This is the first July 4 on which we can actually see the end of America coming | Opinion

Before the “what” came the “why.”

Indeed, though the Declaration of Independence is remembered mostly for its stirring words about self-evident truths and all men being created equal, it’s important to remember that its author, a 33-year-old Virginia planter named Thomas Jefferson, spent most of the document building a case against the British king, justifying the momentous step he and his fellow rebels were about to take.

“When in the Course of human events,” he wrote, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Jefferson felt it important to say why the states were coming together. Two hundred and forty-four years later, it feels important to explain why they may be coming apart.

I may or may not have been the first observer to publicly suggest that Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency represented a life-or-death crisis for this country. At the very least, the limb I climbed out on in August of 2016 was not crowded. An “existential danger,” I called him in my column. The following month, I repeated myself, warning that he might be “this country’s gravest existential threat since the end of the Soviet Union.”

In the months since then, that sparsely populated limb has grown steadily more crowded.

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow is out here. Just before Election Day, he wrote that a Trump presidency “would herald the end of the empire.”

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker is out here. In December, she noted that Democrats considered Trump’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress an existential threat. “They have a point,” she conceded.

John Allen, retired Marine Corps four-star general and president of the Brookings Institution, is out here, writing recently in Foreign Policy magazine that Trump’s use of force against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square “may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”

The Atlantic Monthly is out here behind headlines like “Is Democracy Dying?,” “How America Ends” and “How To Destroy A Government,” in which writer George Packer warns that if Trump is “given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.”

Jason Stanley, a Yale University philosophy professor who studies authoritarianism, is out here. He told The Independent that November “could be our last free election.”

And Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden is out here, flatly labeling Trump “an existential threat.”

Many of us, then, are convinced that sometime in the near future, America as we know and love it might — just might —cease to be. The threat is, granted, a slow-motion catastrophe, but it’s a catastrophe just the same. Already, the signs of decline are manifest and manifold.

Obstructed by gridlock, Congress barely functions as a legislative body. At the beginning of this year, Roll Call, the venerable Capitol Hill newspaper, reported that, “This Congress is on track to enact a lower percentage of bills than any in modern times.”

Riven by partisanship, Congress has all but abandoned its oversight function. “I’m not an impartial juror,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as that body prepared for Trump’s impeachment trial. One month later, he took a solemn oath to be an impartial juror.

Through firings, intimidation and the installation of loyalists, the machinery of government — the Justice Department, including the FBI, the military, the national security apparatus, even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — has been politicized in service to Trump, something that, as many observers have noted, is characteristic of authoritarian regimes.

Voter suppression now happens right out in the open. The Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2018 midterms, Black voters waited 45 percent longer than white ones did. Latinos waited 46 percent longer. Some voters in this month’s Georgia primary reported wait times approaching four hours.

The rise of nakedly partisan content providers and of social media as information platforms has turned the dissemination and reporting of news into a Wild West of alternative facts and bizarre conspiracy theories so that it becomes difficult for the average person to know what to believe — especially with the credibility of traditional news media wilting under unrelenting political attack. As a result, we almost literally live in different worlds. Reality is multiple choice.

Perhaps most critically, Americans simply don’t like or trust each other across their divisions of town and country, liberal and conservative. In 1960, under 5 percent of Americans said they’d be upset if one of their children married a person from another political party. Today, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/Atlantic poll, 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would object. As of 2016, according to a Pew Research Center poll, 45 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats saw the other party as “a threat to the nation’s well-being.”

Some of this did not begin under Trump, but all of it was accelerated by him, particularly the demonizing of political opponents. He has slurred those who disagree with him as “crazy,” “nut jobs,” “dopes,” “dummies,” “nasty,” “stupid,” “fake” and “sad” among other insults, a litany of contempt often echoed by his followers. And it is hard to imagine a path forward as one nation, indivisible, for people who fundamentally despise one another.

So what form might America’s end times take? Peter Turchin recently told Time magazine that tensions in this country “may escalate all the way to a civil war.” What makes that prediction ominous is that Turchin, a researcher and professor of cultural evolution at the University of Connecticut, has already nailed one seemingly far-fetched forecast. In 2010, writing in the journal Nature, he said that America would see a period of major social upheaval “around 2020.” Which, obviously, it has.

So when he says a shooting war is possible, you sit up and take notice, especially given all the real and implicit political violence we’ve seen in recent years: bombs sent to Trump’s political and media opponents, Republican lawmakers gunned down at a baseball game, a young woman killed while protesting white supremacists in Charlottesville, a massacre at a black church in Charleston, an anti-immigrant slaughter in El Paso, people with long guns storming the Michigan statehouse.

But even if it doesn’t come to that, the nation’s demise could easily take other forms.

Perhaps one or more of the secession movements that bubble up from time to time might finally take root, a group of states deciding to strike out on their own, the rest too enervated to stop them. Or maybe there would still be 50 states, but with public institutions weakened, faith in the integrity of elections gone, news media’s credibility hollowed out, Constitutional rights routinely ignored — we got a preview of that in Lafayette Square — “idiocracy” ascendant and some blustery strong man barking orders, the country those states formed would be unrecognizable as America, much like Sinclair Lewis prophesied in his 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.”

But if the how of it is difficult to say, the why is not. To the contrary, it is soberingly, tiresomely easy to say. America’s end, if that’s what we are facing, would be for the stupidest, most frustrating, most self-defeating of reasons. In other words, it would be because of race.

That is, after all, the key reason Trump was elected. A growing body of research has established this beyond doubt.

A 2018 study out of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, a 2019 study out of Iowa State University, a 2016 analysis by The Washington Post and a 2018 University of Kansas study have all quantified the outsized role racial resentment and “white vulnerability” — a fear that white people are losing ground to other groups — played in Trump’s rise. As the Kansas study put it, “The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders.”

Not that one needed numbers-crunching to know what was going on here. One had only to spend a little quality time among his supporters via an online video from The New York Times, “Unfiltered: Voices From Trump’s Crowds.” Somewhere between the guy shouting “F--- those dirty beaners” and the one sporting the “F--- Islam” T-shirt, between the “F--- that nigger” response to a mention of President Obama and the “Sieg heil” salute, it becomes impossible to ever again take seriously anyone who argues that Trump was elected because of “economic anxiety.”

And if you accept that he came to office because a critical mass of white voters felt anger, fear or vulnerability over the fact that they will soon lose the ability to muster a racial majority, then it follows that every disastrous thing stemming from his election also traces ultimately to that same cause.

So we left the Paris climate accords because of race.

We abrogated the Iran nuclear deal because of race.

We suffered the worst economic collapse in 90 years because of race.

We became an international laughingstock and object of pity because of race.

We’ve lost more than 120,000 of our fellow citizens to a deadly pandemic in large part because of race.

Now we might lose our country because of race.

What a high price we have paid, what damage we have done ourselves.

Because of race.

And the ludicrous tragedy of it all is that this isn’t even the first time we’ve done it. The greatest of all America’s existential crises — meaning, of course, the Civil War — also sprang from race.

Alexander Stephens, “vice president” of the group of 11 Southern states that sought to break away in order to protect their right to enlave black people, was not reticent about acknowledging this. The U.S. Constitution, he explained, “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. . . . Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea, its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”

The resulting war left the South bitterly impoverished, its great cities in ruins and 750,000 people dead. So you’d think America would have learned. Yet now, for the second time in its history, this rich and prosperous nation whose standard of living is the envy of the world, this nation that stands secure from military threat by any foreign power, this nation you would think had every reason to be pleased with itself and its place in the scheme of things, chooses to attempt suicide. Because of race.

“All we say to America,” said Martin Luther King on April 3, 1968, “is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’ ” Because for King, as for generations of Americans, what America “said on paper” was a North Star of hope, albeit in a nation that yet refuses to vindicate that hope. Consider that King was shot to death by a white supremacist the very next day.

Yet the words on paper endure, America’s inspiration and yet also its challenge, its cross to bear, its mirror of all that lies unfulfilled and unatoned. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Jefferson, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Had he and his fellow founders actually believed that — in fact, had a critical mass of white Americans ever truly believed it at any point in the nation’s history — you would be reading something else right now in a very different country that wasn’t staring down the barrel of its own demise.

But Jefferson, who at any given time in his adult life owned about 130 human beings, did not believe. And he launched from that statement of freedoms and truths into a recitation of royal wrongs — the “why” of it all, including that the king “has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good” and that the king “has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly.”

If Jefferson’s “why” was a statement of lawyerly indignation, consider this one a raw plea for a hard reckoning 244 years postponed, a renewal of King’s call in the last hours of his life and a reminder that you can only kick the can down the road for so long.

Eventually, you run out of road.

This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 1:57 PM.