The Fierce Urgency of Rebuilding U.S. Democracy

Wendell Griffen on Faith, Hope, Justice, Love, and Peace I Wendell Griffen Click here to read this article online.

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Donald Trump has been back in office as President of the United States for seven days.

In that time span, Trump has ordered Immigration Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents to seize and detain people suspected of not having proper immigration documents.

Trump has eliminated federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, placed federal DEI personnel on paid administrative status, and ordered federal employees to snitch on anyone suspected of not complying with his order.

Trump threatened a hostile takeover of Greenland, a U.S. ally and member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Trump has expressed interest in making the population of 57,000 people a U.S. state over the objection of Denmark.

Mind you, Greenland’s population is much smaller than the populations of Vermont and Wyoming (627,000 and 524,000 respectively), and smaller than the populations in Washington, D.C. (659,000), Puerto Rico (3.5 million), Guam (159,000), and the U.S. Virgin Islands (106,000). However, Greenland’s predominantly white population lives in the Arctic region of the North Atlantic where glacial melting due to climate change has capitalists drooling about the prospects for new shipping alternatives to the Suez Canal and Panama Canal, and hoping to mine precious minerals such as cobalt, copper, lithium, and nickel.

Trump issued blanket pardons for the insurrectionists who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, caused injuries to Capitol police officers, threatened the lives of members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and boasted that they wanted to kill then U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” He wants to reclaim the Panama Canal from Panama, and falsely claims that China owns or runs the Panama Canal.

Trump has ordered all U.S. passports to use male or female sex designations based on the sex assigned passport holders at birth. That order blatantly violates the rights of transgender persons.

In my September 15, 2023 blogpost Things Are Not As Bad As They Seem, I drew on Harper Lee’s classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and argued that we must admit that things are worse than they seem (https://fierceprohetichope.blogspot.com/2023/09/things-are-not-as-bad-as-they-seem.html). Unfortunately (and perhaps tragically), that admonition was ignored. Thanks to the July 1, 2024, U.S. Supreme Court decision in Donald Trump v. United States in which six Justices of the Supreme Court created an extra-constitutional doctrine of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official conduct by anyone serving as President, the November 2024 presidential election, and right-wing Republican party majorities in the U.S. Congress, Donald Trump is now an authoritarian leader of a fascist regime in charge of the U.S. government.

One should not make that observation lightly, and I don’t do so. However, we should not ignore realities merely because they are unpleasant. As I mentioned in another blogpost, the United States ignored appeals from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to undergo what he called a “radical revolution of values” to the point that we are now well into what amounts to a death vigil for U.S. democracy (https://fierceprohetichope.blogspot.com/2024/05/a-tragic-death-wish-granted.html). Ignoring reality does not make a terminal illness benign, let alone prevent it from spreading to the point that it kills a patient.

The hyper-partisanship that followed racial gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts in the wake of the 2010 and 2020 U.S. census tallies, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fear-based bigotry against immigrants (xenophobia), defined the 2024 presidential election and proves that the United States is a bitterly-divided fascist society. This is an unpleasant truth to write. It is an unpleasant truth to read. That unpleasantness does not make the truth less real.

I am a student of politics, honorably discharged U.S. Army veteran, a retired state court judge, and an ordained pastor in the religion of Jesus. It is not part of my character to hide from painful realities. I recognize the death signs of U.S. democracy, and lament what they mean for our society and the rest of the world.

That sense of political and prophetic discernment leads me to detail how we arrived at this dismal situation. The refusal of right-wing U.S. Senators (led by former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) to convict Donald Trump after he was impeached twice during his first term as President allowed Trump to run for office in 2024.

The decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barratt in Trump v. United States gave Trump and every future president the power to be despots.

Chief Justice Roberts led the Supreme Court to gut voting rights protected by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission gutted campaign spending limits in federal elections and set the stage for what has become a political campaign spending arms race.

Remember that after the November 22, 2000, “Brooks Brothers riot” by Republican staffers interrupted vote counting by election officials in Miami-Dade County, Florida, the United States Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore upheld the decision of Florida officials to suspend vote counting altogether. That decision resulted in George W. Bush becoming the winner of the 2000 presidential election because tens of thousands of ballots from predominantly Democratic Dade County were not counted. In 2004, Bush nominated Roberts to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts has held that position since 2005.

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks killed people in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon – following bungled handling of available intelligence by U.S. national security and intelligence agencies – Bush and his Vice President, Richard “Dick” Cheney, led the U.S. into what Bush termed a “preemptive global war on terror” that resulted in the military misadventure known as the war in Iraq, followed by invasion of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was finally found and killed in Pakistan in 2011, ten years after US forces defeated the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan at the end of 2001.

For the next twenty years, Taliban fighters waged guerilla warfare in Afghanistan that matched wits and tactics against a US led multi-national military force that was better equipped, had more personnel, and was better financed. A combination of bloodlust, Western hubris, white supremacy and racism, neoconservative Christian nationalist imperialism, and capitalist greed resulted in the longest war in US history. We may never know the true financial cost of that military misadventure that bedeviled the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.

What is clear is that during that twenty year misadventure, religious and other thought leaders in the United States did not challenge public thinking about the war in Afghanistan the way that Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam challenged thinking when King called on the nation to undergo a radical revolution of values away from racism, materialism, and militarism.

This is the recent history responsible for our current predicament. Instead of a government based on a representative democracy of voters, the 2024 presidential election outcome resulted in the U.S. government now being run by a vicious sociopath (Donald Trump), and a predominantly white male oligarchy of white supremacist, racist, misogynist, and militaristic billionaires. That sociopathic oligarchy is cheered and sacralized by white supremacists who profanely pimp the religion of Jesus, disregard the love and justice imperatives that Jesus taught, and are hateful faith foot soldiers for their fascist regime.

Instead of free and independent media outlets that function as checks on political corruption, authoritarianism, and oppression, so-called legacy media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post function alongside cable “news” operations such as CNN, Fox, and MSNBC to foster what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky accurately term “manufactured consent” for capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and their side effects in their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.[1]

And instead of exercising moral and ethical discernment and warnings about racism, capitalism, and militarism – which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. termed “giant triplets” – religious leaders dismissed obvious dangers posed by sexism, classism, imperialism, techno-centrism, and xenophobia.

The “giant triplets” that King warned about on April 4, 1967, when he called on the nation to undergo “a radical revolution of values,” are octuplets now.

We must rebuild democracy in the United States.

I urge you to read On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder’s 126 page pocket-sized book that he subtitled “Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century.”[2] Snyder is a history professor at Yale University. His little book is a valuable primer on how to confront tyranny and rebuild democracy.

I use the term “rebuild democracy” deliberately. Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. concluded his foreword to Parables, Politics, and Prophetic Faith, the book South African theologian Allan Boesak and I co-authored in 2023, with a parable that Dr. Charles H. Long, a professor of the History of Religions shared with students at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In that parable, Long imagined that someone baked a cake but forgot to include sugar with the ingredients. Jeremiah Wright likened the Constitution of the United States to the resultant “concoction.” He described the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments as tantamount to pouring sugar atop the “concoction” and calling it “cake.”

After the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that recognized the freedom of women to exercise choice over their reproductive health, Jeremiah Wright Jr. questions if the rights enshrined by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are safe, and wonders if they might be discarded the same way. He contends that Americans must construct “a whole new constitution, this time including the sugar that was omitted in the first concoction.”[3]

I also encourage you to read Democracy Matters: Winning The Fight Against Imperialism, by Cornel West.[4] West foresaw the vicious consequences we face today caused by neoliberal free market capitalism, Constantinian Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, and political and sentimental nihilism pervading U.S. news outlets and the entertainment industry.

Martin Luther King Jr., Cornel West, Jeremiah Wright Jr., and Timothy Snyder foresaw our current plight. Americans ignored what they said and wrote. White voters in so-called “red states” patronized corporate media outlets that contributed to voter misinformation and manufactured consent with partisan politics. Those voters elected Trump, whose 2024 campaign was financed by Elon Musk and other right-wing capitalist mega-donors, because their political knowledge and values were poisoned by Project 2025 and right-wing religious fundamentalist propaganda.

Rebuilding democracy will require that U.S. voters “unlearn” white supremacist, patriarchist, racist, sexist, and neoliberal capitalist theology, reject the myth of American exceptionalism, and embrace King’s call for a radical revolution of values. Rebuilding democracy will be difficult, but the difficulties ahead of us are less than those experienced by Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, politically disenfranchised women, unwealthy white men, immigrants, workers, and LGBTQ persons across U.S. history.

The difficult but attainable work of rebuilding democracy begins by admitting that U.S. society is not teetering on the brink of fascism. Donald Trump’s MAGA/Project 2025 presidency proves that we are well past the tipping point. Once we accept that reality, we can take on the important work of rejecting the policies, politics, and politicians associated with Trump’s MAGA/Project 2025 fascism and laying a reinforced foundation for a rebuilt democracy.

This will be hard work. In the words of entertainer Arsenio Hall, “Let’s get busy.”

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[1] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of the Mass Media, (Pantheon: New York, 1988).

[2] Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century, (Tim Duggan Books, New York, NY, 2017).

[3] Allan Aubrey Boesak and Wendell L. Griffen, Parables, Politics, and Prophetic Faith: Hope and Perseverance in Times of Peril, (Nurturing Faith, Macon, GA, 2023), 7.

[4] Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning The Fight Against Imperialism, (Penguin Press, New York, 2004).