The Grand Illusion
Until recently, i.e., until the arrival of Donald Trump and his MAGA clones and the Woke speech police, the United States was a democracy legally balanced (more precariously than most Americans realized) between law and long-standing custom.
Over time some of those customs were changed by law or codified into law, but far from all of them. Although the separation of church and state is mandated by the Constitution, that separation was maintained as much by custom as by law.
What we’ve seen over the last few years is a war between the extremists of the right and the extremists of the left, a war exploited for his personal benefit by Donald Trump, which is bad enough, but what is even worse is the tactic he’s used to great effect.
That tactic is simply seeking out customs and practices that used to have a certain force, almost of law, and overriding them because they’re not enshrined in law. This is nothing new. It’s happened before, but never on the scale pursued by Trump.
Trump tears down the east wing of the White House because there’s no law specifically forbidding it. He orders the militarization of national guard units and attacks on foreign boats and ships as part of a “war” against supposed drug cartels, because there’s not a clear legal definition of “war.”
The U.S. legal system was never designed to have to respond to such acts on a short-term and timely fashion, which is one of the principal reasons why he’s getting away with so much.
The other reason is because extremists control too much of each major party, and the two parties are deadlocked because the party leaders are effectively controlled by their extremists, even though most Americans don’t want the extremes of either party.
As a result of Trump’s tactics, even without Trump, the U.S. will still face the problem he’s exploiting, and that’s the fact that, at present, it appears as if corporations, presidents, and bureaucrats can damn well do anything that’s not definitively prohibited by law – and that to stop that will effectively require an authoritarian state controlling everything because the majority of Americans either don’t care, don’t understand the problem, or support one or the other extreme.
“…because the majority of Americans either don’t care, don’t understand the problem, or support one or the other extreme.”
I wish I had an answer. The situation depresses me in the extreme.
The other part of the problem is the varying views of America’s “greatness.” For too many people, “when people who look like me dominated” is seen as “great.” For many others, that’s when America was least great.
So even a discussion is all but impossible, unless both parties have thought things through (highly unlikely) and are willing to define their terms at the start (even less likely).
LEM, I disagree with your premise that we are seeing a symmetrical fight between the “far left” (what is this antifa???) and the far right. Currently the conservatives have a lock on all three branches of government. So, there’s no excuses to justify anything either illegal or ahistorical that Trump, the Republican controlled Congress, or the supermajority controlled conservative SCOTUS have done, are doing, or are contemplating doing in the future that further divides and tears apart this country.
One can’t codify against evil/crazy when the damage is being done from the very top. Even if one did, who’s going to stop Trump? Even Amy Coney Barrett said recently that the Supreme Court had no power to compel the president to follow a decision issued by the court. I believe that’s very much why that same court has not issued decisions that uphold the constitution and bar Trump from many of the acts he has been taking. They don’t want a constitutional crisis on their watch. Shameful.
The Republican mantra for many years has been one of ‘if it’s not illegal then I/we can do it’. Even the Royal family isn’t going down that road. They just ‘defrocked’ Prince Andrew.