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Kimball Shinkoskey
Woods Cross
Those of us who have studied the history of Rome know that you can't debauch a democratic republic overnight. Many Democrats think Trump did it by issuing some hundred Executive Orders, give or take, on "day one" of his new administration. Truth is, it takes not just 100 decrees but more like 100 years or more to bring down a great democracy. One good marker for the start of America's century of constitutional decline might be set at 1915, a 100 years before Donald Trump arrived on the scene in 2015.
In 1915, it was ironically the Democrats who started the autocratic ball rolling when President Woodrow Wilson made a superhuman effort to overthrow George Washington's Farewell Address advice to stay out of European entanglements. America was dead set against getting involved in the petty wars between European kings, and for good reason. That was none of our business, and taking partisan sides in Europe's endless wars would quickly make us just like them.
America was a die-hard "isolationist" country during the 140-year period from 1776 to 1916. At the time of World War I, the U.S. Army was small compared to the mobilized armies of the European powers. As late as 1914, the Regular Army had under 100,000 men, while the National Guard (the organized militias of the states) numbered around 115,000.
By 1916, it had become clear that any participation by the United States in the conflict in Europe would require a far larger army. To persuade an uninterested populace to support the war and a draft, George Creel, a veteran of the newspaper industry, became the United States' official war propagandist. He set up the Committee on Public Information, which recruited 75,000 speakers, who then made 750,000 four-minute speeches in 5,000 cities and towns across America. As a result, Wilson got his anti-democratic European entanglement, and America has not been able to get out of being the policeman of the world ever since.
By the end of World War I, some two million men had volunteered for various branches of the armed services, and some 2.8 million had been drafted. This meant that more than half of the almost 4.8 million Americans who served in the armed forces were forced to fight and participate in Europe's internal affairs against the Founders' wishes and likely even against their own wishes.
The age-old theory of democracy says that democratic government must make war a matter of voluntary participation, otherwise resentment will undermine the government as it did in our Vietnam War. A good example of voluntarism is seen in the republic of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Moses authorized plentiful exemptions for individuals and families who had other pressing priorities, like those who had just built new homes or had planted new vineyards, newly marrieds just starting families, and even those who were "fearful and faint-hearted" who might affect the morale of the fighting force. (See Deuteronomy 20:5-8) Throughout the time of Judges and even later, the tribes gathered and voted upon whether to participate in military conflicts.
Some tribes would vote to stay out while others carried the weight of the tribal federation defenses.
The moral of this story is that a nation must work long and hard to degrade a democracy into a new form of government like the elective monarchy we have today. Our decline got a huge head of steam when Democrat President Harry Truman overturned the constitutional mandate to have Congress declare America's involvement in war and just declared the Korean War himself. It got further degraded when Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson railroaded his favored legislation through Congress thus overthrowing the constitutional mandate for Congress to "make all laws."
Republican Richard Nixon further eroded the Constitution by utilizing "impoundments" of Congressionally authorized funds for specific programs, effectively refusing to implement programs like the Clean Air Act and moving program dollars from authorized activities to unauthorized activities.
All this preparatory subversion culminated in candidate Trump's killing of bipartisan Congressional legislation related to the border. Once back in office he bypassed Congress to enact myriads of Executive Orders in his first couple months, taking over both the law-making power of Congress, its budget-making power, and even the constitutional amendment power of the American people when he singlehandedly announced his intention to overturn the 14th Amendment by ending birthright citizenship.