seek to undermine the ability of citizens to vote by absentee or vote early. This after repeated states and courts have confirmed that the 2020 elections were the most fairly conducted and recorded elections in U.S. history.
3. Over 50% of identified Republicans still assert that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Joe Biden was not the democratically elected president.
4. There are some states which are considering bills to permit state legislatures or state officials to decertify the results of elections. Votes cast, therefore, in free and open democratic elections could be rejected by political leaders and even some appointed officials,
A functioning democracy requires that differences are resolved through conflict resolution and compromise. This philosophy is broken in Washington. (There remains the possibility that this process might still prevail in the negotiations over the infrastructure package.) Confrontations used to be the beginning and the penultimate steps in negotiations within a democratic governing system. Today it is has largely become normative. If a more consensual model does not prevail, it is not clear if democracy will last.
Lest one assume that these are mere cumbersome bureaucratic roadblocks, the nature of conspiracy theories reached a new low at the QAnon convention in Dallas in the remarks of Michael Flynn. Former Lt. General Flynn--who served as Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, who had pled guilty to a felony, but was subsequently pardoned by President Trump--addressed a QAnon rally on Sunday. Flynn called for a military coup in the U.S. to retake control of the Government just as had occurred successfully in February in Myanmar, when in a bloody coup the army overthrew the democratically elected government in the name of alleged allegations of voter fraud.
As Americans consider their blessings as they now emerge from the throes of COVID-19 after one of the worst years the nation has endured, it is incumbent to consider the glory and fragility of democracy. In his State of the Union Address to Congress on January 6,1941, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the nation as it stood on the precipice of entering the Second World War. He understood the democratic values which were being challenged then as they are today. The Four Freedoms, F.D.R. proclaimed were the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from fear, and the freedom from want. To sustain these values in 2021 one needs to add the freedom to ensure that democracy will always prevail.
On Memorial Day 2021, one ought to ask whether the way our democracy is functioning today is the cause for which the soldiers who are remembered today gave their lives?
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