Treason & Betrayal by Kenneth Foard McCallion

Treason & Betrayal by Kenneth Foard McCallion

Author:Kenneth Foard McCallion
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HHIMEDIA.NET
Published: 2019-04-15T05:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 12

THE GATHERING STORM:

DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

Although the Trump Presidency is unquestionably a toxic and dangerous threat to American democracy, Trump himself is clearly not the sole precipitating cause of America’s current crisis. The storm clouds had been gathering for decades before Trump took the fateful ride down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015 and announced that he was running for President of the United States in order to keep illegal Mexican rapists from terrorizing the American countryside. American society and its democratic institutions were in deep distress prior to the 2016 presidential election, and well before Trump burst onto the national political stage and the Russian government concocted its wildly successful scheme to disrupt our democratic and electoral processes through a well-planned and coordinated cyberwarfare and disinformation campaign. The Trump phenomenon merely accelerated the erosion of our democratic institutions and norms.

For well over two centuries, America has been that Great City on a Hill, that beacon of hope for the poor and oppressed throughout the world who believed in America’s promise that all people are created equal and have certain inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that in this land of opportunity anything and everything was possible. It was a country where immigrant families arriving in this country with little more than their hopes and dreams as they passed under the gaze of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor on their way to Ellis Island and American citizenship. All they wanted or needed was the same opportunity as every other American to make a good life for themselves and their families, armed with the benefits of universal education. Indeed, even during our own lifetimes we have seen immigrants such as Elon Musk, from South Africa, rise to the top of the American ladder based upon their technological expertise and audacious dream that a private American company could become the world leader in space technology and make realistic plans for the colonization of Mars.

To be sure, there have been other dark periods in American history, where our democratic experiment was imperiled, and the light of liberty was in extreme danger of being extinguished. Indeed, the country got off to a false democratic start with the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781, which proved to be unworkable since it did not create a proper balance between the states and their new federal government. The Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia was convened to fix these structural problems, producing the U.S. Constitution that survived and generally thrived for over 243 years, but not without substantial stresses and strains along the way.

In 1860 and 1861, the Northern states and the U.S. government could have just sat on their hands and wished the seceding Southern states good riddance, thus sharply reducing the size of the United States and inhibiting its ability to develop into the economic and political world power that it seemed destined to become. But they didn’t. After a series of mediocre Presidents who



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