Cry, the beloved country.

Among the many things I have come to despise our tea swilling, Galtian, Trump-humping, overlords for, is how they have ruined any celebration of national pride. Turning the American flag into a conservative litmus test of sorts makes it almost impossible to look at the symbol with a combination of both gratitude and sadness. Gratitude for being able to live what most people in the world would consider a rather privileged life, and sadness when you realize how far short the country has fallen of the ideals stated in the document the Declaration of Independence. True patriotism requires more than pride; it requires the ability to recognize the squandered potential of the United States and what a great country it could have been but chose not to be.

But it could be great again if we would only do the right things that we are being called to do.

Let’s be clear. Demanding America become a great country is no statement made in the MAGA sense of the morally bankrupt people who are Trump humpers, but asking it to go beyond the confines of our sad and useless devotion to the myth of American exceptionalism.

I’m not optimistic that the land of my birth can be saved from the almost terminal disease that is afflicting it. One of my favorite Constitutional writers, Garrett Epps, summed up the catastrophic situation we are in 5 years ago:

Trumpism is the symptom, not the cause, of the malaise. I think we have for some time been living in the post-Constitution era. America’s fundamental law remains and will remain important as a source of litigation. But the nation seems to have turned away from a search of values in the Constitution, regarding it instead as a set of annoying rules.

Even though Trump was resoundingly defeated in the past election, the continued embrace of the Big Lie and the poisonous combination of Republican obstructionism and a Supreme Court that has abandoned any pretense of being a guardian of the Constitution on justice makes it a less than 50/50 bet that the United States of America will survive as an effective, functional, multiparty democracy beyond its 250th birthday.

What’s really, really, bad about this prospect is that a large subset of the population is just fine with it.

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This is the thing. The idea that defeating Trump would bring these people to their senses about the basics of democracy – a hope I once held – is simply not tenable. Millions of Americans have decided not to live in a democracy because it didn't go their way once. https://t.co/VLUlViEaOw

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 2, 2021

Democracies can and do die. Sometimes explosively and many times slowly – without the people realizing it’s dying. An example of the latter is both Poland and Hungary, neither of which can be termed a “representative democracy’ anymore. The sad part of their transformation was the lack of real, determined opposition to it.

It may be, as I told a rather smug and self-assured Twitter troll a couple of weeks ago, that we are outgrowing the need for nation-states entirely. Technology is pushing us in directions the founders never really could envision. That said, whatever replaces them has to have rules that are based on fairness and equity – and in the part of the American continent that is the United States should give honest homage to the lines of liberty and equality of all men.

George Packer, David Brooks, and many other writers refuse to believe that America can die. I am not among them. America can rejuvenate itself, but at this current juncture in history, I am damned if I can see how. ” we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split into two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. “

Packer thinks we will continue along in a “cold war of sorts.” I think he needs to go back and look harder at the Ron DeSantis’, Tom Cotton’s, Dan Crenshaw’s, and Gregg Abbotts of this country. Men who look at someone like Viktor Orban and say to themselves, ” I want to be just like him.” They have taken all the bad things that are Trumpism and put them together with a much more efficient and less visibly corrupt machine, and they mean to have their way with America.

For me, ever since 2016, the 4th of July has not been a celebratory holiday. Instead, it’s been a day of mourning. Sadness for what could have been, what now – at my age – I will never see. Spending 22 years overseas and seeing many of our supposedly “unsolvable problems” solved has made that sadness even more bittersweet.

On July 4, 1776, the United States committed itself to a set of principles and declarations. It did not always live up to those words. Often it did not. But it could never wholly turn its back on them either. The words exerted their own power, in all kinds of unexpected ways.

Whether they still exert power in the coming years is yet to be seen. But, until they do – and we set ourselves back on a course of justice and equality – we shall “Cry The Beloved Country.

“Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.”

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