Opinion: America must march toward greatness

Two recent op-ed articles on Northjersey.com, “Make America Great Again,” by Richard Muti and “2018 is new but our cherished values are not,” by Christopher de Vinck, offer contrasting views on America. 

Painting a bleak portrait of our so-called greatness, Muti demolishes Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”  According to Muti, America is not and never has been great because of our history of slavery and discrimination, allowing millions of our citizens to be without proper health care and enacting tax policies that make the disparity between the rich and poor even greater.

De Vinck’s view of America is more optimistic, colored by his mother’s experiences as one of the lucky immigrants who escaped Nazi oppression in Belgium.  De Vinck’s mother rejoiced in the life America gave her children and saw it as striving “to reach out with our hands for the souls of who we are always hoping for illuminations.” De Vinck continues to view America as “the hope of freedom, the breaking away from tyranny, and the consideration of a better world where life and liberty are sown together in a single pattern of unity and goodness.”

I believe America is somewhere between these sharply contrasting views.  We are a work in progress. Alexis DeToqueville described American democracy as a great experiment.  “One step forward, two steps backward” aptly describes us at times.  It took almost a century and the Civil War to eradicate slavery and it took almost another century for the full promise of the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to begin to be realized.

It took 140 years for women to gain the right to vote.  Small steps forward, but we are moving backward by diluting the protections of the Voting Rights Act and enacting legislation on the state level that interferes with the free exercise of voting rights. We took small, albeit imperfect steps toward making health care accessible to all citizens, but there are those of us who would retrace those steps.  When efforts to repeal and place the Affordable Care Act failed, that pull-back was achieved through the back door of the revised tax code.

We are at a crossroads.  As a nation, do we continue the march forward toward the vision of De Vinck’s mother?  In my opinion, President Trump is the puppet of an agenda that represents a threat to our progress and even calls into question our desire to continue our democratic form of government. 

We have only to look at Nazi Germany to understand what happens when a nation stops caring about its democracy.  A museum in Berlin, Topography of Terror, chronicles the death of the nascent German democracy through the Reichstag voluntarily ceding power to Hitler between 1933 and 1942.

One placard notes: “[T]he mood of the 1930’s represented the actual power base of the coming Fuhrer state.  There was a very widespread sense of release and liberation from democracy.  What is a democracy to do when the majority of the people no longer wants it?  There was a desire for something genuinely new:  popular rule without parties, a popular leader figure.”    

Sound familiar?  This is where we are as a nation. 

In electing Trump, a near majority of our population signaled it just wanted to rally around a figure who satisfies what used to be the unspoken desire of some to stop our progress forward because it is viewed as a threat to their status quo.  The election of Trump permitted that segment to voice those desires openly: white nationalism, misogyny, racism, suppression of basic constitutional rights.

Trump also has demonstrated lack of respect for the First Amendment.  The writer Jill Lepore, in a New Yorker Talk of the Town on October 9, wrote about the ebbs and flows of free speech in America: “Free speech is not a week or a place.  It is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth.”  One step forward, two steps back.

The defeat of Alabama’s Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate was a small step forward. But not only did Trump fail to condemn Moore’s sexual assaults against underage women, he endorsed him, hardly shocking given the multitude of sexual assault allegations made against Trump himself.  Yet Trump remains impervious to consequences. Two steps backwards.

This cannot continue.

If we don’t value our democracy, we are going to lose it.  We must continue our march toward greatness, as elusive as it might be, because anything less is not acceptable.

Clara S. Licata is a Midland Park attorney whose practice concentrates primarily on appellate matters.