Restoring the secular republic

Can Biden block the move toward theocratic oligarchy?

The breakdown of secularism as the guiding principle of democratic governance was never more evident than In today’s Europe and its prime example’, The French Republic. Liberty, equality and fraternity formed the moral core of a monocultural society.  But the migration of former colonials has created disparities that challenge the social compact forged in blood at the guillotine.

The United States, also founded as a secular country, is finding that the blood of Revolution and Civil War may have been shed in vain. Radical right wingers are conspiring to form a theocratic oligarchy on the bones of a rapidly failing democratic republic.

It Is a coalition deftly crafted by the GOP to redefine the mainstream values of the US previously held sacred by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The old egalitarian ideas that enabled the “melting pot” no longer drive the legislative and judicial processes. Nostalgic America no longer exists.

The GOP fronted the exploitation of ethnic, religious and racial divides to destroy the cohesion of the majority in order to enable the rise of a permanent oligarchy drawn from the minority. These are the “One Percenters” whose minions are their predominantly white male managers (Pharisees) and political scripters (Scribes). Systemic racism is a pragmatic construct that keeps Blacks, the Indigenous, and other ethnics in a permanent dysfunctional lower class competing to reap the rewards that will be forever dangled.

The GOP brazenly calls this construct a clever strategy when all the hallmarks of a conspiracy are evident. Exploiting loopholes to undermine the very purpose of the Constitution makes legality an instrument of conspiracy. And conspiracy implies a crime - in this case, treason.

How did this happen? The flash point was the 2000 election which was handed to Bush by a divided SCOTUS (another good argument for requiring that certain SCOTUS decisions be unanimous). The dirty tricksters had discovered a way to win the Presidential election by judicial Intervention. Right then the conspiracy was born to disenfranchise the majority by gaming electoral college differences and embedding soft coup techniques into the process at every level.

The actual class struggle had been engaged during the Clinton-Gore administration.  The One Percenters dispatched their lobbyists to create trade agreements that would gut labor unions, ship jobs overseas and reduce the once powerful middle class to rags - creating the disillusioned electorate that would shatter the electoral college algorithm.

It took 8 years of conspirator-in-chief Dick Cheney and another 8 under a distracted Barack Obama for the master plan to be executed: GOP control of most state houses, voter suppression, packing state and federal courts, gerrymandering, a compliant SCOTUS, and so on. Then along came Donald Trump, a New York character straight out of a Damon Runyon tale.

Trump’s natural instinct and prejudices fit both ends of the plan to desecularize the US. He deconstructed the majority that normally powered the Democrats. And delivered the economy the One Percenters needed to turn economic advantage to hegemony. And while keeping the cultural wars boiling, he added two orthodox Catholics and a starched Presbyterian to SCOTUS to support future adventures in theocracy. Witness the recent decision striking down California’s using pandemic guidelines to control the size of religious gatherings for worship.

The question we all faced in the last election was can Joe Biden restore the secular state? Could he end the cycle of crime and punishment, sin and contrition? Could he bring to justice all those who committed acts that would have replaced the American state with a version not envisioned  by the Founders? Would he put an end to politics that lives between the lines of the Constitution? Would he have the courage not to offer a conciliatory hand across the aisle to traitors?  Does he have the courage to unify the country by example and not endless speeches, fund raisers and commissions?

So far, the answer is tending “yes.” The return of the secular state is the precursor to civil discourse. Joe Biden is the antidote to Donald Trump’s poison - the toxic combination of white nationalism, evangelical Christianity, and authoritarian conservatism. His undoing of Trump’s executive orders, his investing in a “percolate up” economy, his raising the flame under the “melting pot,” and his move to free SCOTUS from ideological shackles - all will reassert the liberal values of the secular state.

The American dream of equality, justice and fairness, which rotates on an axis that runs through the presidencies of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson, will once again become a realistic aspiration.