Your Apathy Is Truly Disheartening

[HARDCORE]

4-17-2019

“Along For The Ride” are the only four words that I can come up with to describe the utter apathy that is being displayed, as concerns the virtually uncontested invasion of our soil, our rights, our sovereignty, our identity, and even our responsibilities, by foreign and a few domestic entities alike, who are openly defying our people, while invading our borders, violating our laws, and indeed, even negating our rights!

“I would be remiss in my beliefs” - if I did not at least sound off on how I personally felt, even though I adamantly believe that we are fast approaching a point of no return!!

Unfortunately, what I have had to say apparently means nothing any more? And just like our borders themselves, the documents that led to our inception, those who gave up their lives to secure our liberties and right to exist, and even the mandates of “Our Founding Fathers Themselves” - these things have all become moot and inconsequential to elements of our political oligarchy! Indeed - “Our Nation” has become a virtual grab bag and the rip and run society to the world and even our own political machine as well, in my opinion?

And worst of all, “far too many of you no longer even give a damn” if “Rome Upon The Potomac” and its ultra-vested dealings, continue to reverse nearly two and a half centuries of “American Progress, American Blood, American Sweat, American Tears, American Toil, American Rights, and even Good Old American Dedication” are chewed-up and puked-out in the process! Pathetic!!

Hardcore

[Boats]

How Americans Lost Their National Identity
By: Hazony is the author of The Virtue of Nationalism
RE: http://time.com/5431089/trump-white-nationalism-bible/

Today, we hear the sloppy, misconceived term “white nationalism” more often than we hear about American nationalism. And whenever the term nationalism is raised, it is often quickly conflated with racism. For instance, at an Oct. 23 rally, President Donald Trump declared that he was a nationalist. He used the term in contrast with globalist, who he called “a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much.” Many commentators quickly deplored the President’s statement as a dog-whistle admission that he truly supports “white nationalism,” once again suppressing legitimate debate over the value of American nationalism, while insisting that racialist “white nationalism” is what we really should be talking about.

This is a problem. Because it’s American nationalism that the U.S. needs right now. Never in our lifetimes have we seen America’s various tribes so divided, so intolerant of one another, so quick to delegitimize and even threaten violence. The mutual loyalty that has bound Americans together as a nation seems like it is disappearing. The bitter argument over ongoing large-scale immigration is only a proxy for this deeper issue: Can Americans ever unite again around a shared national story? Can they ever see themselves as brothers again?

“White nationalism” is used to describe the small fringe of Americans who believe nationality is defined by the color of one’s skin. These groups promote the kind of loosely Darwinian thinking that motivated German Nazism: What’s decisive, they say, is the “quality” of one’s genes. So people should obsess about skin color and the shape of one’s facial features — traits that supposedly tell you who’s got the right genetic make-up.

Most Americans find these attempts to reduce nationality to race repugnant. This is because race politics brought about the murder of millions in Europe, while in America it produced slavery, civil war and a legacy of domestic unease — and occasional violence — that hasn’t died down to this day.

But “white nationalism” is also misconceived because “whites” are not a nation: We’re familiar with the English, Dutch, French and Polish nations. They’re recognized by a common cultural inheritance, especially a distinctive language and religion, and by the bonds of mutual loyalty that come of centuries of joint struggle. The Polish nation, for example, is known by its Polish language, Catholicism and a long, painful history of striving for independence from Germany and Russia. By contrast, no “white” nation is found in any history book. There is no distinctive “white” language, religion or cultural inheritance. The idea that “whites” are a nation is just so much make-believe. Instead of deepening Americans’ pride in, and attachment to, the remarkable Anglo-American political and religious traditions that brought the United States into being, “white nationalists” conduct their parades under bizarre new flags they have invented for themselves: They prefer to replace the authentic American nationalist tradition with a concocted new racial identity that is just as much a break with the American past as the neo-Marxist revolution being proposed by the Left.

But if the American nation is not a race, what is it? It’s now often said that the American nation is actually an “idea” — the idea that all men are created equal, for example, or that the powers of government derive from consent, as suggested in the Declaration of Independence. But that isn’t any more plausible than the racism of the alt-right. After all, if America is a handful of abstract principles drawn from 18th century Enlightenment philosophy, what are we to make of Americans who dissent from this philosophy — on biblical or Aristotelian, Burkean or Humean grounds? Does philosophical disagreement mean you’re not an American? Of course not. Similarly, if a people in a foreign land pledges allegiance to the ideals of the Declaration, does that make them Americans? No, it doesn’t.

Most Americans aren’t attracted to white-racist politics or to the racialist identity politics of the neo-Marxist left. But the claim that America is just “an idea” hasn’t gotten much traction either. Most Americans remain attached to a more traditional way of understanding their nation — one that isn’t clearly articulated very often these days.

Not long ago, Americans still possessed an intuitive understanding of nationhood whose source was in the Bible. The King James Bible uses the terms “nation” and “people” thousands of times. In reading Scripture, Americans — like their English, Dutch and Scottish cousins — encountered God promising Abraham, “I will make of thee a great nation” (Genesis 12.2); and telling Moses, “Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19.6). Ancient Israel was, for generations of Bible-literate Americans, the prototype of a “nation.”

In the Bible, “nations” aren’t defined by race. The Bible reports that many Egyptians joined the Israelites and stood with them at Mt. Sinai; and that King David was descended from Ruth, a Moabite who joined herself to Israel, saying “Your people is my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1.16). In the Bible, nations adopt individuals and even entire tribes.

While biblical nations aren’t defined by race, they are also not merely “an idea.” Biblical Israel consists of a diversity of tribes, who are nonetheless bound to one another by language and law, and a mutual loyalty arising from facing adversity together in the past. Notice that when Ruth joins herself to Israel, she embraces both the Jewish people and its God. It’s not just the “idea” of the one God, then, that makes her an Israelite. She binds herself to the actual families and tribes of this nation, their language and their ways of doing things: “Your people is my people.”

American nationalists used to think of their nation in just this way: Neither as a race, nor as an abstract “idea” — but rather as a diversity of tribes sharing a heritage and a mutual loyalty born of a joint history. The original American states, while internally diverse, nonetheless largely shared the English language, Protestant religion and the common law, and had fought Britain together. The nation reflected in these characteristics was so strong that Americans were gradually able to adopt other “tribes” into the mix: Catholics, Jews and — with time — the African-Americans who had lived through the evils of enslavement and segregation.

But American nationalists sought to counterbalance increasing diversity with a carefully protected common cultural inheritance: New territories were admitted as American states only once they had an English-speaking majority and adopted the common law. The eradication of slavery in the South and polygamy among the Mormons was likewise the result of a common cultural inheritance, descended from English Puritanism, which Americans insisted on maintaining even at the price of coercion.

It was not until after World War II that these core institutions at the heart of classical American nationalism — Biblical religion, the Anglo-American legal inheritance, and the English language — began to fade. The disintegration of classical American nationalism, and the consequent loosening of the bonds of mutual loyalty that had held Americans together, has created a vacuum at the heart of American national identity. It is this vacuum that revolutionary new theories such as “white nationalism” hope to fill.

As Americans have stopped reading the Bible, they have also lost an intuitive sense of what a “nation” is, and of what must be done to maintain it. At a time when large-scale immigration is at the forefront of U.S. politics, a biblically-rooted American nationalism — one that recognizes the nation as a diversity of tribes bound together by a common heritage and mutual loyalty — is sorely lacking from American public debate.

[Boats]

American democracy is in crisis, and not just because of Trump
By: Simon Tisdall / The Guardian
RE: https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-supreme-court

Note: Old news but still applicable.

Dark money, unchecked presidential power and a politicised supreme court are wrecking the world’s flagship democracy.

~ Nineteen months into the Trump presidency, US democracy is running into serious trouble – but it is not all, or even mostly, Donald Trump’s fault. This crisis of governance has been building for decades. It is only now, as Trump’s iconoclastic assaults on established beliefs, laws, institutions and values test the system to destruction, that the true scale of pre-existing weaknesses and faultlines is becoming apparent.

This deep crisis of confidence, bordering on national meltdown, comes as the US hurtles towards midterm elections in November – a familiar American ritual now rendered strangely unpredictable by fears of foreign manipulation and an FBI investigation that could, by some estimates, lead ultimately to Trump’s impeachment. The process of degradation affects US citizens and all those around the world who hold up the US democratic system as a paradigm worthy of emulation. Friends worry that the country’s ability to sustain its traditional global leadership role – moral and practical – is being undermined. Enemies, principally anti-democratic, authoritarian competitor regimes in Russia and China, hope this is so.

Take a case in point, with global implications: Trump has repeatedly bragged about his willingness to use nuclear weapons. As commander-in-chief, he oversees the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Last year he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, a nation of 25 million people. He has also threatened Iran. Such lunatic recklessness appals many Americans. But it transpires there is little they could do to stop Trump should he decide, on a whim, to press the “nuclear button”.

Checks do exist. There is a chain of command that cannot be bypassed. But security experts say nobody, not even the secretaries of state and defence or the chairman of the joint chiefs, has legal power to block a presidential launch order. What could be less democratic? Yet this dilemma was not created by Trump. It has existed for many years. Congress is now belatedly reviewing it.

Trump’s frequent use of “executive orders” has provided another wake-up call. Most infamous was his travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries, but others – concerning his Mexican border wall, his unilateral imposition of steel tariffs, and his reversal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act – were also highly contentious. Yet, once issued, such orders are rarely overturned. After numerous legal challenges, the supreme court upheld the travel ban.

Many were shocked to discover that a US president could issue diktats and fatwas like the worst kind of unelected despot or ayatollah. But the use of such orders, avoiding public scrutiny, is long-established. Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor by this means. Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation ending slavery was an executive order. In exercising this arbitrary power, Trump is following precedent, however undemocratic. The expanding powers of what the Vietnam-era historian Arthur Schlesinger dubbed the “imperial presidency” is a long-recognised phenomenon and one that Congress, America’s primary constitutional pillar, has signally failed to curb over the years. This may be one reason why Americans, according to polling going back decades, exhibit a consistently low opinion of Congress. But there are many others. The dominant two-party system, virulent partisanship and out-of-touch politicians are blamed for chronic failures of governance. The advantages conferred by incumbency are overwhelming; most members are repeatedly re-elected, reducing democratic choice. In terms of the presidency – the second constitutional pillar – systemic problems produce even greater anomalies. Trump was the fifth president to win office despite losing the popular vote, thanks to the archaic, unaccountably unreformed electoral college process.

Members of Congress are widely viewed as overly beholden to corporations, wealthy donors and special interests. In other words, they are seen as corrupt. The sums involved in greasing the wheels of US democracy are indeed eye-watering. According to the campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets, an overall $6.5bn (£5bn) was spent by presidential and congressional candidates in 2016 – enough to give every teacher in the country a $2,000 pay rise.

The average cost of winning a Senate seat was $19.4m. Winning a House of Representatives seat in the midterm elections will cost an average $1.5m, at least. The need for such huge war chests effectively excludes many would-be candidates from the democratic process and places others in hock to their financial backers.

Again, worries over excessive, non-transparent or illegal campaign financing long precede Trump. Despite many reform efforts, a growing proportion of funding comes from anonymous sources. According to a recent USA Today investigation, 40% of all television ads for political candidates are financed by secret donors with private political or commercial agendas. Then there is untraceable money emanating from foreign governments or individuals, via agents and lobbyists – an issue of heightened concern in the context of the Mueller inquiry into Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Mounting evidence of Russian influence-peddling and meddling has added to the sense of a gathering crisis of democracy. Yet while Trump’s minimising of the issue and his attempts to shut down the Mueller probe are plainly self-interested, these problems cannot all be laid at his door. Russians have been seeking to undermine US democracy since 1945. The difference now is they’re getting better at it – as are other foreign states.

US intelligence chiefs agree. “Our democracy itself is in the crosshairs,” the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, said last week. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and it has become clear that they are the target of our adversaries, who seek … to sow discord and undermine our way of life.” Yet what if Trump really were to be proven guilty of conspiring with a foreign power? How would he react? This is unknown, scary territory.

Can the judicial branch and, in particular, the supreme court – the third constitutional pillar and proud symbol of the founding fathers’ doctrine of the separation of powers – save US democracy? It seems unlikely. In nominating a prominent conservative, Brett Kavanaugh, for the latest court vacancy, Trump followed recent practice in shaping the court to suit his political outlook. It has not always worked this way. As the author David Greenberg has pointed out, supreme court nominations used to be mostly apolitical. This is not the constitution envisaged when they wrote the rules in Philadelphia in 1787.

Trump’s maverick behaviour highlights these entrenched structural problems. Yet, that aside, his rogue presidency is uniquely corrosive, right now, of democracy everywhere. His encouragement of ultranationalist, racist and neo-fascist forces from Warsaw to Charlottesville, divisive demagoguery, relentless vilification of independent journalism, contempt for the western European democracies, coddling of dictators and rejection of the established, rules-based international order all reinforce perceptions that the global role of the US as shining democratic beacon is dimming rapidly. Trump did this all by himself.

So what is to be done? The most urgent task is to recognise what is happening. Decades of complacent assumptions about America’s unending, unquestioning adherence to the democratic model have left it vulnerable to subversion within and without. Radical, inclusive political reform is urgently required. There needs to be a national conversation – and a revisiting of basic democratic principles. Maybe it’s time, 231 years on, for a follow-up constitutional convention in Philadelphia?

• Simon Tisdall is a foreign affairs commentator