Comments Off on America is The Backbone of Democracy
Apparently Not!
All of the touted greatness of the United States and the assistance given to other countries has started to pale. Our former world dominance is being relegated to this country being seen as potentially near mediocre actor on the world stage. All of the bad actors are looking at the current “leader” as a purchasable commodity who if offered the right largesse will ease their situations with the U.S. in the way of sanctions or restrictions. As shown in his first term DJT is out for DJT and it will always be so. His Cabinet members, his Whitehouse staff all play to his ego and his greed so they can insert their agendas onto the American public.
These are the same actions performed during the 30 or so years prior to WWII. There are too many folks who don’t think it can happen here while it’s happening here! DRT is seeking a “Kingship” with absolute authority, that aspiration was imbued by same folks who pushed the “moral Majority, attacked and killed abortion rights”. These are the people who think Medicaid should get less funding (do you hear that Seniors with medical needs and disabilities?) It is not wrong to pursue waste and fraud but usually after a complete investigation as to where misdeeds occur. Forcing needy folks whose disabilities and age preclude any ability to work is ridiculous and wrong. At the bottom of all of this is funding the massive tax cuts for the wealthy.
The elected members of Congress who are kissing the “Arse” of FFLOTUS are people elected by the people to represent them in government but have failed and will continue to fail as long as they are in office. Terms are limited at the ballot box not by the people running for office.
The statements made on the campaign trail along with the empty promises are borne out by the negative rhetoric about Americans and allies against the sucking up to middle eastern strongmen who have swayed his views with pomp and circumstance long with lavish gifts. All of this aside, the promises made by the people we elected are next to useless while the promises made by a inveterate self-serving liar is as Anti American as you can get without actually stating that fact!
Apparently, we are not as sharp politically as we should be, we have more rested on our laurels aka Asses while the government is in the hands of an idiot on steroids!
I have a difficult time understanding the lack of outrage over the actions of “commander Chaos” and his drain circlers. History has shown the same actions were taken in the 1930’s when A. Hitler lied and cheated his way into German Government. Even though Germany was in poor financial shape due to an ill-advised war in which they lost, the people were aroused over untrue issues and against certain people who were deemed “unfit, not German enough or otherwise undesirable”. When called to task over the treatment of so-called non-Germans, MR. H decided to squeeze an easier target and proceeded to persecute anyone Jewish. He so thoroughly indoctrinated the population in hatred of Jews that everyday people ignored the brutality against the Jews and often joined in.
The plight of the Jewish community was widely reported by those who fled and newspapers in Europe, but no one listened or paid much attention except to the “outrageous” statements blaming the Jews for everything that he could. All of this while the general public needed relief from the poor economy left after losing the war and having to pay reparations.
Instead, while making Jews the target of attention, he began building his “war Machine”, the German people did not notice (or did not want to) because they had good jobs in the munition and steel factories that were producing war machine and materials. He went after books, trashed Jewish businesses, raided Jewish homes and took anything of value. Took the residents took work camps building the infrastructure for the war machines and the soon to be “camps’ for Jews and other so called unwanted people aka, gays, Hungarians or anyone who was not able to prove German citizenship.
Fast forward to 2024 Donald J Trump elected to the Presidency! After the fiasco of his first term and the extensive rhetoric leading up to this one, his supporters didn’t learn anything or did not pay attention when he stated exactly what he was going to and is doing it. His broad strokes do not discriminate, and all are encompassed in them. WE the people need to wake up and insist on action from our elected officials especially the supporters in Congress who are facilitating his actions.
Arlington Cemetery Erases Civil War in Hegseth DEI Purge
Nandika Chatterjee
Fri, March 14, 2025 at 4:21 PM CDT
3 min read
The Arlington National Cemetery has removed key information from its website about prominent Black, Hispanic, and female service members as well as historical topics like the Civil War.
The moves are part of a broader initiative by the Department of Defense to do away with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the Washington Post reported.
A spokesperson for the cemetery confirmed on Friday that, in compliance with new Pentagon directives, internal links leading to webpages about notable veterans who were minorities—such as Gen. Colin Powell, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and members of the all-Black, all-female 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion—were taken down.
Educational material on the Civil War and Medal of Honor recipients has also been completely removed, leaving only a brief mention of the cemetery’s connection to the conflict.
These deletions follow a series of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump banning DEI across the federal government. In accordance with the directives, Pentagon leaders have been tasked with purging content that “promotes” DEI on military websites.
“We are proud of our educational content and programming and working diligently to return removed content to ensure alignment with Department of Defense instruction 5400.17 and Executive Orders issued by the President,” a cemetery spokesperson told the Post in a statement.
They added: “We remain committed to sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism, while continuing to engage with our community in a manner that reflects our core values.”
Historian Kevin M. Levin first noted the removals in his Substack, “Civil War Memory,” which was further reported on by military news site Task & Purpose. The removals have drawn sharp criticism from educators and historians, who argue that the changes erase vital pieces of American history.
Levin, a Boston-based author and former teacher, expressed disappointment over the loss of accessible material about influential individuals like Captain Joy Bright Hancock, one of the military’s first woman officers, and Major General Marcelite Jordan Harris, the Air Force’s first female, African-American general officer.
“It’s incredibly unfortunate. This is just the kind of history that we want students to be learning, a history that allows students from different backgrounds to make a meaningful connection with one of our sacred sites,” Levin told the Post.
Some of the removed content is still accessible through active links to pages on “Prominent Military Figures” and “U.S. Supreme Court,” but the categories “African American History,” “Hispanic American History,” and “Women’s History” no longer appear prominently on the site.
The cemetery’s website, a key resource for educators and visitors, once provided lesson plans, walking tours, and detailed profiles of military heroes. Now, many of these resources have been scrubbed.
“This is a place where history comes alive, and you feel it when you’re there,” Levin said. “Even if you can’t bring your students there, you can bring the stories to them in the classroom. There’s a story there for everyone to connect to.”
Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.
During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.
Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.
As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.
In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.
When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that a large government was destroying American individualism.
It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.
But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.
Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.
The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “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,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.
But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.
To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.
Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.
Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.
Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.
To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.
Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”
It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.
When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.
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