I’m tiring of media personalities who point to the atrocities Trump commits with the tacit approval of congressional Republicans and say “this is not who we are.” It is indeed who we are. It is who we have become as Americans.
For years, Republicans have cheated, lied, connived, and ultimately sold roughly half the electorate on their anti-democratic and immoral agenda. In an enlightened, politically aware society, such a perversion of voters’ values would not have happened.
We like to think of ourselves as “being better” than our politics would suggest. In fact, I’m old enough to remember a time when there was no question we were. But we haven’t been that nation since 1980, when we elected Ronald Reagan as our president. With an avuncular, aw-shucks smile, Reagan hacked at the foundation of our democracy declaring that "Government is the problem," as he divided us by race, income, and geography. All the while, he basked in the adulation of his clueless base which, ironically, stood to lose the most from his austere economic policies.
In the nearly 40 years since Reagan’s election, we’ve lost our generosity. We lost the willingness to work out our differences, the willingness to compromise. The divisions he sowed have festered. They have deepened, the fault lines hardening. We no longer seek to cooperate; we want only to vanquish one another.
When he accepted the Republican party’s nomination as Illinois’ US senator, Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He was, of course, referring to the dispute over slavery between the states.
Today we’re again divided, the old wounds reopened, ironically, by members of Lincoln’s party. Yet his famous admonition still applies.
Unless and until we reconcile our differences (and, for what it’s worth, I’m skeptical we can), we will never again be the nation we once were and “better than this.”