Democracy, as we once thought of it, as a system in which no man is above the law, of co-equal branches of government, of lawmakers who honored their oaths to the Constitution, of lawmakers who even understood the Constitution and were committed to its ideals, is dead in America.
Whether someday it can be revived remains the great question before us. It will not be easy. Its death has been engineered for years as the few carved away special privileges for themselves and chipped away at the hallmark ideas on which the country was founded.
Today's abomination of a sham Senate trial is not the phenomenon of this moment nor is it the handiwork of any single actor. For four decades, our Congress, our courts, our presidency, and our campaign finance system, have been remade to empower a partisan, selfish minority.
Ask yourself what the basics of American democracy were to you. They have been broken down and stripped away and now our core protections are gone. A lawless and corrupt president can betray his country, self-deal, lie, and put our national security at risk.
A partisan majority in the Senate can enable that corruption and compound it with its own agenda to bend the law to benefit their sponsors and cronies. The Department of Justice can cease to stand for justice of any kind and instead can be twisted into a tool of the corrupt.
Elections can be handed over to those who can write the biggest checks. Courts can be packed with unqualified, compromised party functionaries, not impartial but impervious to reason or precedent or the simple imperative of seeking what is right.
Not only can these things happen. They have. They are our new and shameful reality. Only wholesale change of our leadership in Washington for a protracted period of time can change this. All those from either party who has tolerated or enabled these changes must go.
Many Americans shrugged off these changes as they happened incrementally. Many even today dismiss them or are apathetic about them. Those conditions combined with the greed, ambition, self-interest & faithlessness of the engineers of those changes have brought us to where we are.
If you watched what happened today & were sickened or saddened, understand the sweeping decades long fight that lies ahead to reverse these changes. If you are not up for that, not committed to it, if others are not, then there is only one option left.
Mourn for American democracy. Mourn for the America you hoped we were or might become. Mourn for justice in our country. But, even moreso, mourn for the unjust, undemocratic society which you are bequeathing to your children and your children's children.
