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| Photo credit: KSylvie |
Two weeks
ago, I attended the “No Kings” march at the capitol in St. Paul. Earlier that
morning, and mostly unbeknownst to me, a Trump-voter with a gun had murdered the
Minnesota State House Speaker emerita, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, killing
her dog for good measure, among previous attempted murders. This Friday last, I
attended, with my civic-minded spouse and ten thousand others, Rep. Hortman’s
lying-in-state, filing by their photos, coffins and an urn to pay our last
respects. When I contrast the cautious, sometimes raucous optimism of the march
with the ensuing solemnity, and consider these past two weeks’ news from
Washington—Iran bombing, deeper debt- and deficit-enabling legislation, and Supreme
Court spinelessness—I must sadly conclude that the Republic is a republic in
name only, made so largely by a Republican Party that is republican in name
only and has been for a long time. We are at the bottom, the Constitution a dead original
letter, our politics a tawdry and empty theater, a dumb-show.
Insofar as I
have had an academic, an intellectual career, it has been in the study of
republicanism in the United States. The concept of virtue—personal and
individual, constitutional, and political institutional—the very soul of our
political system over two hundred and fifty years strikes me now as quite
antique and enfeebled. A few fragments and figments of classical virtue remain
to disguise the almost perfectly complete corruption, but, and I’ve hesitated
to say it for eight months or so at the risk of sounding like an old man, which
I am, we have become not merely a long-standing if imperfect example, but now a
complete and utter embarrassment of that ancient ideal.
I have never
lived in a dead country before. Perhaps it is the living death of a zombie republic.
