The Collapse of the American Political Spectrum (Part 2 of 3)

Written by Igor Goldkind

Continued from Part 1 of 3

America is a melting pot goes the cliche, but it’s not a melting pot of people and cultures. Instead, America is a melting pot of people’s idealization of America. A merging of hopes and aspirations from all four corners of the world. All of the immigrants who came to America for whatever reason, imagined what this country represented, my Russian grandfather included. As a youth, he had posters of Hollywood film stars pasted on his walls. He had always dreamed of escaping the Jewish pogroms and escaping to America, the land of the Free, where people could work hard and prosper. He imagined the land where he wanted to live, to escape to, long before he had touched feet on American soil. It was his desire to pursue his dream, his optimistic illusion that moved him. So it was with the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, the Italians, the French, the English, the Spanish, the Indians, the Vietnamese, the Japanese, the Chinese and so forth. Wave upon wave of immigrants arriving literally on the wings of a prayer: that there might be a better life here for them and their families.

From the onset immigrants wanted to conform, to fit into this culture. When people are diverse, they strive to be the same and when people are the same they strive to be distinguished. Immigrants want to become American as fast as possible, or at least they want their children to be as a natural progression. When I asked my grandfather to teach me Russian he refused telling me that it was the language of the old country and best forgotten along with the victims of the Cossack pogroms he and my grandmother had left behind. This was the land of their aspirations and embraced whatever culture they could touch. More often than not, it was the aspirations of the previous generation of immigrants they embraced, that still lingered in the atmosphere like the scent from a million flowers. It was within this churn of dreams that America was invented.

This was the living, breathing American idealism that seamlessly overlapped the original Anglo-Protestant American idealism of the post-Enlightenment both confirming and revitalizing the ideal of America. What America really is, what it really represents is refreshed and reinvigorated with each and every new wave of immigrants. Refugees come here escaping war and tyranny because until this past year, this nation was the safe harbor of Liberty. This is why immigrants are so vital to our democracy and why Trump is so horrifically wrong to hinder their entry. It is optimism of the immigrant, their aspirations, their idealism, that refreshes our democracy and reminds us what is truly great about America and Americans. Not our jingoism (every nation state has that), but our openness to the other we may not first understand and our willingness to change and be changed by the world turning round.

The Black Panthers, the usual right wing's bugbear, at their worst fought for the right to bear arms (as provided by the Second Amendment) and to not be harassed by the Oakland police. They armed themselves to protect their civil rights and to protect themselves from racist police brutality. Don't believe me? Read your history and read the works of Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Malcolm X. All were fighting for their American civil rights as provided by and guaranteed in the text of the U.S. Constitution, the highest law of the land.

Even the destruction of property isn't prohibited by the Constitution but by other more localized laws. However, constitutional law trumps federal law, state law, county law and city law. If it's not spelt out in the Constitution then it has been down to the legal tradition to work it out through the enforcement of lower court decisions all the way to the Supreme Court, if need be. But those laws of governance and the rights of man are spelt out, such as the right to free speech, the right to dissent, the right to pursue one's happiness without deterrence and the right to practice any religion without harassment; it stands above any other law that has been passed locally or otherwise.

The U.S. Constitution (and its accompanying Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence), are by their very existence if not definition, progressive documents. They were all written, argued about and voted on to progress us beyond a decadent monarchy, church and systems of government that had existed for a millennium at least previously (with perhaps the exception of the short-lived English Civil War). They were also the rules of governance, not anti-government, but an equitable governance that assured the democratic representation of all citizens, documented or not.

If, on the other hand, you are terrified of change, resistant to progress and always proclaim the past as superior to the present, then you are conservative, but no longer of the right. If you were successfully transferred to the distant past, you would have been a Tory resisting the radical, never before tried, severance from the King and the religious establishment. You would have gone as far as to collude with our foreign enemies, like Benedict Arnold and Donald Trump did to undermine our democratic institutions and betray the Constitution that both had sworn to protect.

So much clarity is lost when we succumb to counterfactual history. In this case, “counterfactual” meaning, not only backward looking narratives that are factually inaccurate, but contrived narratives that actually defy and contradict the tenets they are meant to illustrate. Examples include the right wing attempt to reattach church and state with the preposterous notion that our history is Judeo-Christian just because a lot of Christians live and practice here. As well they should as the first amendment guarantees the right to worship anyway you want but NOT deny others the right to practice their religion or even lack of belief. Again, the United States was founded on the basis of reasoned judgement NOT faith and superstition.

This is exemplified in the malicious rewrite of history that forgets that most, if not all references to God in our founders documents were added later by Christian legislators. The credo ‘In God We Trust’ was actually added to our currency in the mid-20th century, to distinguish us from Communist atheism.

It's time for American patriots to start calling a spade a spade (as in pointed shovel, not a racial slur) if you oppose the general welfare of the American people, you stand against the Constitution. If you oppose every American's unqualified entitlement to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," you stand against the Constitution. If you favour the introduction of prayer into schools and the Christian faith above all other religions in our laws and institutions, then you stand against the Constitution. And if you favour or excuse the gerrymandering of political precincts for the sake of political advantage or to disenfranchise the right of all U.S. citizens to vote regardless, or invite a foreign power to interfere with a U.S. election, you stand against the Constitution.

If you collude with a foreign power to receive stolen information detrimental to your political opponent for political gain; not only do you stand against the Constitution. You're a traitor to it.

Continue to Part 3 of 3

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