RESTORE THE REPUBLIC OR LOSE IT FOREVER
Democracy needs rebuilding — not a revolution from Sanders
“Sadly, the American dream,” President Donald Trump said in 2015, “is dead.” So, what if, four years later, Trump turns out to be right? With Tuesday’s Texas primaries, the 2020 election is not just about President Trump. Replacing Trump isn’t enough; the American republic needs repair and refounding. So, the real question is not, “Which candidate do you like?” It’s this: “Can the American dream — the republic — be revived?”
For Texans, the stakes are huge and so are the republic’s stake in Texas. Now an arguably purple state, Texas can set the course for the Democratic Party on Tuesday and even decide the election in the fall. If Trump loses Texas then, Republicans would lose their path to the White House for a generation. So, for Texas Democrats, the burden is especially heavy. Their choice is not between candidates but between outcomes: Either restore the republic or lose it forever. And if they want to restore it, they need to do the most counterintuitive thing possible: Stop Bernie Sanders.
So, buckle up, y’all. We’re going to take a big tour of history to figure out where we are. Our stops will include ancient Rome, the French Revolution, Europe, political philosophy, 250 years of American history and, of course, Texas. Also, we will stare into the abyss. So, be prepared because the abyss will stare back.
First, if you don’t believe that Texas has played an outsized role in determining the fate of America, let history be your signpost. Texas was key to opening the West through the Mexican-American War. Texas nearly helped destroy the
Union in the Civil War. Texas oil powered the 20th century. Texas gave America and the world, for better and worse, the Bushes.
Yet the words of the father of Texas, Sam Houston, echo today. “A nation divided against itself cannot stand,” Houston, the Lone Star State’s most ardent unionist, said. “I wish if this Union must be dissolved that its ruins may be the monument of my grave, and the graves of my family. I wish no epitaph to be written to tell that I survive the ruin of this glorious Union.”
And that, precisely, is what is at stake now: the Union, the
very definition of the American republic itself. Arguably, the republic has been invented and reinvented no fewer than five times, a lot like the history of the French republics, which also count five. The first American one was born with independence in 1776 and refined in 1789 with the Constitution. But it died, leading to a second, in 1865 with the collapse of slavery and the Confederacy.
The Great Depression and The New Deal created the third republic. World War II and the national security state of the Cold War forged the fifth. The expanded fifth was birthed in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn to globalization, which pledged to extend capitalism and democracy worldwide and lift standards of living here at home. But the Great Recession in 2008 laid bare the grim problems, even the collapse, of globalization.
Enter Donald Trump. Trump is not a builder. He is a destroyer of everything in his path: marriages, business deals, loan agreements, institutions, alliances, the separation of powers, the earth, laws, truth, trust and even reason itself. But give him his due. Trumpism is a real political ideology. And it doesn’t seek to re-invent the republic. It seeks, instead, to destroy it and stop its slow, yet relentless, progress.
Trumpism is rooted in a single core grievance which happens to be exactly true: Americans didn’t get their fair share out of the fifth republic, namely out of globalization. But Trumpsim incorrectly blames international trade with the accumulation of wealth at the very top of society.
It’s not that the tide didn’t rise. It’s just that a small number of super yachts crowded the inlet when it did, leaving everybody else stuck in the harbor. That’s why the top 20 percent of Americans own nearly 80 percent of the country’s wealth and the top 1 percent own 29 percent, according to the Brookings Institution, some $25 trillion. That’s more than the entire middle class.
You don’t have to leave Texas to see it. The biggest Texas cities, including Houston, reaped the reward of the “Texas Miracle,” the economic boom that began over a decade ago. Jobs doubled in the big cities. But 2 million Texans, at least, missed the boom entirely. Lots of places in Texas top the list of struggling towns when oil prices slide: Longview, Odessa-Midland and Victoria did the last time it happened in 2016. But you don’t have to be in the oil patch to go bust.
Just visit, say, San Angelo as I recently did. In the heart of the verdant Concho River Valley, San Angelo was the goat and sheep capital of Texas. Now, the downtown is listless even on a Friday night. A newspaper blows down the street. Storefronts are empty, if not abandoned. The population has practically flat-lined at 100,000; Abilene’s, just to the east, has too. So, places like these are Trump country in Texas. And Texas is one of just nine states where income inequality has actually worsened in 2018 during the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.
But there is a dark side to Trumpism: Simply put, it’s fascism. Be clear: I didn’t say Trump is a fascist. I didn’t say that if you voted for Trump you are. But the ideology of Trumpism is most certainly fascist — if you understand it as a philosophy, not as an insult. Fascism didn’t start with 20th-century Italy and Germany. As a philosophy, it took root in Europe after the French revolution in 1789. And in the 20th century, it wasn’t limited to Germany, Italy or the occupied territories. There was Spanish fascism and Portuguese fascism; both lasted until the 1970s.
Yes, George Orwell once wrote that “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” Almost, but not quite. As James Fallows once noted in The Atlantic , the great Italian writer and philosopher, Umberto Eco, who lived under Mussolini, responded in 1995: “It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple.” Instead, fascism would take a modern form, say on the Internet and television.
Check for yourself. A commonsense, layman’s definition of fascism can be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which lists 15 or so characteristics. Trumpism, by my count, checks off about 11 of these items, either through actual policy or public sentiment. Here in America we can actually measure fascism, quantify it in public opinion and policy.
Opposition to parliaments and legislatures? Check. Forty-three percent of Republicans say presidents could operate more effectively if they didn’t have to bother themselves with Congress and the courts, according to the Pew Research Center. Opposition to
Marxism? Check. Conservative economics which benefit the rich? Corporatism? Check-plus. Demonization of certain groups. Check-plus-plus. And sort of like coronavirus, we’re not the only ones infected by it. India, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, the United Kingdom and Italy have all caught the contagion.
The American republic, as we know it, has just about stopped working. It’s not just Donald Trump; he’s just an opportunist who seized on the compilation of mistakes like the flooding of politics with money, the paralysis of the Senate, the intense politicization of the courts and huge expansion of the presidency under the pretense of national security. Literally, almost nothing works now. Democracy isn’t under attack. It’s dying.
So, what is to be done? For that we need to flip back to 509 B.C.E., when the Romans ejected the Etruscans to establish the first republic in history, when citizens elected a legislature — the Senate — which governed on their behalf. The Roman Republic, however, was a messy affair and it succumbed, too, in 44 B.C.E. when the Senate handed its power to Julius Caesar, naming him dictator for life. Realizing their mistake, the Senate stabbed him to death. But it was too late. The lower and middle classes rose up for their slain dictator. The senators caved and worsened the situation further, installing Caesar’s heir, Octavius — as emperor. The world’s first republic died this very month, 2064 years ago.
In this scenario, President Trump is Julius Caesar. (Though he has been aptly compared to Caligula.) And Bernie Sanders is Marcus Junius Brutus, who first stabbed Caesar. Sanders represents a swift, and sharp end to Trumpism, lopping off a rightwing authoritarian and replacing it with revolution. But if the American republic is as fragile as I’ve described, it simply can’t withstand revolution.
Even if he got elected, many of Sanders’ promises would never be approved even by an all-Democratic Congress; there are too many conservative Democrats. Sandersism would fail or he would be tempted to choose revolution over republic. Many of his promises involve using exactly what Trump has used: the executive order. Worse, what if the failure of Sanders’ programs to be enacted only undermined the fragile republic further, eroding confidence in institutions? Demands would rise for an emperor, not just a dictator.
The sad news is that the republic is too feeble to withstand the earthquake of revolution; it needs a caretaker and fixer or it really does die for good. Sure, revolution has a nice ring to it. Burn it down, right? And yes putting shoulder to wheel to reinvent a sixth republic is hard work. But the first job toward reviving American democracy is to choose carefully. Trump has to go. And Bernie, realistically, can’t do it. Can you imagine him extending an olive branch to San Angelo? His zeal has never been matched by actual achievement. And he is an impatient revolutionary, not a meticulous political surgeon. Whether in the election or after, the fragile patient will die on the table.
Texans have the burden of making these great, big choices which befits a great, big state. It’s also the price of being purple, relevant again. Good luck. Or as the Romans might have said, “Optima
fortuna, y'all.”
Parker, author of “Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America,” is a contributing columnist for the Chronicle.