Who are the real Americans? We are

Armed federal agents intimidating people on the streets of great American cities. Public servants who lived up to their oaths of office losing their careers or being charged with crimes at the behest of a man convicted of numerous felonies. Hundreds of U.S. generals summoned to Marine headquarters in Virginia to hear what a former Fox News personality and a five-time draft dodger want to demand of them. (Hint: loyalty to them, not to the Constitution.)

As to those cities, after Donald Trump called Portland, Oregon, “war-ravaged,” people who actually live have been posting videos to social media platforms showing the peaceful sights and sounds of their vibrant city. We recently spent a couple of days in Chicago, and the only crime we encountered was how much it cost to park the car. Now, heavily armed federal agents are marching up and down the Magnificent Mile.

I’ve been writing for some time that it’s an odd thing for liberals and progressives to suddenly find themselves acting as conservatives. Butmuch of what used to define conservative ideology, like adherence to the rule of law, has been abandoned by MAGA religious zealots and white supremacists, and someone needs to step into the breach and stand up for the Constitution.

Lord knows the third-grader occupying the White House and the six hard-right Catholics (including two corrupt ideologues and a frat boy, who really likes beer) on the Supreme Court aren’t doing the job they took a solemn oath to perform.

Trump created his MAGA coalition based on fear of “the other,” which has historically been a potent political move (think Richard Nixon’s perfection of the Southern strategy and Ronald Reagan’s aggressive race-baiting with his fictional Chicago welfare queen, among many other dog whistles).

After America elected and then re-elected Barack Obama, not only a Black man but a constitutional scholar and an intellectual, to the presidency, the Republicans in Congress completely lost their minds and pledged to make him fail as president. They began to do all they could to shut down government and to excoriate Democrats, using the list of pejorative terms former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cribbed from conservative shock-jock Rush Limbaugh. The hard turn in Congress away from collegiality and compromise had begun.

Trump expanded the hate list to include not only people of color, but Muslims, Democrats, “nasty” women who speak up and expect full citizenship, people with different sexual and gender orientations, and Republicans who did not show sufficient loyalty to him. Why did he do this? Not only because he, a lifelong grifter, knew he could win on a platform of hate, but because he truly hates people who don’t praise him. Forever stuck in a state of arrested development with seemingly numerous dark personality traits, Trump lies incessantly, blames others for his failures, never feels remorse for his actions, encourages violence with a wink and a smirk, and calls more than half of Americans things like “scum” and “vermin.”

Dark triad? Dark tetrad? Darkness to the eighth power? Whatever. We’ve seen from the beginning Trump’s endless reel of psychopathies. Mental health professionals tried, again and again, to warn the public.

Getting back to the vast majority of Americans, the reasonable, expert-based economic policies we support are far, far better than Trump’s gibberish about tariffs, his anti-green energy idiocy, and his ceaseless big-plans-just-weeks-away-from-being-announced bulls**t. What Democrats propose in the face of growing economic inequity are more jobs, a higher minimum wage, support for workers to unionize and better social safeguards.

Consider just the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, better known as food stamps. The Trump administration has not only cut federal funding for Americans who suffer from hunger, pushing more of that onto the states, it has also imposed more stringent work requirements. Trump is also ending the reporting of food insecurity. What we don’t know is good for him, apparently. How can anyone think America is great again if we read about unhoused parents and malnourished children?

Trump’s decidedly un-Christian approach to the homeless emboldened “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade to muse on-air that the homeless ought to be euthanized. (Under pressure, Kilmeade apologized, but he was not fired or suspended.)

We could argue the many, many inhumane points of Trumpist decrees if we were actually interested in discussing policy or, say, the mainline Christianity I once knew as a Presbyterian. But the Republican Party stopped working on policy — and started perverting Christianity — many election cycles back.

Why? Largely because the GOP ran out of ideas that would fly with the American public (“Trickle-down” economics? C’mon, man!), and was assiduously courting the evangelical and Catholic religious right as a voting bloc. Meanwhile, “welcome-the-stranger” and “eye-of-the-needle” messages of Jesus had become entirely inconvenient for elite Republicans.

With Trump, the Southern strategy morphed into something quite like a “Bring back the Jim Crow laws that inspired the Nazis” strategy.

To divert attention from their desire to give further assistance to the wealthy and corporations through tax breaks, they focused their energies on “othering” different groups: People of color, immigrants, Democrats, women and LGBTQ folks.

Of course, if you are part of the MAGA cult of personality, you don’t want to hear any of this. But we — progressives, liberals, Democrats, moderate Republicans (those horrible “RINOs”), people of faith and of no faith — are, frankly (to use a word Republicans love to utilize), the reasonable ones. There’s no question about it. To mimic Trump, everybody knows it. You do, too.

We are Americans who believe that the separation of church and state is, as historian Garry Wills wrote, the one unique, genius thing about our Constitution; that we need to learn the truth about our history to create a healthier future as a dynamic, creative and pluralistic society; that the gun lobby should not dictate how safe we are in our schools and churches; that women and people with different levels of melatonin in their skin have all the same rights that a white man has; that politics is the art of compromise, something you gave up on a long time ago because your ideas about governing finally collapsed into Reagan’s propaganda that government cannot work. (One thinks of cartoonist Randy Molton’s “De-evolution of the GOP.”)

Government works pretty well all over the world, so long as well-meaning people with strong, relevant experience are put in leadership positions. Look at this deplorable Trump “administration,” filled to the brim with suck-ups, grifters, unhinged ideologues and conspiracy-theory kooks — each one, including the one playacting at the Resolute desk, astonishingly unqualified. The word for that kind of group being in charge is kakistocracy, which is an unhappy-sounding term that describes a devastatingly unhappy situation: government by the worst people. It sounds like something you might utter right before vomiting.

A white supremacist theocracy, installing this Trumpian reign of the corrupt, mean-spirited, and woefully incompetent? We are just as disappointed and angry as you are about predatory capitalism, which leaves many Americans homeless and many more without access to health care. And we are just as angry about the failures of our democracy, which, as Robert Reich recently pointed out, are almost entirely due to lobbying money in politics. Much of our political class takes legal bribes and serves the interests of those with the most money.

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But we aren’t living in the wrong country. Our America is multicultural and all of us benefit, socially and economically — yes, even you — from that fact. Our America supports freedom of religious belief, including the freedom to hold none at all, because we do not have a national religion. Our America strives to make it easier for all citizens to exercise their right to vote. Our America believes in facts and the process of scientific discovery. Our America does not whitewash its history but learns from it.

Our America recoils from people who push their religious beliefs on others, or who denigrate women and other citizens who happen to be unlike them. Our America welcomes the strangers who come to this country with a desire to better their lives through hard work and community service. Our America supports public education and wants to make it stronger, not undermine it. Our America believes that a country should be judged by how it treats its least fortunate citizens. Our America is not ruled by a petty, vindictive despot wannabe with an outrageous history of criminal and socially abhorrent behavior who imagines he is king.

No, despite what the astonishingly corrupt, would-be Roman emperor occupying the White House tells you, we are not the enemy: we are Americans. We have tried to be true to the best, most idealistic of American values. In the meantime — and these truly are mean times, both in material and spiritual terms — we will serve the public good by standing up for the Constitution, the rule of law and the nonpartisan civil service, and we will argue for our own ideas on how we might make a better union.