Everyone asks, so I’ll get it out of the way up front: yes, I am related to James Garfield, 20th President of the United States. I’m a great-great grandson. I can’t claim any credit for this. It was an accident of birth.
James Garfield was a Republican, but I can state with near certainty that he would not be a Republican today. Hell, Eisenhower would not be a Republican today.
I’ve steered away from partisan politics in this blog, but like the Civil War in which my famous ancestor served, we are living in an age when one must choose sides. I think auto racing is the most boring sport in the world, but I commend NASCAR for removing the Confederate flag from its events.
Today’s Republicans accuse their detractors of “hating America,” as if their point of view were the only legitimately American one. Want universal, tax-funded health care? You hate America. Believe that minorities have legitimate grievances about their treatment by rogue cops and police departments? You hate America. Support the right of athletes to engage in peaceful protest while the national anthem is played before a game? You hate America.
But does anything scream “I hate America” louder than displaying the flag of a national entity that openly declared it wanted no part of the United States and its guarantees of freedom for all, that fought a war to protect the institution of human slavery? Tell me the difference between burning an American flag and waving a Confederate one. I’ll wait.
Republicans of my great-great grandfather’s era were forgiving enough to allow these traitors back into our great nation. Look where it’s gotten us. Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our nature.” The man who now holds his job appeals to something much different and much darker.
During the quarantine I’ve been catching up on some television shows I didn’t see the first time around. One of them is “The West Wing,” starring Martin Sheen as a president who hires people from the opposing party because he “likes smart people who disagree with him.” Things have gotten pretty bad when a fictional president seems more in tune with American values than the real one. (I should note that Sheen also played Gregg Stillson in the film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, a politician with a temperament much closer to that of the current president.)
What’s striking about watching “The West Wing” in 2020 is that members of opposing political parties, though they maneuvered and strategized and tried to work events to their advantage, never dubbed their opponents “enemies of America.” They never suggested that differing points of view were treasonous.
This administration looks more like a Jerry Springer-style reality show than any fictional drama with an ounce of thoughtfulness. This president seems more interested in taunting his political opponents than in working with them. His supporters take to social media platforms with insults like “vermin” and “scum” to describe their fellow citizens who happen to be liberals. They defend the most outrageous lies with the idea that the president was only joking, and that if you can’t understand “sarcasm” or “satire,” you need to develop a thicker skin. They describe the rallies that will soon resume, in spite of social distancing warnings, as “fun” and “entertaining.”
It’s entertainment on the level of Jerry Springer. But it’s worse than that, because governing the world’s third-largest nation is serious, difficult business. It’s not lowbrow television. Treating it as such is dangerous, in an interconnected world full of regional conflicts and global challenges.
I’m not crazy about tearing down statues, turning over cars, lighting fire to police departments and businesses, or shouting down speakers on college campuses. I don’t have any respect for people who bring weapons to a rally against social distancing measures or wave confederate flags in public, either. But this president is all about provocation. In three and a half years his modus operandi has been to tell an increasing number of American that they hate their own country. He has yelled “Fire!” in a crowded theater and then denied all responsibility for the resulting stampede.
It isn’t anti-American to suggest that we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by driving fewer cars. It isn’t anti-American to examine honestly our less-than-proud history of annihilating indigenous peoples and enslaving imported Africans. It isn’t anti-American to defend the natural environment, or to promote tax codes that skim some of the excess from the wealth of billionaires to provide public services for average citizens. It isn’t anti-American to support a woman’s right to determine her own reproductive choices. And it isn’t anti-American to question the size and use of our military forces around the world.
I am sick to death of the narrow definition of Americanism promulgated by the people who are still supporting the current administration. I won’t even call them conservatives, because what are they conserving? They want to take a torch to our governmental institutions and build their own authoritarian structures in their place.
Many Europeans have told me that what they most admire about the United States is our political stability. We have peaceful and orderly transfers of power. We don’t experience periodic coups in which government swings wildly from communism to fascism or vice versa. But to today’s revolutionary right wing, our stable institutions, and the people who keep them running, are “the Deep State” that represents some sort of nefarious conspiracy to destroy America’s perceived greatness.
Let me tell you something: America will be great when we stop propping up homicidal dictators because they sell us oil. America will be great when we export the noble sentiments of the Declaration of Independence around the world. We will be great when minorities and immigrants enjoy equal protection under the law, not just in word but deed. We will be great when we stop consuming a disproportionate share of the world’s finite natural resources. We will be great when our actions live up to our intentions.
We live in a political world. We have a global economy, a global communications network, a global travel system, and obviously a global ecosystem. Right now we have a global virus. What we don’t have is a global politics. Instead, we have competing nationalisms, concrete and barbed wire borders, out of control military spending, and a puerile president of the most powerful nation-state on the planet who responds like a playground bully to adult situations. I am ashamed that he represents the country that my ancestors came to in 1620 and have served since.
You may call me wrong, you may call me misguided, you may call me a lefty liberal lunatic. But don’t you dare call me anti-American.
