“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.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s words come from the Lyceum Address, more formally titled
The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:
Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois
January 27, 1838
Look at the date, 1838. Decades before the Civil War. Lincoln wasn’t yet President, and didn’t even have any sort of national recognition. He was 27 years old, and turned 28 a couple weeks after delivering the speech.
Lincoln delivered the Lyceum Address 187 years ago. It was a warning, and in the very next sentence following the lead quotation, Lincoln added:
“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.”
And look where we are today: the wild and furious passions are being substituted for the sober judgment of courts. The country is increasingly pervaded by disregard for law.
So we, the people of the USA, have been warned, and warned many, many times about losing our democratic republic. Technically, of course, we’ve never had “a democracy,” in spite of megatons of rhetoric using that as a description. That rhetoric, which has been around for decades or more, has come from all sides: political, jingoistic, inspirational, patriotic. But like a lot of misleading rhetoric, it works, and at this point has worked in a counterproductive, negative way. It may not have been counterproductive in all cases, of course, there have probably been people all along who’ve used this particular recipe of misleading bloviation to work toward what’s now happened.
Here’s what I’m circling around toward: the radical right, which at this point includes nearly all of the Republican party, has removed Congress, both representatives and senators, from the triad of powers established in the design specification of our nation, the Constitution. They’ve come up with another bit of misleading rhetoric in doing this: “unitary executive theory.” This is succinctly put in the Supreme Court decision in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “The Framers made the President the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government.” The idea here is that the President is the only one that every voter elects. This is misleading rhetoric. Or you could call it a baldfaced lie.
If you go back to the design spec, what Roberts wrote is not true in the least. You’ve heard of the Electoral College. That’s the only body that actually elects the President. When you visit the polls every two years, you vote directly for your local representative. Every six years you vote directly for one of your Senators. And every four years, you don’t vote for the president. You vote for your state’s delegates to the Electoral College, who you trust will “listen” to the voters and cast their actual presidential votes for the presidential candidate preferred by the majority in your state. You have that trust because that’s how it’s worked in living memory, and that idea has been reinforced ad infinitum by the misleading rhetoric calling our democratic republic “a democracy.” The actual idea, originally, was that individual voters might not cast ballots for the presidency at all; how the electoral college delegates were picked and how they were supposed to vote was left up to each state legislature.
I’m old enough to have been taught this stuff in school, in a class called “Civics” or something similar. I believe my civics classes began around fourth or fifth grade, and there were more advanced versions in higher grades. Civics classes seem to have quietly disappeared from many public school curricula quite a while ago. Learning how our nation actually works (as opposed to how misleading rhetoric tries to persuade you it works) doesn’t seem to be part of preparing our children for adult citizenship any more. But it used to be. Here are some test questions from a 1935 civics exam:
- In 1-2 sentences each describe the purpose of each of the Constitutional Amendments. (I can even make this one easier: how many amendments are there?)
- What is the Bill of Rights?
- What is a constitutional law?
- What is an unconstitutional law?
- What is a writ of habeas corpus? (note that the current Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, did not know this when testifying before Congress. They installed her anyway.)
- What is a bill of attainder?
- What is an ex post facto law?
My classes in civics were long after 1935, and even back in the day I couldn’t have answered all of these. But I could have answered most of them, even though the civics classes I attended were evidently less rigorous than at least one from 1935. As for today, as far as I can tell, when civics is even addressed as a subject, it is even less rigorous. The Sandra Day O’Connor Institute reports that “A 2024 study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that more than 70% of Americans failed a basic U.S. civic literacy quiz; one in three respondents did not even know that there exist three branches of government, much less what those branches are and what they do.”
It was during the 1980s that US education emphasized “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, and math) to the exclusion of topics like civics. Intentional or not, this shifted the fundamental objective of education from preparing children to be informed citizens to preparing children to be employees. The O’Connor institute also points out that “It is also worth emphasizing that declines in civic literacy have corresponded with a decline in trust in government…[in 1958] about three quarters of Americans “trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time. As of April 2024 that figure had declined to 24 percent.”
The decline in trust of government started back in the days of the Vietnam War as well as other criminal acts by Richard Nixon. Another radical right-wing criminal. And the government let him get away with it. Then the radical right-wing criminal Reagan kept it up, and turned the misleading rhetoric knob up to eleven. It was around that time that the radical right-wing lawyer John Roberts, now the Chief Justice, started learning the ropes of government, and, presumably, which ones to cut in order to get rid of this pesky “democracy” once and for all.
It would be easy to conclude that the radical right has planned all this from the start, and that shadowy right-wing radicals from the Heritage Foundation and from billionnaires’ country clubs have been in charge in exactly the way they’ve claimed shadowy left wingers, like the “trilateral commission” and “George Soros” have been. But they haven’t. Right-wing radicals as a group are not that smart. They’re more aptly described by Lincoln as ruled by “wild and furious passions” and “worse than savage mobs.” I should add here that there are also left-wing radicals who are similarly irrational; political radicals generally don’t seem to be methodical 4-D chess geniuses manipulating the world.
What the radical right has plenty to spare, though, are people ready to exploit a perceived advantage with reptilian quickness and a similarly reptilian absence of ethics and morals. Look at the Keystone Kops in the orange baby’s regime; you’d never use the word “competent” to talk about them. And yet this worse than savage mob has done, and is doing, enormous damage. The damage is so enormous and so deep that this might be the year that future historians (if there are any) point to as the year the US “died by suicide.”
