If you were around in the middle of the last century, you remember those “Get US out of UN” signs along the roadsides. Sometimes they were just nailed directly onto pine trees, and many years later they had grown up into the treetops, lending a sense of nuttiness to their discredited message.
The signs were the work of the John Birch Society, precursor to the Federalist Society and its offshoot the 2025 Project. Their precursors kept the U.S. out of the League of Nations after the First World War, and they kept the U.S. out of the Second World War against fascism, until the Japanese attack forced us in.
Now they’re back, and they’re in control. After living in the shadows of our politics, they found their reality-show strongman, and they’re finally able to enact their agenda of taking our country out of its world leadership role and back to Fortress America, a straight, white, Christian male-dominated society that sics the military on those who have a broader vision of America.
They have to suppress dissent, because to tell you the truth, their message is still nutty to the extent of being un-American. Their politics were thoroughly discredited back during the 1930s, when they destroyed our economy, and our disgusted citizenry threw them out of office and repudiated their isolationist, oligarchical policies. Since that time, America has become a strong nation internationally and a more humane nation internally, attempting to correct longstanding inequities, respect diversity and include all citizens in the promises of the American dream.
All of this is being dismantled, and the new dogma is as nutty as it was in 1930 and 1960 and in 1860. It is nutty because it is anti-democratic. It is nutty because it serves the very rich at the expense of everybody else. It is nutty because the only way it has a chance to work is by forcing people to accept it, by forcibly scrapping our democracy and making our economy work for the super rich and the ideology that caters to them.
We have all known folks governed by a rigid ideology impervious to facts. For sure, we all have to guard against such blind obsessions, wherever they hit on the political spectrum. The very essence of our democracy is the necessity to allow all varieties of ideas and policies so that we can choose those that best address the realities of our existence. Once we become driven by ideology, we begin to ignore and then to suppress those ideas and ideals that don’t fit into our framework.
Democracy is at risk in America and right here at home in Athens, where our diverse community has attempted to extend equality and include everybody regardless of whether they meet some white Christian male standards of normality. The Athens we have created is not acceptable to many people here who would return us to what they believe was the Athens of some golden period when you didn’t have to lock your house and could leave your keys in your ignition. Those people have not been able to convince a majority of our citizens to adopt their worldview, so they have called upon our gerrymandered legislators to oust duly elected local officials, and have welcomed voter suppression, and look forward to the next mayoral election to slip in a candidate who is not in tune with the Athens we have built. They did it before our present mayor, and they can do it after him.
Our local government has been effective in opening Athens up to the energy that springs from the freedom to try new things—local businesses, art, music, publications, lifestyles, etc.—instead of requiring adherence to some orthodoxy deemed necessary to a narrow vision of what is allowable by those in control.
Our democracy is threatened nationally and locally. We can protect it by keeping our eyes open to understand who has the better, more realistic idea of who and what is best for our country and for Athens, and vote accordingly. The future is yet to be created, and it’s not hanging around at the top of some pine tree, pointing us back toward a past based on a nutty ideology with no room for democracy.
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