There’s something excruciatingly sad, and almost morbidly funny, about the circumstances surrounding the U.S.A.’s 250^th birthday. It’s come and gone now, but if we hadn’t all lived through the semiquincentennial, it would be hard to imagine that an anniversary of this magnitude could elicit so much bleak silence and so little, well, celebration. Americans, on the whole, are a flag-waving, even chest-thumping people. This should have been a big deal. But here we are.

The predominant vibe wasn’t pride. It wasn’t gratitude or optimism. The anniversary wasn’t much of an occasion for adult conversation about American history, about what the country is at its best. The vibe was chagrin. Or, for many, many of us, something much worse: stomach-churning dismay, if not horror.

In recent weeks I’ve seen several evocations of “Idiocracy,” the 2006 film by Mike Judge, but I’m not sure that even Judge could have dreamed up the UFC-on-the-White-House-lawn or botched-reflecting-pool story lines. Or, for that matter, the Great American State Fair with its dozens of attendees. The president made it about him to the extent that even the Milli Vanilli guy wanted no part of it.

As we mark a quarter of a millennium since the Declaration of Independence, the United States looks like an empire that has well and truly driven itself into the ditch.

Time will tell whether we can dig ourselves out.

America is still rich, in the aggregate, but the super wealthy have opened record-breaking chasms between themselves and the rest of us, gaps far more extreme than during the Gilded Age. Americans are deeply pessimistic about their financial futures. Two-thirds of us say a middle-class life is out of reach for most people. On the bright side, we recently minted our first trillionaire.

America at 250 is a nation at war, sort of. The regime is trying to free itself from a disastrous Middle East conflict — a war the president launched with no public or Congressional buy-in, no legal justification, and no plan. In his efforts to get out of Iran, Trump resembles Brer Rabbit trying haplessly to punch and kick himself free of the Tar Baby. The baby’s got him by the Strait of Hormuz and won’t let go. (Unlike in that tale, there’s no sign this rabbit will outwit his enemies in the end.)

250 years in, the America that was founded as a nation of, by, and for “white” people is led (still? again?) by a brazenly racist government. The president welcomes White Afrikaners as “refugees” while seeking to uproot and deport Haitians whom he, adopting the language of Hitler, accuses of “poisoning the blood” of the nation. In an opinion allowing Trump to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito writes, presumably with a straight face, that none of Trump’s hateful language about them was “overtly racial.” The same court pretends to see no racism in racial gerrymandering by Southern states, so it decided to permit the practice, killing off one of the last provisions of the Voting Rights Act and effectively disenfranchising millions of Black Americans.

There was even something grimly apt about the scorching temperatures across much of the country over the holiday weekend. The leading historical emitter of greenhouse gases, the U.S. has now gone fully rogue in its climate policies, dismantling half-built wind farms and ramping up its guzzling of fossil fuels as a matter of national policy. It’s almost as if the weather goddesses were trying to get our attention on this august (July) occasion.

The health of American democracy has plummeted — predictably, since we the people saw fit to restore a manifestly unfit, openly authoritarian “leader” to the Oval Office. Respect for the U.S. has fallen globally, and even among our closest friends America is now more likely to be seen as a threat than an ally.

I could go on, lord knows.

This country is a danger to itself and others. The state of our union is volatile and precarious. And the second Trump term still has thirty months to go. There’s no point in whistling past the graveyard, or pretending things are more-or-less normal — as many in the news media seemed inclined to do over Independence Day.

“We are in free fall off a cliff,” the Harvard historian Jill LePore, no flaming radical, recently told a British interviewer. “I don’t know when we land.”

I’m reluctant to even look for a bright side in a moment this awful — when growing swarms of federal agents are tearing families apart, rounding up hardworking members of American communities and throwing them into detention camps; when ICE has a fresh killing on its hands, the tenth by immigration agents during Trump 2.0; when our government has murdered more than 200 people by blowing up their boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific; when the reckless gutting of U.S.A.I.D. is causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the world; when our next major election hangs in the balance as the president and his henchmen use the levers of government in one strategy after another aimed at twisting the outcome in their party’s favor.

But if there is a silver lining, it can be found precisely in the depths of this emergency.

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,” wrote the arch-conservative, neoliberal economist Milton Friedman. (We also cite this quote in Episode 8 of the Scene on Radio season, The News, which dropped last week.) Friedman and his right-wing allies have long understood this dynamic and have acted on it to advance their goals — as detailed by Naomi Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine.

Those who want to break free from the status quo and create deep change, Friedman went on to say, must develop alternative ideas and keep them alive “until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” That is, until the inadequacy of the old moderate prescriptions has become clear to a critical mass of the people.

Are we there yet?

Thanks to the Trump regime’s breathtaking incompetence and cruelty, the majority of Americans (though still a frustratingly limited majority) see a society headed down the wrong track. To the extent that Trumpism represents the apotheosis of the very worst of America, surely he’s discrediting those traits and behaviors more effectively than any progressive critic ever could. Perhaps the U.S. is the junkie that needed to hit rock bottom.

We likely have further to fall, as LePore implied. Trump is certainly not finished trying to manipulate this fall’s election so he can hold onto the Congressional majorities that insulate him from accountability. The Trump-Miller-Vought regime is far from finished in trying to establish de facto one-party rule, a police-surveillance state, a White nationalist ethnostate. The project proceeds apace despite Trump’s sinking approval ratings. We have a fight on our hands and there’s no telling what will be asked of us if democracy is to win.

Some historians have said it took three American revolutions to get to something resembling democracy: the one in the 1770s; another after the Civil War, with Emancipation and the Reconstruction Amendments; and a third in the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement.

Each revolution was followed by retrenchments — the inevitable backlash. We’re now ruled by a right-wing movement so reactionary that it’s trying to drag us all the way back to the 19th century. With big contributions from the Roberts Court, the Trump regime is threatening even the gains won with the Civil War.

Time for that Fourth Revolution, people.

*

My posts here have been fewer and farther between the last few months, as I was busy finishing The News. I do hope you all have listened, or will!

Like this? Share Keeping ScOR with a friend, or several, by forwarding this message to them.

If you missed past posts, find the archive here.