It's Been Four Years Since a Mob, Incited by Trump, Stormed the Capitol in an Insurrection Intended to Disrupt the Peaceful Transfer of Power

So it will be that on the fourth anniversary of the now infamous Trump Insurrection, a title which I will use, including capital letters, to communicate exactly what it was, the electoral votes of the former President who incited it will be certified as the winner of the 2024 election.  There's been nothing in American history quite like this, something which the founding fathers of this country could not, on the days when they were speculating about the worst that could possibly happen if they adopted the constitution they had drafted, have ever imagined.  

Today, the uniquely American values that were the result of America's evolution from being part of a colonial empire under the rule of the British monarchy to reaching the heights of world military and economic power as a constitutional democracy, will be tossed aside, trashed, and completely ignored as Congress certifies the electoral vote which will put Trump, the instigator and initiator of the insurrection, back in the White House.  The evil that has succeeded in edging its way back into power, after being defeated, and then showing itself for exactly what it was, has replaced patriotic American values.  A nation that once succeeded in replacing monarchial power with the rule of law has now abandoned that rule of law.  

I honestly have no words which can describe this historical abberration.  It is, in fact, much more than that.  It is a stunning reversal of the growth and development of America as the world's leading democracy, the intrusion of licentious demagoguery, a rejection of the values upon which this country was founded and has existed for over 240 years.  The constitution states that the nation has a government "of the people, by the people and for the people."  If this election really is legitimate, and the people, by a slim majority of those who bothered to vote, but more by the absence of millions who didn't bother, have chosen this as their government, then there have been some massive failures of cultural and social instutitions that once supported individual freedom, and protected individual diversity.  

Elections Have Consequences

We've done this to ourselves.  As far back as the Bush administration, Republicans were supporting plans to divide up and sell the government to the highest bidder.  "Privatize" is always on the table, as is "cut the budget," for the sake of cutting taxes for the wealthy.  And when it comes to controlling the narrative, and getting the message out to the electorate, we had Rush Limbaugh, who constantly advocated for a "winner take all" mentality, abhorring the give and take of bipartisan cooperation and negotiation.  Limbaugh pushed Republicans, who were more often than not a minority, to use any opening they had to stack the justice system in their favor, and to those who were appointed, he offered encouragement to ignore the law and always rule in favor of conservative causes.  

Democrats just couldn't seem to get their voters energized for mid-term elections.  We owe the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court to our party's efforts in mid-term elections being stymied by what was the minority party, because we kept playing the game the old way, long after Republicans changed the rules.  Some of those judges sitting on the federal bench, giving favors to the President who appointed them, rather than ruling according to the law, are gifts of elections we lost this century.

John Dewey, the father of progressive education in the United States, declared that maintaining democracy required an educated electorate.  Republicans, focusing on winning down ballot elections and gaining control of state legislatures during mid-term elections, cut the education budgets whenever they could.  This meant that public schools had to cut budgets, and in order to maintain a focus on more technical, science and math objectives, it meant cutting social studies requirements, which is just fine with Republicans.  And into this gap, in which we have also lost our free press, comes the fascist demagoguery of Trump.  

The Subversion of American Christianity

The blending of several brands of conservative Evangelicalism, including Fundamentalists of the Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones variety, with right wing extremist politics has produced a cult that has tranformed a good segment of American Christendom into an enemy of democracy.  One of the best books directly addressing this subject, prompted by the January 6th, 2021 Trump Insurrection is Defending Democracy From Its Christian Enemies by Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta.  

Gushee points out that Christians in America once embraced democracy, supporting it wholeheartedly, and in the case of some Evangelicals, modeled their church governance in democratic fashion.  He gives a good perspective on how it was that, among the more conservative elements of Evangelicalism, some of its leaders, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who openly organized conservative Evangelicals into political structures to turn the vote to Reagan in 1980, but that underlying their open support was none other than Rev. Billy Graham, and a group of other Evangelical leaders who didn't want to be as open with breaking down the walls of church and state, but who still leaned toward a Christian nationalist perspective with a measure of white supremacy thrown in for good measure.  

They've had to set aside their Christian convictions and values in order to embrace Trump's worldly, licentious lifestyle and blasphemous declarations of not having done anything requiring God's forgiveness, and this has allowed a vacuum to sweep in.  Evangelical leaders who support Trump have given in to the temptation to replace spiritual power to achieve the will of God with worldly power and wealth, which is not God's will for his church.  In so doing, they've become a cult that has misled millions of Americans. 

Can We Prevent the Destruction of Constitutional Democracy

The odds are stacked against that happening at the present time.  We have six justices on the Supreme Court, who have the responsibility for interpreting the Constitution, who have already ruled against its basic principles, and the clear intentions of the founders, to do political favors for the President who appointed them, and who want to use their position for their own accumulation of wealth and power.  And there are plenty of those with the same motives sitting on the federal bench, as we have seen in the case of classified document theft.  

We've lost our free press.  It's not possible, it seems, to penetrate the media bubble in which many Americans seem to be lost.  

We're about to find out exactly how bad it will get.  Whether we can hang on until the mid-terms, or if we can even make a difference at the mid-terms, we are still a long way from finding out.  And when we had the chance, the Justice Department fell short of the mark.  That makes me wonder whether Democrats really did believe Trump was the existential threat to Democracy that was being claimed.  

We will know soon enough.