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To say we are living in a confusing, destabilizing, polarizing, and dangerous era is stating the obvious. In thinking back over the past thirty years, I offer an expanded list of events that I believe contributed to bringing us to this inflection moment in American history, mostly negative events (sorry to say), but many positive ones too (I have not included foreign happenings except for those that have affected directly the United States and the stability of our nation).
The positive events:
- The election of the first African American president of the United States;
- The recovery from the 2008-9 economic crisis;
- The normalization of LGBTQ rights;
- The passage of the Affordable Care Act;
- The Iran Nuclear deal;
- The largest march in American history for women’s rights following the installation of Donald Trump as President on January 21, 2017;
- The galvanizing of the Me-Too and Black Lives Matter movements;
- The passage of climate change legislation and the international Paris Climate Accord;
- The nomination of the first woman of a major political party for president of the United States and the installation of the first woman and person of color as vice-president in US history;
- The multiple and successful law suits brought against unconstitutional and illegal actions taken by the Trump Administration;
- The end of the Gaza War and the return of the Israeli hostages;
- The November elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and California;
- The “No Kings” march.
The negative events:
- The 9/11/2001 terrorist attack;
- The Afghan and Iraqi wars in which 7000 Americans, 200,000 Afghanis, and 600,000 Iraqis were killed during the United States’ longest wars against Al Qaida and extremist Muslim terrorists;
- The 2008-9 US economic meltdown, mortgage crisis, and bank failures;
- The rulings of the Roberts’ Supreme Court that have compromised American democracy including Citizens United, the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, the discarding of key elements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the gutting of affirmative action in college decisions, the expansion of gun rights, the granting of presidential immunity, and the MAGA assault on voting rights;
- Multiple mass shootings in cities across the country;
- Increasing income inequality, the accumulation of massive wealth of the top one percent, regressive tax policies, and the exploding federal debt;
- The rise of social media (for better and worse) reflecting negative and positive human impulses;
- The spread of opinion-laced “information” through media bubbles and the diminishing viability of classic news sources (e.g. newspapers, network evening news broadcasts, etc.);
- The rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement;
- The multiple indictments and double-impeachment of a sitting American president;
- The Covid plague and death of 1.2 million Americans;
- The violent rebellion against the legitimate election of a president on January 6, 2021 led by the sitting president who refused to accept his electoral defeat;
- Russia’s aggression and nearly four-year war against Ukraine;
- The Hamas invasion of Israel and the murder of 1200 Israelis and foreign workers on October 7, 2023, the taking of 250 hostages, and the ensuing 2-year Israel-Hamas war resulting in the death of more than one thousand Israeli soldiers and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians;
- The dramatic rise in antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israel hatred on the far political right and far political left;
- The rise in racism, misogyny, homophobia, and Islamophobia;
- Trump’s pardoning of all those tried and sentenced for violence and sedition against the United States on January 6, 2021;
- The return of Trump 2.0 in the 2024 presidential election that has brought a systematic attack on American democracy and norms, the Constitution, media, the Justice and Defense departments, most federal agencies, American foreign aid, the State Department, EPA, HHS, the American military and intelligence services, the human rights of immigrants and peoples of color, the killing of people without due process in international waters based on the assertion that they are narco-terrorists, the threat of ICE and the use of the military in cities and states, Trump’s weaponizing of the Justice Department against his political critics and enemies, and Trump’s call for the execution of six members of Congress (all distinguished military veterans and intelligence officers) who cut a video telling service members not to follow illegal orders;
- Trump’s cancellation of the Iran Deal, Biden’s Climate Change legislation, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord;
- The attack from the far political right-wing on the Judeo-Christian ethic;
- The normalization of white Christian nationalist supremacy in the US;
- The massive grift and enrichment of the President, his family and wealthy friends in the amount of billions of dollars in an ongoing violation of the US Constitution’s Emolument clause.
Like so many of you, I have responded with disgust, anger, anxiety, exhaustion, and despair at the plethora of bad news, the cruelty, inhumanity, indecency, and ongoing assault against the US Constitution and American democratic norms that permeates our politics and culture in these days. I have asked myself why millions of Americans and their congressional representatives accept without protest the developing autocracy of Donald Trump who has in these first ten months of his second presidency done so much damage to American democracy and our democratic traditions.
I am reminded of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ (1865-1939) famous poem The Second Coming that he wrote in 1919 shortly after the First World War ended and as the Irish War of Independence began. The poem was inspired by that era’s turmoil, chaos and societal collapse (not unlike our own times):
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, / And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
It seems to me that there are two primary motivating needs of tens of millions of Americans who have supported or acquiesced to Trump’s growing autocracy and immorality. In times of flux and chaos, people crave, on the one hand, certainty, and on the other a sense of security with like-minded culturally similar others.
My childhood Rabbi Leonard Beerman (1921-2014) offered a profound bit of wisdom, as he always did, long ago when he wrote:
“I live with uncertainty and doubt. But what I have learned is that doubt may be the most civilizing force we have available to us, for it is doubt that protects us from the arrogance of utter rightness, from the barbarism of blind loyalties, all of which threaten the human possibility.”
The writer Kathryn Schultz (b. 1954) explains in her book Being Wrong why certainty is so appealing to so many:
“The simplest truth about certainty is that it feels good. It gives us the comforting illusion that our environment is stable and knowable, and that therefore we are safe within it. Just as important, it makes us feel informed, intelligent, and powerful…Uncertainty leaves us stranded in a universe that is too big, too open, too ill-defined…Where certainty reassures us with answers, doubt confronts us with questions, not only about our future but also about our past: about the decisions we made, the beliefs we held, the people and groups to whom we offered our allegiance, the very way we lived our lives…the unconsulting fact [is] that …we can’t shield ourselves and our loved ones from error, accident, and disaster…our attraction to certainty is best understood as an aversion to uncertainty.” (p. 169)
That is where autocrats step in. They claim certainty about everything, contrary to what the French philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier (1815-1903) poignantly said: “Properly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain.”
Of course, there are always options, some are better and some are worse, but it’s upon us, an informed citizenry, to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each based upon the facts, science, reason, human rights, and the principles of equality, justice, compassion, empathy, and peace.
As elections begin to appear on the political horizon, it’s important for us all to consider what constitutes great leadership. As concisely as I can characterize it, great leadership requires not just vision and high moral rectitude, but the love of truth and a sacred commitment to further the common good. There are times when all leaders must stand up against the crowd, take a political risk knowing that they can lose everything, power, position, and the respect of their followers. Great leaders, however, bear the responsibility to act on behalf of the best interests of the public and to set a high moral standard for themselves and their colleagues.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his superb book that I highly recommend, Lessons in Leadership – A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (Jerusalem: Koren Publishers, 2015) put it simply: “To lead is to serve. Greatness is humility.” (p. 190)
As the election season begins in the United States, and would-be leaders announce their candidacies, polls rejecting the Trump administration’s positions on virtually all the issues of concern to American voters, along with the millions who turned out to march on “No Kings Day,” and the important work of so many American lawyers and judges who have advocated for and ruled on behalf of American constitutional and state law and against autocratic over-reach, ought to give us a measure of hope and remind us how much agency we still have.
In electing candidates worthy of our support as servant-leaders, we can reverse the anti-democratic actions and trends that have plagued the United States in recent decades, and begin to restore American democracy despite the horrific damage that has been done.
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