Jamelle Bouie’s brilliant column in the New York Times last week proposed that the United States has been a series, so far, of four Republics:
Our first republic began with ratification in 1788 and collapsed at Fort Sumter in 1861. Our second emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and was dismantled, as the University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha argues, by Jim Crow at home and imperial ambition abroad. If the third American republic took shape under the unusual circumstances of the middle decades of the 20th century — what the Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie calls “the great exception” of depression, war and a political system indelibly shaped by immigration restriction and the near-total exclusion of millions of American citizens from the political system — then the fourth began with the achievements of the civil rights movement, which included a newly open door to the world.
The country I wake up in every day is not so far away as the country into which I was born, that is, the Third Republic. It had Social Security, but no Medicare, not to mention Medicaid. The social welfare system insisted that case workers visit the homes of welfare recipients occasionally to be certain they had not bought anything superfluous with their welfare money. I got to know folks who regularly hid new clothes or even the occasional small appliance away in case one of these people came to call. Healthcare was completely absent unless you could afford private insurance. Abortion was outlawed and rarely if ever spoken of. There were few regulations regarding air or water quality. Even divorce had a whiff of the unsavory.
Then came Jamelle’s Fourth Republic, and I dare anyone to say that the 60’s didn’t accomplish anything. The last three on this list are direct outgrowths of what had been accomplished during the 60’s.
- 1964: Civil Rights Bill
- 1965: Voting Rights Act
- 1967: Warrantless "midnight raids" upon the homes of welfare recipients were condemned as unjustifiable invasions of privacy.
- 1969: Environmental Protection Act
- 1973: Roe vs. Wade
- 2010: Affordable Care Act
- 2015: Gay Marriage
Then in 2016 Donald Trump took a trip down a golden escalator with a message of national destruction. I now see it as the beginning of the Fifth Republic.
I hope someone somewhere is making a definitive list of all that his administration has taken away from us. I’m not even counting the Dobbs act, which nullified Roe. That one alone has left uncounted women across the country in dire straits, right back to where I started from. People selected by skin color are being rounded up by ICE and told that illegal aliens have no civil rights. Medicaid recipients may be visited to determine if they are at all able to work. And gay marriage, while still technically legal, is in danger of having rights denied them for “DEI” designations.
So much public good that has been there all along for many of us, or that has come along during our lifetimes that we have applauded, feeling better that all of that is there, in the background, part of our country. Part of what makes us better, somehow. All of which we have grown to count on in ways we don’t always acknowledge. But its been there. When we needed it. Or wanted it.
- National Park Service
- NOAA
- U.S. Geological Service
- The National Weather Service
- EPA
- FEMA
- The Smithsonian
- The Kennedy Center for the Arts
- CDC
- The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Clean air, clean water, emergency housing, The Science Guy and Masterpiece Theater, hurricane warnings. So many things that we have counted on. Even if they are not always there in time, we knew there was someplace to go for information and help, and we could complain loudly when those responsible failed us. The point being – somewhere someone was responsible for these things.
Now, no one is.
They have been fired. Or defunded. Or lost too many valued people. Or deemed not necessary. And if the word “race” or the word “woman” or the word “sex” in included in a priority it is declared to be “DEI” and erased. The Environmental Protection Agency no longer protects the environment. The Justice Department no longer knows the meaning of justice.
So I cannot say that I live in a foreign country, since this is very much like the country I was born into. A country that had a few, but not nearly all of the things that were beginning to brighten the place up a bit.
Now, in just a few months, it is beginning to look a bit tattered. Important pieces are missing. Pillars have begun to crumble. In some ways it’s even worse than the place I was born in. It looks used and abused.
A forewarning was in 2013, with Shelby County, and the decimation of Article 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Today, Section 2 of the VRA is in jeopardy due to a case rising in Louisiana. Reading Jamelle’s column, one can see that he does not expect it to go well. And there, it seems, as far as he is concerned goes the Fourth Republic for good and all. We are left with what remains of the Fifth, or as I have come to see it, the tag ends of civilization as we know it.
People go nowadays to see the remnants of ancient civilizations – what one English wag sometimes referred to as “a series of small walls.” For over 100 years, America has been a place where others longed to come, to start over, to experience freedom of speech, to see what Democracy looked like.
I wonder what visitors of the future will find. I wonder why they will come at all.