Are We Americans Any More…Is There Still an America?

French Prime Minister François Bayrou recently called for a national debate on just what it means to be French, a question he said has been “festering for years” and needed to be brought out into the open. The incentive should be familiar. France, like the United States, has been inundated with what Bayrou termed a “flood of immigrants,” which is causing as much controversy there as here. Parroting Donald Trump, for example, the French justice minister has proposed that their constitution be changed to end birthright citizenship.

The United States has already begun a similar debate—it kicked off on November 5. While immigration is surely a factor, our issues go far deeper.

National identity is difficult to quantify, probably more so here than in France, since our country is only a couple of centuries old and the French, and all Europeans and Asians for that matter, see their history and their culture stretching back at least a thousand years before that. Nonetheless there are some traits that, in the course of our development, we have come to identify as particularly American.

We pride ourselves on being a nation that esteems justice and decency. As slow, halting, and imperfect as it may have been, as the years went on, our country has continued to move toward those ideals, until finally we seemed to come to believe that “all people are created equal” and “endowed with certain inalienable rights.”

For all the lofty language, that sentiment did not exist at the onset of our history. The United States started out as deeply intolerant, discriminating against (in addition to, obviously, Black people) Catholics, Jews, Native Americans, women and, when the Chinese, Japanese, and Latinos began to arrive, them as well. Rule was to be by the few, not the many, and anyone who did not own property was not considered fit to help choose those who would govern.

But over the years, those preconceptions began to erode. Whether the United States was created on the prejudices of the day, be they racial, religious, or class-oriented, the glory of this nation, what has made it the envy of the world, is its struggle over the ensuing two and a half centuries to expand the very rights that the Founders sought to limit. One by one, previously banned groups were allowed into the political process, first in choosing the nation’s leaders and then by becoming them. Property-holding requirements to vote were eliminated in the first decades of the nineteenth century; Black Americans were guaranteed citizenship and the right to vote by the 14^th and 15^th amendments and were allowed to become naturalized citizens in 1870; women were granted the vote by the 19^th Amendment in 1920; and Asian Americans were finally assured full participation in government in the 1950s.

As the national mood changed and Americans grew more expansive and tolerant, the meaning of the Constitution changed as well. Dred Scott was overruled by the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments; Plessy v Ferguson was overruled by Brown v Board of Education; birthright citizenship was upheld in Wong Kim Ark; the rights of accused were seen to be constitutionally guaranteed in Miranda, as was the right for a woman to terminate a pregnancy in Roe v Wade, and right to interracial marriage in Loving v Virginia.

In these and other Supreme Court decisions, the American Constitution was considered a living, breathing document, adapting and growing—as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention intended, by the way—as conditions in the nation and world changed. Of course, there were those, such as former-Justice Antonin Scalia, who were on record as favoring—and this is his phrase—a “dead Constitution,” which, one assumes, would have dead brains interpreting it.

Well, the dead brains seem to have won.

To say that the Constitution has ossified is, alas, a gross understatement. Where the words were once used to help guarantee equal rights, they are now used to take them away. There have been breathtaking moves against even the pretext of democracy, with the Supreme Court granting the most amoral and venal person ever to hold the presidency virtual carte blanche to move the country toward autocracy and fascism. Those who had been jailed for what any idiot could see was an attempt to overthrow the government have been freed with the thanks and support of the would-be usurper, without a peep from Congress or the courts.

It is unnecessary to produce a litany of Putinesque orders or betrayals of his supporters Trump has initiated in two short weeks to realize that unless his own party rebels, which is as likely as climate change turning out to be a hoax, there is scant chance to derail his determination to create a government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump.

We surely cannot look to the Supreme Court to save us. The “rule of law”(the justices favorite phrase) has been reduced to a punchline. What we have now is a rule of law twisted, contorted, and perverted by a roster of justices who seem to see it as their duty to dismantle the very system of government they took an oath to protect. How sad it must be for the thousands in the legal profession, both before the bench and behind it, who venerate the law and have spent their lives trying to make it meaningful for all Americans, to be part of a system so openly corrupt. As sad as it is for them, it is worse for those who must live with decisions that snatch away the rights it had often taken many, many terrifying and bloody years to ensure.

So what does it mean to be an American now? We’ve gone from inclusion to hate; generosity to greed; charity to cruelty. To be sure, tens of millions have rejected this America, this bastardization of democracy that Donald Trump and his band of suck-ups has foisted on us, but in the end, does that have any meaning? The government is theirs and, with the rule of law abolished, it is likely to remain so for some time.

And so, if America is gone, can those of us who are appalled and disgusted by what our country has become still call ourselves Americans?

Should we?