Democracy, rule of law and the U.S. as a nation of immigrants

If the assault on norms, democracy and diversity continues through the next Presidential election, the U.S. as a nation will essentially no longer exist. The U.S. can not exist if it is not even close to being a democracy. The U.S. can not exist if there is no rule of law that applies to all. The U.S. can not exist without continuing to be a nation of immigrants. Those are all baseline.

I am not kidding myself that the U.S. has always been a perfect democracy. Far from it. In its beginnings, only land-owning white Christian men were included in democracy, Over time, through many millions of peoples’ efforts and strife, that democracy expanded to include those who didn’t own property, women, people who were not white, non-Christians, LGBTQ. There were plenty of efforts to hold back democracy from different groups, and in particular, people who aren’t white have been stopped in many cases from the benefits of a full democracy, both by laws designed to keep them out and by people going around the laws to discriminate. Nevertheless, by the 2010s, on paper at least, there was a flawed democracy that purportedly included all. I am not arguing that it worked perfectly, but it did not automatically exclude any one of these groups from voting, running for office and other key parts of democracy.

Donald Trump and his anti-democratic buddies are attacking core features of democracy. In Texas, they are trying to redraw Congressional districts mid-decade in order to gerrymander the districts even further and disenfranchise Democrats who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. They are using propaganda to undermine trust in democracy around the world.

I’m also not kidding myself that the rule of law has been applied identically and fairly for all. The rich and those with influence routinely get away with things that others do not. They can buy the best lawyers and they can sometimes influence powerful people to pardon them or ensure they never face charges. There are racist biases that influence who gets charged and who faces more severe punishment. Yet there were still instances of extremely powerful people facing justice.

The spitting in the face of the rule of law has reached new epic proportions. In Trump’s first term, he at least made gestures to reduce the appearance of conflicts of interest. Now he openly extorts other countries, universities, law firms and corporations to get richer. He’s pardoned crypto felons after they donated large sums of money to him. His administration shuttered USAID, whose budget was approved by Congress. They have openly defied judges’ orders countless times. And now we have the grotesque case of the Epstein files. Hundreds of victims’ testimony in the Jeffrey Epstein (a long-time friend of Trump) has led only to two people serving jail time, one of whom – Epstein – is dead, and the other of whom – Ghislaine Maxwell - is being granted leniency not commonly accorded to people with far lesser charges. Trump announces tariffs on whims and changes them based on who gets on his good or bad side, using them as a weapon to try to force Brazil to not investigate his fellow autocrat wannabe Jair Bolsonaro. And it has become normal for international media to point out that any agreement with the U.S. no longer has any meaning, since Trump changes his mind and his demands regularly, like a Mafia boss who continually ups the ante. He treats our long-time allies like adversaries while giving long-time adversaries plush treatment. Including war criminal Vladimir Putin, who Trump is rewarding with a meeting in Alaska next week, with Trump proposing an end to the Russia war on Ukraine that sounds like it had the terms drawn up by Putin.

As important as both rule of law and democracy are to U.S. existence, so too is the fact that the U.S. is a diverse nation of immigrants. John F. Kennedy Jr., when he was a Senator and before elected to the Presidency, even wrote a book titled “Nation of Immigrants.” Nearly every citizen and resident of the United States is an immigrant themselves or descended from immigrants. Nevertheless, the nation has a very uneven acceptance of immigrants and non-white people throughout the centuries, moving the needle on who can be American according to the decade. Most glaringly, Blacks were excluded and treated as not human, both as slaves and separately as less-than-full citizens. But Asian-Americans, Latinos, Spaniards, Italians, and more have all faced discrimination from extremes of Japanese being put into internment camps to lesser discrimination of redlining or not hiring certain groups for certain jobs. Historian Peter Hayes has pointed out that discrimination against immigrants is as “American as apple pie.” Despite all this, the American Dream of the U.S. as a place where people can have freedom that comes with democracy and can pursue economic dreams too has attracted immigrants from all over the world. This (along with other factors such as laws enticing business creation and stability of law and top universities) has led to the U.S. being so wildly successful economically, overperforming in winning Nobel Prizes and developing scientific and technological innovation.

Currently, the U.S. government is doing all it can to turn away immigration and make the U.S. into a white fascist theocracy. It is cruelly targeting not just immigrants who have committed crimes but immigrants who have spent decades in the country, immigrants with legal visas and even people who aren’t immigrants but are Latino. It has sent immigrants with no due process to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where many say they were tortured. It is building harsh jails for immigrants such as the cruelly nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. And it is pursuing immigrants for deportation based on their exercising their freedom of speech to support Palestinians. Throughout all of this, it is using memes reminiscent of the Nazis and dehumanizing language to portray immigrants as the worst of the worst and not human. The government is threatening immigrants and scaring others from coming or into leaving due to fear of horrible mistreatment and long detention. Already, there are reports that the number of foreign students could drop by 150,000 or more this year. So much for the American Dream.

I’ve only touched on a tiny bit of the corruption and cruelty here. It all adds up to an end to the American experiment if we don’t put a stop to it. The corrosion of democracy, the disappearance of rule of law and the xenophobic attacks on immigrants are just three factors in the Trump/MAGA attacks on the U.S. They are three big ones, though, and in order to keep any semblance of the U.S. we have known, we need to turn the tide back and protect democracy, rule of law and our nation of immigrants.