A Call for National Reexamination on the 250th Anniversary of American Independence
"The old world is dying and the new world is yet to be born. Now is the time of monsters."
This quote- often attributed to the renowned Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci- perfectly captures the fragility of this moment in American history.
Truth be told, the founding fathers might as well be rolling in their graves, as the current sitting president- in his ever-loving quest for power and in his eternal quest against truth and justice- is now resorting to outright bribing his supporters with the "promise" of $5,000 checks, and, if that fails, "jokingly" telling those same slavish supporters to commit acts of felony by cheating in the upcoming midterm elections.
This isn’t justice. This isn’t democracy. And this isn’t a joke. This is stone-cold, felonious demagoguery- the kind that would have horrified America’s Founding generation: figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, along with the thousands of patriots who willingly and courageously fought and died to secure Americans’ right to free and representative government through honest elections.
The constitutional system created after the American Revolution was not designed around personal or cultish loyalty to a single president or personality. It was designed around divided power, representative government, lawful appropriations, and recurring elections. The president is not a monarch distributing personal treasure. These public funds belong to the nation and its people and, as such, may be spent only through lawful governmental processes. Oh, how far we have fallen.
Friends- there is a real danger which now stands before us- and which extends beyond a single promise or a single election. The danger which we are all facing lies in the precedents Americans are being asked to accept: whether election procedures may be deliberately manipulated; whether public funds may be presented as the personal generosity of a political leader; and whether the nation’s Treasury may be discussed as though it were a campaign fund bearing one man's name.
Let me be clear: No president owns the Treasury. No single political party owns the electorate. No leader possesses the authority to transform public money into a personal reward for political loyalty. And no American- whether Republican, Democrat, or independent- should be okay with such precedents being established, merely because the person attempting to establish it belongs to the party they presently support.
That is precisely why this moment- the 250th anniversary of American independence- must become more than a patriotic commemoration. It must become a moment of broad national examination.
The cold, hard truth of the matter is this: warnings from history rarely arrive dressed in the clothing of the past. Threats to constitutional government do not always announce themselves with crowns, thrones, and marching armies. They can take root gradually- through the normalization of personal loyalty, the erosion of institutional boundaries, the degradation of truth, the corruption of common decency, and the transformation of citizenship into political obedience.
Now is the time for all of us, as Americans- regardless of class, creed, race, or political party- to open our eyes and recognize that devotion to the republic must always outweigh devotion to the person temporarily entrusted with its presidency. Because a nation does not remain free simply because it was born in revolution. Rather, it remains free only when its people remember why that revolution became necessary in the first place.