Independence Day

As we lurch into our annual ritualistic celebration of American independence, we have every reason to be depressed about the state of our union. Our current Commander-in-Chief, who rode into The White House on a wave of toxic, vulgar racism and Islamophobia, has spent the last week attacking journalists of every stripe, from talk show hosts, to cable news networks, to newspapers staffed with prizewinning, relentless investigative journalists.
Since our country’s birth, our leaders have consistently understood that a free press is necessary for a functioning representative democracy. Trump and his enablers and mouthpieces, from Tom Bossert to Newt Gingrich, in keeping with their determination to detonate centuries’ old norms, reject this understanding and openly cultivate the idea that the press is the “enemy.” The irony of the President of the United States tweeting a video showing him pummeling a reporter with the CNN logo superimposed on his face, on the eve of Independence Day, is lost on absolutely no one. The fact that Trump would spend time creating this sophomoric video, rather than using the bully pulpit of the presidency to remind Americans of the ideals that make our independence worth celebrating is far from surprising, but should shake even the most oblivious among us out of our torpor.
It is not enough to “tut-tut” and condemn Trump’s attacks on Mika Brzezinski as sexist and vulgar. Trump has been sexist and vulgar since Day One, and we should have cared even when his targets weren’t pretty and blond. It is all well and good to decry his Twitter video for inciting violence against the press, but Trump has been encouraging violence against citizens exercising their First Amendment rights since the campaign. Trump’s disdain for the Constitution should have been evident when those citizens were Black students, rather than television journalists. It is time for conservatives to admit that their decades’ long campaign to marry demonization of people of color with radical fiscal austerity has led us exactly here. Since the passage of the Civil Rights statutes in the mid-60’s, conservatives have harnessed racial resentment as a means of consolidating power. They have deployed an ahistorical narrative in which the disproportionate poverty suffered by Black and Latino Americans was a function of their indolence, rather than deeply entrenched structural racism that deprived them of economic opportunity. Conservatives created the myth of a “big government” overtaxing “regular” Americans to fund a safety net for the undeserving poor. They simultaneously stoked widespread fear of Black and Latino men, depicting them as innately criminal, to create the foundation for mass incarceration.
Now, the NRA is producing propaganda openly inciting violence against American citizens who protest injustice. The American President is obdurately attacking the bedrock Constitutional principle of freedom of the press and encouraging violence against journalists. Republicans in Congress are hell bent on ramming through legislation that would vastly increase American suffering and death, by depriving us of healthcare, in order to engineer an unnecessary tax cut for a handful of billionaires.
On America’s Birthday, we should all remember these words from our Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed–that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”