The United States of America is broken beyond repair.
The 244-year-old experiment called the USA, which declared at its birth that it was self-evident that “all men are created equal;” that nation, is fast becoming a failed state, beyond hope of redemption.
Historians will confess that the country’s independence was hastened by the British movement to outlaw slavery before abolition spread to the colonies, and that the revolutionary, egalitarian Declaration of Independence, was revised so-to-speak, by the conservative, hide-bound Constitution which first declared the lowly, enslaved Africans to be just three-fifths of a person — without rights any white man was bound to respect — declared a Senate which gave Southern slave states equal power as the densely populated Northern, free states; and established an Electoral College which gave those same slave states equal (really superior) power in choosing a president.
The system worked well enough until the Southern insistence in holding on to the “Peculiar Institution,” as slavery was known, became the fuse that detonated the first Civil War. It was known then as “The Lost Cause.”
The treasonous Confederate rebels reckoned that the enslaved Africans would maintain their loyalty to their white, chattel slave masters and fight with them to preserve their own bondage. Instead, more than 200,000 Blacks fled to fight for their freedom, joining on to Union in units of U.S. Colored Troops.
But the movement to create a “More Perfect Union” stumbled when a Confederate sympathizer murdered President Abraham Lincoln. The defeated rebels then regrouped to wage guerilla warfare.
Lincoln’s successor vetoed legislation that would have given each freed male slave a start in the form of “40 acres and a mule.” Indeed, the Reconstruction was upended and the land which had been confiscated from the treasonous Southerners was given back to them, federal troops which had protected the Black Freedmen, were withdrawn from The South, and masked, night-riding white terrorists, known as the Ku Klux Klan emerged to violently put Black people back “in their place.”
The Reconstruction was crushed! Darkness again ruled the day.
Nearly a century later, the civil rights movement — the Second Reconstruction — emerged in the Deep South, the belly of the beast. Aided by the federal government and the courts, the Jim Crow “separate but equal” system was officially beaten back, until, that is Richard Nixon — the Original Donald Trump — took the White House with a racist, so-called “Southern Strategy” which transformed the white, segregationist Democratic Party into the white segregationist Republican Party.
Then, with the emergence of Barack Obama — the first African American president — a solid, Black wall of resistance and hope united with a body of enlightened white voters, and the Third Reconstruction was born.
But soon, when it became apparent that the mere symbol — a Black face in the highest office in the land — was not sufficient to quell Black demands for full and complete equality, wealth equality, health equality, full equality; when it became apparent that Black demands and the demands of other marginalized groups and individuals were not going to be addressed, and that now “suffering” white folks were tired of what they perceived as “losing ground” to the undeserving Black hordes; out of that backlash was born the Real Donald Trump, Trump-ism, and calls for a new Civil War.
Of course, just like every time before — including the 20th-century European stab at similar hatred, xenophobia and U.S. eugenics, behind Adolf Hitler and the “superior” Aryan Nazis — the white tribalists/nationalists cannot succeed this time.
White Americans don’t get it. They think that oppressed Black folks should consider it an honor and a privilege to be oppressed by them; lifted up into “higher civilization” if you will. Wrong!
And so, here we are today. Ready to breathe a sigh of relief when The Donald is finally frog-marched out of the White House kicking and screaming on Jan. 20. But Trumpism, white nationalism in U.S. thinking, will remain.
Despite the fact that this inveterate liar, philanderer, business cheat, and all-around grifter was impeached, making him the most unqualified human being imaginable to be president, Dude received 74 million votes — more than any president in history. The only hitch is that 81 million voted for his opponent.
The failure of this nation and its forfeiture of its future comes in the fact that two-thirds of those 74 million white people believe that the other 81 million votes are fraudulent and that maybe if they used that three-fifths formula again, the white tribal choice could remain in power.
Therein lies the downfall of the USA. Many of those 74 million are armed with tiki torches and guns from Walmart and are willing to fight another bloody Civil War in order to have their wicked wishes prevail.
That “deplorable” system is broken, and cannot be fixed.