Has the U.S. Hit Bottom Yet?

Asking for some friends . . .

That appalling incident with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S president Donald Trump, and U.S. vice president JD Vance took place on the 39th day of the second Trump presidency. I just counted.

I post this in the early morning of Day 44. I have been writing it since Day 40. I’m good with words. I make my living with words. What I haven’t been able to do lately is to string words together in sentences that make sense of the situation.

I was not born yesterday, or the day before that. As I’ve written before, I came of political age in 1968, the year I turned 17. By any definition it was a turbulent year, and the years that followed did not turn me into a flag-waver, or even a flag-flyer.

But before February 2025 was done, we were in turbulence that makes 1968 and my first six decades look reasonably understandable and even manageable, at least in retrospect.

By the end of February —

• One of the two major U.S. political parties had gone blatantly anti-democratic¹

• The other major party was still struggling to get its act together

• The Supreme Court had been for at least two decades systematically pulling the supports out from under “our democracy.” (Pay special attention to Citizens United [2010] and Shelby County v. Holder [2013] and, of course, to Trump v. United States [2024]. That last case name tells the story so well it should be a book title.)

• Much of the U.S. electorate didn’t know how government works (abstract) or how it affects their daily lives (concrete).

None of this came out of nowhere. When an alcoholic or addict “hits bottom,” they’ve been on a general trajectory for some time and it usually isn’t a secret to anybody around them, though some may pretend they don’t see it or recognize it for what it is.

Too many people are talking and acting as if this all began when Trump was elected the first time. Got news for all the wishful thinkers: It didn’t.

On the last day of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when asked what form of government the conferees had decided on, Benjamin Franklin is reported to have responded “A republic, if you can can keep it.”

Ben Franklin was long before my time, but “my time” has included several assassinations, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the Vietnam War, Nixon’s dirty tricks (including Watergate), Spiro Agnew, and CIA support for the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s legitimate government in Chile. After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, we got Iran-Contra,² the refusal to take HIV/AIDS seriously, tax cuts for the rich, the busting of unions, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex.

I could go on and on, but the notion that America deserved a sterling reputation before Trump came along, that it ever was a “shining city on the hill,” is belied by the historical record. When I came of political age in the mid-to-late '60s, the U.S. was on the wrong side of just about every liberation struggle in the world, all in the interest of "fighting communism" and supporting U.S. corporations.

The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Today’s Republicans, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis are doing their damndest to make sure we never learn it. How can we remember what we never learned?

I and many others have managed to learn about events we were too young to remember, if we were even born when they happened. Ethnic cleansing and the Trail of Tears.³ Jim Crow. White violence against Black communities, especially prosperous Black communities like Tulsa. The Palmer raids and the long reign of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.⁴ McCarthyism.⁵

And white violence against the civil rights movement, including the murder of activists like Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo,⁶ James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young Black girls were killed.⁷ And, of course, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, my coming-of-age year.

Short version: I've never been proud to be an American. I take it as a challenge: we can be and do so much better than this. What happened at the White House last Friday might have been the worst in presidential history, though 1/6/2021 deserves consideration. At the same time, it's Trump's and Vance's clumsiness and ineptitude that set it apart from so many American actions of the post-WWII decades. And Volodymyr Zelenskyy's courage in speaking truth to power sets an inspiring example for all of us pro-democracy Americans.

Where do we go from here? If we want to keep our Republic and get our aspiring democracy back on track, “up” is the only possibility.

If you’re on Martha’s Vineyard, join us on March 15 (which is the Ides of March, btw)! If you’re not, keep your eye out for actions in your area.

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NOTES

1. To be clear, this did not happen overnight, or since the beginning of the first Trump administration. Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crack-up of the Republican Party (Doubleday, 2022) is really good, but as the title suggests it focuses on the rise of Newt Gingrich and how it came about. (See this Guardian review from September 2022.) Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2020) takes a much longer view. For causes, I’d take a hard look at Nixon’s southern strategy and the consequent emigration of unrepentant white Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. There they were joined by religious institutions and others shocked by women’s rights in general and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision (January 1973) in particular.

2. Since I was only two years old in August 1953, I was not aware until years later of the U.S.-British-backed Iranian army coup that threw out democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and buttressed the rule of the autocratic, U.S.-friendly shah. It was an important step on the road to the 1979 Iranian revolution, which replaced the shah with the autocratic, U.S.-hostile ayatollahs. Wonder of wonders, by 2023 — 70 years later — the CIA had come around to calling the 1953 coup “undemocratic.”

3. A hearty recommendation for Rebecca Nagle’s By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land (HarperCollins, 2024). It weaves together the “removal” of Native peoples from the U.S. Southeast with Sharp v. Murphy, an Oklahoma murder case that dealt with Native land sovereignty and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — which ruled in favor of the tribes.

4. As a young woman in the antiwar movement, I heard plenty of stories from my elders who had been targeted for their activism in the labor and/or civil rights movements, and/or for their actual or suspected membership in the Communist Party USA.

5. Joe McCarthy’s body has long since moldered in its grave, but its stench has never gone away.

6. Google Liuzzo’s name and you’ll learn more about her, why she went to Selma, and how she died. This October 2024 blog post by Jonathan P. Baird is very good.

7. I might have learned the names of the victims from Richard Fariña’s song “Birmingham Sunday,” as sung by Joan Baez. Fariña died in 1966, age 29, but his song lives on, not least in a stunning 2017 recording by Rhiannon Giddens. Thanks to Baez and Fariña, I have never forgotten the names of the girls: Addie Mae Collins. Denise McNair. Cynthia Wesley. Carole Robertson. “And the choir kept singing of freedom.”