America Needs to Act
This article appeared in the German newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper and concerns the decision of the United States Supreme Court to immunize Former President Donald Trump against prosecution for past offenses. The Supreme Court voted predictably 6-3 for Trump, splitting pretty cleanly along political lines. Chief Justice Roberts "delivered the opinion of the court", and Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas agreed with it. In addition, Thomas and Justice Barrett wrote separate "concurring" opinions. The Democrat Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson dissented strenuously.
America has Republican justices. It has Democratic Justices. They vote their opinions along philosophical lines and never concur! We don't have a unified government even at the judicial level. We have to face the truth that the evenly-matched forces in our hopelessly divided nation pull away from each other within the membrane of our corporate heart. It has an impact like a heart attack each time it happens and scares the crap out of us. I just have to ask my reader how long he wants to experience this? You can turn away and forget what I have to say. I realize that no one particularly wants to hear it, but we need to divide the country to give the dissenting political philosophies equal-footing in their own countries.
If you say reflexively, "Nahh, we don't want to do that!" with jittery chuckles and sidelong glances that ask "Are you out of your f--ng mind!!!" Who wants to divide our wonderful punching-bag of a nation? We get to go on tirades about our political opponents and nobody stops us. It doesn't do anyone any real harm, right? Like football fans screaming at a game and getting in fights. We're one big happy family, squabbling all the time.
Our leaders are not really our leaders. They are our representatives. We expect them to defend our side against our political enemies, but mostly they just want to get re-elected who go to great lengths to placate their constituencies. They can juggle constituencies better than any street-artiste. When they sense the character of their constituency changing, they change along with it. Most of the Congress-members attended law school. They learned to mediate, They learned to negotiate and reach agreements.
Donald Trump's success largely grows from a rebellion against all that. He wants to lead. That's why the Congress fears him so much. He has a character that suggests all his opinions are carved in stone. We like his stance of "What you see is what you get!" We don't even mind that we disagree with some of his stances. We like that he wants to put an end to the compromises that have negotiated away so much of the nation's strengths, in a stupid effort to make ourselves more likeable in the eyes of the World.
Most of the World will never like us. We should accept that as the default-setting in our relations with them. They couldn't care less about our likeableness. They would like to get hand-outs, but then dish out payback. They hate us because we have succeeded so well. Our ancestors did all of the hard work of building a nation. We do not have the right to throw it all away.