Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah

I am writing this commentary on the holiday we traditionally honor past presidents who served our country without overmuch tomfoolery or outright tyranny. Abigail Adams told her husband John, our second President, that “All men would be tyrants if they could.” In America, we tied the hands of our presidents with a strongly worded constitutional law so those administrators of the will of the Congress could not become what human beings always want to become when they get into positions of power.

In the 21st century, our once well-educated and strongly-purposed electorate loosed the hands and fists occupying the Oval Office so much so that we have a one-man Congress sitting at the Oval Office desk and a politically captive Supreme Court that believes its occupant can do no wrong. This is what the peasants, serfs, and commoners of medieval times were made to believe was the prerogative of their untouchable kings because it was the will of God.

It’s time to pass judgment on our two proud but largely fallen political parties. Each of them must take responsibility for being the principal agent of destruction of major operating principles of the U.S. Constitution.

Republicans unquestionably have played the leading role in trashing the wealth regulating power inherent in the revenue raising or taxation power of Congress and also usurping the elections powers of the states. Republicans just don’t want any regulations placed on the accumulation of individual and corporate wealth and they are doing everything they can to limit black and brown suffrage in America. Without these constitutional provisions in place, representative government cannot exist.

Democrats unquestionably have played the leading role in trashing the exclusive war power of Congress and in trashing the 10th amendment police powers of the states. Their record in both areas is abominable. Without these powers in place, consensual government cannot exist.

What are the trends in culture and politics that have doomed our once vaunted system of American democracy? For one, I think it is clear it is our long neglect of educating both young people and adults in civics subjects like history, law, and political science. For another, I believe it is our hard and fast love of materialism over humanitarianism that has changed us and also the entire world we once led.

America’s delusional thinking that we are the best at everything is a huge sign we have become an anti-democratic nation. Just think about how we obsess over the medals count at the Winter Olympics. Democracy is a system of government where people are constantly pulling for the little guy to become successful rather than tooting our own horn.

Just think about President Trump who often declares himself the best president America has ever had, the most transparent President ever, the most peace-loving President, the Commander-in-Chief with the strongest military in the history of the world.

We have become a society motivated by words more than deeds, by insecurity more than self-confidence, by egotistical bragging rather more than by humble and self-effacing goodness.

Think about our media fixation on crimes against the rich and famous in America like the Nancy and Savannah Guthrie story. Are crimes against wealthy celebrities more important than crimes against a Constitution that protects ordinary people?

Catholics and many Protestants are entering the season Christians call “Lent” where we put aside heavy consumption and spending in favor of a season of relative “fasting” from materialism. Americans in our 200-year colonial era and in the first 100 years of our national era lived their entire lives anchored to social, political, and economic moderation so they could devote themselves to the humanitarianism required of a true democracy.

But then came successive waves of outrageous luxury orientation like the days of the Robber Barons, followed by the citizenry trying to imitate the barons in the Gay Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, and the Age of Aquarius in the post-World War II Sixties. More recently we have seen the explosion of billionaire plutocrats and oligarchs who want to monopolize not only industry and finance, but political power, even if they must unhinge America from all of its traditional values to do so.

We have become a people embracing 12th Century royalist values of mass ignorance, force, dishonesty, luxury, and social and sexual exploitation, hoping by these means to lift our 21st Century world. I don’t think so, people.