So say those working to steal it
and gave us permission to publish it. – Andy Kroll
So this is what it’s like to live history. You may have read about the Civil Rights movement and watched coverage of Vietnam, the first moon landing, and the Watergate hearings as they happened. But in this century, American history is more personal. A friend who lost her fiancé on Sept. 11 and dreads every anniversary. We participated in electing the first Black president, lived through the Great Recession, and sheltered from COVID-19. We watched the Trump insurrection unfold live. At a remove like past events, yes, but the feeling is more visceral.
This week, we found out that key actors in our national drama fly flags representing support for unmaking our democratic republic and constructing in its place a white Christian theocracy. Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that the Appeal to Heaven flag has been on display “in front of the office of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and over the houses of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and the architect of the right-wing theocratic takeover of the federal courts, Leonard Leo.”
“Slow-motion train wreck” may be overused but feels right here. The Supremes led by Alito overturned Roe. Plans like Project 2025 are public. “Baby Don” Trump broadcasts his revanchist plans for a second term. Half the country believes the country is in recession, unemployment is at record highs, and the stock market is in decline when the opposite is true.
Richardson references how Abraham Lincoln, in his June 16, 1858 “House Divided” speech, spoke of the actors at work to destroy democracy in his day:
Lincoln outlined the steps that the United States had taken away from freedom toward tyranny, and noted:
“[W]hen we see a lot of framed timbers…which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house… we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”
Lincoln did not choose the names of his workmen at random. Stephen was Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who had popularized the idea that local voters should be able to decide whether their territory would permit slavery, no matter what the majority of Americans wanted; Franklin was Franklin Pierce, who had presided over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting enslavement to move into the western territories; Roger was Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court that decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, saying that Congress could not keep slavery out of the territories; and James was President James Buchanan, who urged Americans to accept the judgment of the Supreme Court. By spreading enslavement westward, that judgment would create new slave states that would work with the southern slave states to make slavery national.
Together, Lincoln said, these four workmen had constructed an edifice to support human enslavement, an edifice working against the nation’s dedication to freedom established by the Declaration of Independence. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” he said. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
One step at a time, revanchist officials are turning back the clock on more Americans enjoying the fruits of liberty, unwinding what’s become a more perfect union since the end of World War II. They are shocked, shocked to find a majority of Americans took the founders’ “created equal” and “pursuit of happiness” vision seriously and expect the United States to live up to it. Appeal to Heaven flyers believe this land was bequeathed by Jesus as a Christian patriarchy led by white males, and damn the Constitution to which they swore oaths.
If democracy cannot deliver their theocracy, then democracy must go. Andy Kroll of ProPublica examines the “America First” movement’s red, white, and blue war against it. The Republican Party is its own “house divided“:
What divides the Republican Party of 2024 is not any one policy or ideology. It is not whether to support Donald Trump. The most important fault line in the party now is democracy itself. Today’s Republican insurgents believe democracy has been stolen, and they don’t trust the ability of democratic processes to restore it.
This phenomenon is evident across the country, in Georgia and Nevada, in Arizona, Idaho and Florida. But it’s perhaps the starkest in Michigan, a place long associated with political pragmatism and a business-friendly GOP, embodied by governors George Romney, John Engler and, most recently, Rick Snyder. It was a son of Michigan, former President Gerald Ford, who once said, “I have never mistaken moderation for weakness, nor civility for surrender.”
That wimp? That RINO? Ford would be drummed out of today’s GOP.
Kroll explains that several years ago, his home state of Michigan “stopped making sense to me.”
“We can’t keep going through election after election like this where a large plurality of the country just does not accept the outcome of the majority and refuses to abide by it,” said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “That’s when the system falls apart.”
But that’s the America First plan, Jeff. Did you not get the memo?
Kroll maps out how America Firsters took control of the Michigan party. Washington, D.C. has Johnson, Alito, and Leo. In Michigan, America First has infiltrated down to the precinct level. Political fratricide is the name of the game.
Yet Richardson reminds readers that Democrats do not lack agency in this renewed fight to preserve the union:
Instead of sympathizing with the extremists, as Buchanan did, President Joe Biden has worked to undermine the sense of grievance that has permitted them to amass power. In the 1850s the federal government had few ways to weaken the ties of ordinary people to the state leaders who were determined to spread the institution of slavery that had made them enormously wealthy, but the modern administrative state has given Biden more options.
The administration has used the power of the federal government to begin to unwind the trickle-down economy that between 1981 and 2021 transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of the U.S. to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. The result has been solid economic growth of 5.7% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.
The unemployment rate has been at record lows of under 4% for more than two years, the strongest run since the 1960s. Inflation is not rising; it is falling and is now at 3.4%, higher than the Federal Reserve’s preferred mark of 2% but down significantly from its high of 9.1% in June 2022, just after the worst of the pandemic eased. At 4.5% growth over 2023, wage growth outpaced inflation, meaning that although prices have risen, workers have come out ahead. The S&P stock market index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
None of that will make an impression if people don’t know about it. And they don’t, as recent polling shows. Shout louder.
Update: Leo’s statement on why he flies the Tree of Heaven flag doesn’t exppain why he flies it from a tree along the road the way some Klansmen fly theirs, as a signal.
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