January 6th, 2021. Something broke in our democracy today. The pain in my heart and spirit is difficult to put into words.
I signed up as a soldier in the US Army to defend our democracy. Today, I saw our democracy assaulted from the inside.
The United States stands like a beacon to the world, yet like Rome, we face defeat not from the foreign invaders, but from rot within. It is a fact that our enemies across the world have viewed the Trump Presidency as a sign of the weakness and collapse of our great nation. Rush Doshi reports in his book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, that, “the global financial crisis of 2008 convinced Beijing that the United States was weakening.”
He continues, “We are now living through a third strategic shift. The process began four years ago when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Beijing was shocked that the world’s most powerful democracies were withdrawing from the international order they had helped erect.”
Today, we saw the downfall of the ideological ground of the United States. No longer can we proclaim to support democracy and the sanctity of elections. International observers have criticized our election and the dangerous and false claims of President Trump as early as November. How can our State Department now proclaim the high ground in elections abroad?
We have two choices now.
We can continue our trajectory of complete and total collapse. We can continue to fight ourselves to the point of destruction. We can continue to deny science on ideological grounds to the point where hundreds of thousands of American die out of a botched response to Coronavirus. We can fade into ignominy like so many empires before us, a chronicle like that of Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
In other words, we can fulfill the Thucydides Trap, and fall like Athens to the Peloponnesian might of a rising China.
Or we can choose to reject the Cleonism that has gripped our country like a fever dream. We can make this moment a moment of strength. We can choose to renew our democracy by strengthening our institutions, by solidifying the inclusiveness of those institutions for all our people, and by reaching for something greater.
If we do not, we shall surely perish in the annals of history.
This is a moment of existential importance to our country. We cannot afford to sit idle as the papier-mâché Mephistopheles of our country would pull down the foundations of our democracy for the sake of their own advancement and power.
Trump and those who supported him have forever forfeited any claim on patriotism. They have become the single greatest threat to our national sovereignty since the outbreak of the Civil War.
I swear, I will defend American from Trumpism forever more. It will persist, like a cancer, in our political system for years from this day. I have known too many Trumpists to believe otherwise. Their resolve and their belief is great.
Our resolve must be greater. We must live up to the promise of our country, not the compromise.
I believe we can be greater still, that this moment doesn’t have to signify the collapse of American power and the dream that represents. I believe we can reach out to the stars and forge a new dream for humanity. I believe that we must rise to the great Challenges before us, to rise like a Phoenix from the ashes of the post World War Two order. We must adapt to the new millennium before us.
We can achieve so much greatness. Together. Divided, we can only fall.
Let us walk hand in hand into the future instead.
