Some observations on Independence Day

In its almost one-quarter millennium of independent existence, our country has achieved much.  The winning of independence itself, against the determined opposition of the most powerful empire in the world, was a remarkable accomplishment, as was the successful beating back of that same empire's blockade and invasion during the Napoleonic wars a few decades later -- the last time hostile foreign armies ever set foot on our territory.  We defeated a massive, traitorous attempt to divide the nation in order to preserve slavery, and emerged stronger than ever.  Fascist regimes in Japan and Germany tried their strength against us, and in a few years both countries were smoldering ruins.  Other achievements have made America itself a better place -- the Nineteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights movement, and gay liberation extended freedom and democracy to tens of millions of previously disenfranchised or oppressed Americans.

All these things were accomplished by people who worked hard and fought hard for victory, and who knew that that victory was achievable.

Yet today we seem afflicted by a pervasive loss of nerve, a sniveling and cowardly pessimism which reacts to every setback as an apocalyptic disaster.  Biden had one bad debate and the next day half the left-wing political internet was engulfed in "we're doomed, doomed, DOOMED" and panicky calls for him to step aside in favor of another candidate.  Most of this stuff had subsided by the weekend, but then came the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, and everybody was back to "we're doomed, doomed, DOOMED" all over again.  Next week it will probably be something else.

This is not the spirit that smashed the Confederacy, kicked Tojo's ass all the way back to Tokyo, and threw Jim Crow onto the garbage heap of history.

Every struggle for freedom and progress has included some setbacks, sometimes major ones.  This is inevitable because the very fact that a struggle is happening means there are opponents, who are fighting to push us back or destroy us.  The people who won those struggles didn't do so by flying into a panic and declaring defeat every time something bad happened.  They recognized that every war includes battles lost as well as battles won, and that the proper response to the former is to fight harder and with greater determination.

Yes, Trump and his enablers are dangerous, especially with "Project 2025" waiting in the wings.  All the more reason to do everything possible to make sure he doesn't win the presidency again.  Yes, the Supreme Court has become totally unmoored from the Constitution and is shitting out totalitarian absurdities all over our system of laws.  All the more reason to do everything possible to win majorities in the House and Senate as well as the presidency, so that Congress can enlarge or rein in the Court -- and to make it clear to the politicians that we expect them to actually do so.

Yes, the country faces other threats.  Religion is rapidly declining, but its death throes have given rise to a militant Christian-supremacist movement whose aggressive, if mush-brained, attacks on separation of church and state must constantly be fended off.  Since Dobbs, half the states are trying to force women down to the status of involuntary breeding stock, with sadistic laws and policies right out of the Dark Ages.  The anti-science sludge that has always festered at the bottom of the national gene pool is raising more of a stink than ever, thanks to the internet's power to bring blithering idiots together to reinforce each other's global-warming denialism, paranoid fantasies against vaccines, and other such raving nonsense.  A belligerent ideology rooted in the preposterous claim that humans can change sex has fomented the undermining of women's rights and safety and has led to the surgical and hormonal mutilation of thousands of children.  Worst of all is the horrifying anti-Israel, anti-Jewish movement which erupted on our campuses after October 7, and which -- as I've been documenting in the link round-ups since then -- has often closely replicated elements of the behavior and rhetoric of the original Nazi movement in Germany in the years before it came to power.

All of these are genuine dangers, and none will be easy to defeat.  But I've never wavered in my conviction that we will defeat them, however long and difficult the fight may be.  We have a reputation for being a nation of optimists.  Pessimists are dead weight.  Only those who fight can win.