IN SEARCH OF A SILVER LINING

These ARE the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot HAVE ALREADY, in this crisis, shrunk from the service of their country; BUT IT IS MORE TRUE THAN EVER that they who stand by it now deserve the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Tom Paine wrote “The American Crisis” on December 23, 1776, one of the darkest times in the history of this country, a time so dark that it was possible to believe there would soon be no country.

The summer of 2024 is another of those times. Try as I have, I cannot remember a time so dark in the 80 years that have passed since I was born on the high tide of the American Republic, the year America liberated the world.

Rick Wilson is entirely correct when he writes this morning that yesterday may be the last Celebration of the America we have known and loved all our lives, should the dark forces surrounding Donald Trump win this November’s elections. The destruction of the Old Republic will happen so fast that it will all be over by next July Fourth; the America they will celebrate being great again will not be the country we celebrated yesterday.

This events of this past week will be recorded by future historians as one of the most important turning points in American History. Depending on what happens over the rest of 2024, those future historians may mark the decision by the Supreme Court to destroy the rule of law that no man is above the law as being as important to the fall of the American Republic as was Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon to the fall of the Roman Republic. Or they may recall that it was the moment that sparked resistance and led to victory over the dark forces.

Right now, our future is unwritten, unknown. It abounds with possibilities good and bad.

We stand at a turning point that will determine whether we proceed as a democracy or descend into authoritarianism.

Over the days since last Monday, I have thought a lot about Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Speech, particularly these lines:

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

“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.”

As of last Monday, with this cataclysmic decision on executive power, the democracy we thought we had, the Republic we thought would stand, and the country we thought we knew stands at the edge of the abyss wherein one can find the bones of every other democratic republic ever created. All of them. All the victims of national suicide.

The ruling states that a President’s official actions protect him from prosecution. This is a creation from whole cloth; there is nothing in the Constitution as written that says or even implies such a radical concept. Those words are a flimsy veil over the horrors that loom should Trump return to power.

There is nothing about this ruling would make it acceptable, even if applied to an ordinary President, but the possibility of Trump being reelected means this decision sets fire to the Constitution and everything in it.

This decision is a license for promoting unlimited corruption, criminality, and the abuse of executive power not seen since the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act of 1933.

While the conservative position on executive power has always been that it must be constrained, controlled, limited, bounded, and managed carefully to avoid abuses, to prevent both the return of monarchy and the depredations a populist urge to power, this decision clearly demonstrates that we are not dealing with “conservatives” and never have been.

We have been and are dealing with radical reactionary revolutionaries, who like similar movements before them have stolen the word “conservative” to mask their true nature. The seven letter synonym for “radical reactionary revolutionaries” is “fascist.”

We confront a well organized fascist assault on democracy itself, by people who no longer feel the need to hide their true nature. This decision didn’t emerge from conservative fear of executive power being too limited; it is an announcement that such power will now be expanded beyond all reason.

We are all Michael York’s character Brian Roberts in “Cabaret,” who is astonished when his good German friend, Maximilian von Heune, meets him clad in the black uniform of the Nazi SS, the moment he realizes that all his beliefs about the way things are were wrong.

This is that moment for us.

What is really at play here is the hyper-populist nationalism on the right is frustrated with the limits and controls of a Constitutional government. They are the autocrats who will declare the urgency of their causes and beliefs is so great that anything standing in their way must be swept aside. They believe the Constitution and the rule of law are impediments, not among America’s proudest achievements.

If Donald Trump returns to power, they will have control. They will be unaccountable. They will be shielded from any sanction. They will abuse that power in ways we can barely comprehend. They will never stop. They will never relinquish power. They will never cease their abuses of anyone who tries to oppose them. They will revel in the pain they cause to millions, wrapping themselves in the comfortable cloak of immunity.

A TAFM reader commented last Sunday that being old enough to remember when things seemed good, when battles won for progress seemed permanent, makes current affairs hard to take. “That everything I thought was good for fifty years is now going to be torn down?”

She’s right. For me, having been a participant in many of those fights, news like this decision by the Supreme Court to crown a criminal as king, is particularly dispiriting.

I’ve been looking for a silver lining in those dark clouds.

Looking back, I was reminded that We Have Been Here Before. Not perhaps “we” personally, but ancestors whose blood flows in our veins have been here before. Cursed with “living in ‘interesting’ times.”

In my personal case, I have a sixth great grandfather who was one of the few who didn’t desert in the face of defeat after defeat, who stuck around and then crossed the Delaware with General Washington to give us the gift of this country, which might not have survived its birth otherwise.

And a great-great grandfather who ran 20 miles through a hot and humid Pennsylvania summer in a wool uniform to be one of the few who reinforced the 18th Maine at Little Round Top, celebrating his sixteenth birthday the next day by holding the most important place of the most important battle of the war, and thereby saving the republic his ancestor fought to create.

Every human society ever created has believed that remembering one’s ancestors is important in tough times because it allows us to ask ourselves if we want to shame them by doing less than they did.

And every one of us has those people, those stories, to look to for guidance of what to do at a time like this. We are all the descendants of people who made the brave choice to leave behind everything they knew that was familiar - good and bad - and take the leap into the abyss in the hope of achieving the promise that there was a place where they could get chance to have the opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families.

We’re the descendants of people who fought every day - not just in wars - to make that future and keep it. Our present. We must each embrace their memory and live up to their dream.

The news is not always good. The fight is not always easy. Sometimes, you take a hit, and sometimes the hit is deserved - those are the ones that hurt the most. What to do then?

The answer to that question is what General Ulysses S. Grant said after acknowledging the Union Army’s terrible first day at the Battle of Shiloh, in 1862: “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

Times like this bring back to me the memory of the last conversation I had with Dan Bowling, one of the most interesting of that band of brothers I was so fortunate to know in my life and career. Looking back at his time in the war, he said:

“We were lucky, to be the people who were called on and did all that.”

So are we.

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