The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

NATIONAL Days. Independence Days. Canada had its special day last Friday. We have ours coming up this weekend – and a very special 50th one to look forward to next year. The US stumbled through its own Fourth of July on Sunday. On an occasion meant to be a celebration of national pride, it’s pretty difficult to remain optimistic about the US these days.

There were – of course – several sensational shootings around the US over the weekend, most notably at a Fourth of July parade in one of Chicago’s northern suburbs, and in Philadelphia. At the same time, the dispiriting hangover of the Supreme Court’s decisions continues to loom over the optimism of many millions of Americans, as there is mounting evidence the nation’s ultimate legal arbiter has lost its essential objective impartiality.

Maybe we should have seen this coming, because it’s been building for a long time. Maybe it all began with the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963 – for as yet definitively unspecified reasons that have spawned a whole cottage industry of conspiracy theory explanations but for which no clear explanation exists even today. That assassin’s bullet extinguished what was probably, in hindsight, an ephemeral faith in JFK’s youthful national pride and exuberance.

We will never know what this young prince might have accomplished. His unintended successor, Lyndon Johnson, presided over five years of dramatic, stupendous developments. The wrenching, misguided and stubbornly wrong-headed part of LBJ’s legacy was the exponential, explosive expansion of the Vietnam War, quietly and accurately called ‘the American War’ in Vietnam. That distant war, fought at one point by 500,000 American troops, many of them conscripts, divided the country so profoundly that the resulting social fissures and distrust of government remain today.

But Democrat Johnson also rammed through Congress a series of civil rights and voting rights bills that empowered American minority voters and ensured federal support for enforcement of these newly reinforced rights and freedoms. As a revived American nativism seems to be strengthening its hold on an obdurate and grimly unified minority of American voters, a unifying theme is resistance to and resentment of LBJ’s landmark legislative victories of nearly 60 years ago.

Plagued by the massive unpopularity of the war in Vietnam which would ultimately claim 57,000 American lives, Johnson did not seek re-election in 1968. Richard Nixon, a mysterious Republican from California who had been Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President for eight years but who remained an enigma to most voters, and who squandered an inviting chance to be President in 1960, captured the presidency in 1968 instead.

Sensing the undercurrent of opposition even then to LBJ’s social reforms, Nixon steered the Republican Party onto its present course of favouring states’ rights and, as black, brown and immigrant numbers rose over the decades in melting-pot America, minority white rule.

All the current Republican shenanigans over voting rights for minorities and immigrants flow from Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’ of subtly favouring racist and nativist tendencies in the broadly conservative American body politic. At the heart of it all is the old axiom that the end justifies the means. The end is the indefinite continuation of white, largely male-dominated rule in the US. The means are today’s voting rights machinations and code-worded racism.

Nixon, who died in 1994, would have been pleased indeed to witness the mid-term US election results in 2010. In an election held just two years after the dramatic election of America’s first and only black president, the GOP notched an astounding triumph. Before that election, Democrats fully controlled 27 state legislatures and Republicans just 14. Nine were divided. But after widespread GOP victories in 2010, the Republican Party was able to direct legislative redistricting in many states. Within just five years and after two elections under the new maps cleverly redrawn by Republicans, the GOP fully controlled 30 legislatures and Democrats just 11, with nine still split. That’s an unprecedented gain of 32 percent in five years.

This Republican legislative advantage in the states persisted through the 2020 elections, including in states that, in terms of statewide general elections, are very closely divided between Democrats and Republicans. Prime examples of such states are exactly the ones that swung the 2016 presidential election to the GOP: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

According to a published analysis by the Associated Press, for example, Republicans drew Michigan legislative districts after the 2010 census and created such an advantage for their party that the GOP could continue to maintain control of the closely divided state's lower legislative body. Democrats in Michigan won the governor’s race and every other major statewide office in 2018 but could not overcome legislative districts gerrymandered by Republicans.

Similarly, observers of the US Supreme Court now worry that a North Carolina-based case accepted for review in the court’s upcoming term is particularly ominous. The case, an appeal of that state court’s overturning of a congressional redistricting plan approved by the GOP-controlled state legislature, is based upon a legal theory that holds that state legislatures have near-total control over elections law. If the US high court rules in favour of the plaintiffs, it might be possible for Republican-controlled state legislatures to overturn the popular vote in their state and shift its electors to the GOP candidate.

This is of course one of the strategies employed by Republican operatives in their failed attempt to hijack the 2020 presidential election. Judges all over the country summarily dismissed such tactics. But what if they had been legal?

Objectively, none of this portends the imminent end of American democracy. And when they get the chance, Democrats are just as guilty as anyone else of trying to rig the game in favour of their candidates. There are all kinds of examples from all over the US of skullduggery by its two principal political parties.

And complaints by the aggrieved about the impending demise of democracy in America are nothing new. Many of the current laments would probably not be even newsworthy were it not for the existence of a ravenous cable network world that feeds from both the left and the right on every bit of incendiary “news” available to attract and keep viewers watching advertisers’ messages.

But also, none of that means the US doesn’t face serious, critical, even existential issues as it celebrates its National Day. And history offers many examples of nations whose citizens ignored warning signs until they became powerless to resist them.

Faith and the ballot box

There’s a relatively new emphasis on an enduring concept in American political life. That concept is Christian nationalism, and it returned to the forefront of US political discourse when some members of the January 6 mob that assaulted the US capitol carried crosses or invoked the name of Jesus. The strong support afforded to ex-President Donald Trump by many in the American evangelical and other religion-based movements was often cited as a key element in his base of support. He reciprocated by adopting many of their core positions.

This pushed religious people of many faiths much closer to the epicentre of the political morass that presently hobbles the US. And it has made villains of some religious groups in the eyes of many in the American left.

A recent opinion columnist in the New York Times said the following about Christian nationalism: “It is a mistake to imagine that Christian nationalism is a social movement arising from the grassroots and aiming to satisfy the real needs of its base. It isn’t. This is a leader-driven movement. The leaders set the agenda, and their main goals are power and access to public money. They aren’t serving the interests of their base; they are exploiting their base as a means of exploiting the rest of us.”

Ironically, as fewer Americans identify themselves to pollsters as affiliated with an organized faith, conservative-leaning courts and judges are issuing decisions that continue to blur church-state lines, and to politicize religion. We see the virtual identification of religions with state-exercised political power in such countries as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia among others.

America has no state religion. But the absence of a state religion does not preclude the rise of the sort of religious nationalism in the name of which many wars have been fought, much political power has been achieved and consolidated, and many have died.

Faith and the ballot box

THERE’S a relatively new emphasis on an enduring concept in American political life. That concept is Christian nationalism, and it returned to the forefront of US political discourse when some members of the January 6 mob that assaulted the US capitol carried crosses or invoked the name of Jesus. The strong support afforded to ex-President Donald Trump by many in the American evangelical and other religion-based movements was often cited as a key element in his base of support. He reciprocated by adopting many of their core positions.

This pushed religious people of many faiths much closer to the epicentre of the political morass that presently hobbles the US.

And it has made villains of some religious groups in the eyes of many in the American left.

A recent opinion columnist in the New York Times said the following about Christian nationalism: “It is a mistake to imagine that Christian nationalism is a social movement arising from the grassroots and aiming to satisfy the real needs of its base. It isn’t.

This is a leader-driven movement. The leaders set the agenda, and their main goals are power and access to public money.

They aren’t serving the interests of their base; they are exploiting their base as a means of exploiting the rest of us.”

Ironically, as fewer Americans identify themselves to pollsters as affiliated with an organized faith, conservative-leaning courts and judges are issuing decisions that continue to blur church-state lines, and to politicize religion.

We see the virtual identification of religions with state-exercised political power in such countries as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia among others.

America has no state religion. But the absence of a state religion does not preclude the rise of the sort of religious nationalism in the name of which many wars have been fought, much political power has been achieved and consolidated, and many have died.