I grew up thinking of America as the best country in the world. That was considered, by me and everybody else I knew, to be an indisputable fact. We were the “land of the free, and the home of the brave”. I grew up in the period starting about a decade after the end of WWII, a time when we were flush with the money from a war economy, employee labor unions were strong, the middle class life was accessible to anybody with a high school education who stayed out of trouble and was willing to effin’ work, as one of my shop foremen so delicately put it (without the defanging euphemism). I still think I was correct, but over the past 40 or so years, things have changed in our country, and not for the better.

Starting in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, a different kind of America started to emerge, an America where money is king and capitalism is to be celebrated and not restricted, and scant attention need be paid to those who, for whatever reason, can’t raise enough money to elevate themselves out of poverty. Reagan declared there to be a “morning in America” where government is not the solution to problems, it is the problem. So guess what government does well, better than the private sector? For one thing, government can handle health insurance (single payer). For another thing, it can handle food and cash disbursements to the poor, elderly, and sick. So the focus started to turn away from helping those in need, and toward helping those who are not in need, under the guise that the upper class could create jobs and lift up the lower and middle classes. It has never worked out that way, but that hasn’t stopped House Speaker Paul Ryan and his ilk from continuing to promote it.

Twice in the last 20 years, Republican presidents have been elected without having the majority of the vote. This has been made possible largely because of the Electoral College system, which empowers rural and midwestern states at the expense of populous states and cities, and subverts democracy. W got appointed president by the Supreme Court. Trump got appointed president by the Electoral College. I don’t know if we ever needed the Electoral College, but as it stands now, it is an antidemocratic institution. If you live in California or Massachusetts, you might as well not bother to vote because it won’t move the needle toward your candidate. Hillary won by millions, but lost the election to a traitorous demagogue. Regardless, what’s a few million votes between friends anyway, right?

And as if that wasn’t enough, we have the antidemocratic Citizens United decision, which allows unlimited dark money to influence our presidential elections. Hey, money talks, stuff walks, right? That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.

So now we are at the mercy of a traitorous, mendacious Republican president, and a Republican congress that has ensured its survival by gerrymandering voting districts and voter suppression by voter roll purges and ridiculous, unnecessary voter ID laws. As well as closing down voting sites in poorer minority areas (read Democratic) and making it more difficult for people to get the required ID to vote by closing down DMV offices and the like.

I didn’t bother putting in any links to other material this time. These are well-known facts. If you believe them, you don’t need the links, and if you don’t believe them you won’t read them anyway, and most likely you don’t even care. Just like you don’t care that we have an ignorant, dangerous traitor as our president, and you don’t care that he got elected by the Russian government, which incidentally is going to do the same thing in the midterms in a few months, as well as the 2020 election.

The party of law and order and patriotism has ceased to exist. In its place is a cult of personality that reveres Donald Trump, and excuses or justifies everything he does.

God save the democracy of the United States of America