Whenever there’s a civic holiday coming up, the recessional hymn at our church is always “America the Beautiful.” We in the choir usually sing all four verses, and we always get a round of applause at the end — for us, for the country, maybe both.
I’ve never liked the song. It’s no “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which I find far more melodic and moving. But lately my antipathy toward “America the Beautiful” has taken on deeper meaning.
What is beautiful about this country at the moment? We’re deporting migrants without due process to dangerous countries that are not even their countries of origin. We’ve killed the USAID program that helped millions around the world with everything from maternal care to HIV-AIDS at little cost to us but at tremendous increase of good will and soft power. We’ve bullied those at home who dissent from the current game plan with job loss, harassment, threats of deportation and violence. And we’ve ensured that future generations will keep to the game plan by stifling the arts and education, particularly history and the sciences.
Perhaps what is most devastating is that there is no organized resistance to this and only pockets of leadership. You have Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who wants to be president. You have Zohran Mamdani, who wants to be mayor of New York City. You have Pope Leo XIV, the American-born pope. They have spoken out against the migrant crisis and the diminution of rights (Newsom and Mamdani) as well as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and the assault on the environment (Pope Leo).
But there isn’t one voice in this country taking a principled stand on these issues and leading from the front. You can campaign from what President Theodore Roosevelt called “the lunatic fringe,” but as President Donald J. Trump domonstrates every day you can’t govern from it. If Newsom is serious about the loss of states’ rights and other issues, he’s going to have to make that case to the red states. If Mamdani wants to help all New Yorkers, he’s going to have to make that case to the Blacks and Jews who didn’t turn out to support him in the Democratic Primary he won. Even Pope Leo would speak with greater authority if he would redress, once and for all, the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis.
If the Democrats hope to take back Congress or at least the House of Representatives, which is doable, they’re going to have to do a lot more than filibuster. They’re going to have to make the case to the American people with cold, hard facts — the reality that can’t be as easily dismissed as “speaking your own truth” — that the current path is not in their best economic interest and will cost them enormously short- and long-term.
I’m convinced now that the economic argument is the only one that has any hope of succeeding (and hard it will be to make it as Wall Street seems to be having a giddy 1920s moment). Forget appealing to the “better angels of our nature,” as President Abraham Lincoln said. During two terms in office, President Barack Obama deported five million people, earning the nickname “the deporter in chief.” He did so without shaving their heads, chaining them together in their underwear and sending them off to El Salvador and South Sudan.
But Trump has made a gladiatorial spectacle of this — partly for financial reasons (so terrified migrants will self-deport at no cost to his administration) but also for sport. As several people have already noted to me but also in the press, the cruelty is the point.
And now that cruel chicken has come home to roost in the form of “the big, beautiful bill” that is going to hurt the most vulnerable in this country. President Joe Biden — who has been thoroughly demonized by the right, even though he took the helm of this country at an untenable moment and steadied a ship rocked by Covid (more than one million dead) and economic decline —always said of the cruelty, “this is not who we are.” But look at American history — this is exactly who we are. Our history, for all its aspiration and actual goodness and excellence, is also one of conquest, exploitation, oppression, violence and, above all, economic self-interest. We talk a good game but we haven’t always walked that talk.
Trump says we’ve been made to feel bad about our history. But we shouldn’t feel bad about it. History is the story of the past, and we live with the past, not in it. Rather it’s for us to have secure enough egos to learn from the past so we can make the present and the future better for ourselves and others.
Yet we’ll never get there if we keep feeding ourselves the pablum of platitudes and demonizing others who don’t agree with us when multiple viewpoints coming to consensus is the bedrock of democracy. “E Pluribus Unum” — “out of many, one”: This is the motto of our country. However, we’ve lost sight of the one, because we’ve lost respect for the many.
On the 249th anniversary of the birth of this nation, it’s time to rededicate ourselves to what we think this country is and should be— a democratic republic “with liberty and justice for all,” as well as some compassion for those who seek to come here for a better life, as most of our forefathers did, and to partake in what is still the American experiment.