How Did We Lose Our Shared Commitment to the Heritage that Made Us a Free Society?

This piece ran in the newspapers in late August, 2025.

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I’m never going to be one of those people who says, “Nothing surprises me.” Recent history has given me surprises aplenty. I can’t think of a single such surprise that’s been pleasant. And on top of that, these big surprises have been humbling for one, like me, whose full-time job has been for more than a half-century trying to understand what’s going on.

The biggest thing I’ve NOT understood is how so many of my fellow Americans can watch the dismantling of our system of government — with its checks and balances, its Rule of Law, and its empowering of “the will of the people” — and not seem to mind.

I grew up in the America that had just won World War II and was proud of its role as “leader of the free world.”
We began our school days pledging allegiance “to the Republic” for which the flag stands.

(A “Republic,” said Benjamin Franklin, “if you can keep it.” He understood that the freedoms the Constitution grants must be continually defended — by preserving this new “nation of laws, not of men,” and by ensuring that public officials, from the President on down, honor their oath to “protect and defend the Constitution” and stay within the roles the Constitution assigns them.)

For Americans of that era, the difference between democracy and tyranny was vivid. The movies of the time often dramatized that contrast — between the good power of America, defending “human rights” and basic decency, and the bad power of regimes like the Nazis and the Soviet communists. (Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s NKVD could simply seize you and kill you.)

I thought I understood that Americans were basically committed to the American system for letting the people call the shots, rather than Gangsters (who are invariably cruel and unjust). The speeches of our leaders and the stories told in our movies of that era show that protecting “the American way” was portrayed as a matter of Good versus Evil.

I still believe I was right about what America was then.

What I don’t understand is how we moved from that near-universal pro-democracy moral commitment to a time when tens of millions of Americans — after living their years in a basically free and decent country — came around to supporting a political force that’s been assaulting our constitutional order for a generation.

Trump is the driving wedge of that all-out assault now, but the opening stages of that attack long predate him, as anyone paying attention should have seen:
• This political force has respected only the elections it wins.
• In several states, Republican lawmakers have stripped newly elected Democrats of powers the people voted to give them.
• They’ve cried “election fraud” — urging their followers to reject the people’s choice — without a shred of evidence. (It could hardly be cleared that the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen was fig leaf over the truth that it was Trump and his GOP enablers who tried to steal it.)

That the pattern was so blatantly obvious — of grabbing for power regardless of the rules – captures part of what I don’t understand. There’s really nothing hidden about all the ways the Republicans have been seizing power that the Constitution doesn’t give them.

(Like the way the Republican Senate stole from President Obama his constitutional power to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court.)

At every turn, the Republican Party of this era has acted in ways that the Americans of the 1950s would have condemned as disreputable.

The lack of democratic spirit has been so “blatantly obvious” I can only assume these tens of millions do see what’s before their eyes.

True, something like the Republican theft of a Supreme Court seat was subtle: the abuse of the “Advise and Consent” clause would be too arcane for many Americans to grasp.

But, since returning to the presidency in January, Donald Trump has gone out of his way to dramatize his intentions to overturn our constitutional order and transform America into an undemocratic, unfree, authoritarian regime. With his actions, Trump is saying that his America is a place where the President can
• usurp the power to impose tariffs, a breach of the Constitution;
• intimidates major news media companies into paying him tribute;
• dictates to America’s great universities how they must support his agenda;
• end the careers of any in his party who do not subordinate themselves to his will.

These are not the ways of the “Republic” Ben Franklin said we were tasked to keep. Such unchecked power is, rather, like the regimes we Americans used to see as Evil.

All of this is dramatized so openly, so regularly, I have to conclude that a major segment of my fellow Americans have lost that American commitment to the system that has kept us free and America decent. (86% of Trump voters, a recent poll shows, would vote for him again.)

And I do not understand how that commitment got lost. Do those people not understand that it is THEIR WORLD that will grow dark as well, and that the political force they’re supporting has no concern for their well-being, but – like all such regimes — will sacrifice them when that serves their lust for power?