This Year They’re Blowing Up America, Not Fireworks

A new twist on an old tradition.

Hey, have a Happy Fourth of July.

I guess.

At least try to enjoy the moronic American tradition of blowing sh*t up to celebrate our independence. Where I live, that tradition seems to involve several days of constant explosions until 3 am, the “witching hour”—or “zero dark thirty.”

This annual display of firepower is political idolatry. Explosives—guns, bombs, rockets—were only tools in the pursuit of independence, not independence itself. And other countries won their independence from Great Britain without war.

The Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but the war itself went on for another seven years. As Jimmy Carter observed in 2019, the United States had experienced more than 226 years of war and only 16 years of peace since the Declaration was signed (and that’s not counting all the quiet wars, proxy wars, and other secret wars we’ve carried out in other countries).

What is independence if it doesn’t bring peace or prosperity for everyone? Can we even call it independence when the government is controlled by a few wealthy individuals? That’s more like exchanging one set of royals for another.

But this year’s different. They’re not just setting off fireworks. They’re blowing up America itself—the often-mythic but sometimes semi-present “America” that is a community of people with shared ideals.

Donald Trump’s pre-Fourth comment about Democrats were just one sparkler among many. In case you missed it, he was talking about the Democrats who voted against his “Big Bill” this week in Congress—and, implicitly, about anyone else who opposed his policies.

“They wouldn’t vote only because they hate Trump,” Trump said, “but I hate them, too, you know that?”

“I really do. I hate them,” he added. “I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country, if you want to know the truth.”

The bill itself goes a long way toward Trump’s goal of dismantling America—the one that exists, and the one that might have been. It accelerates the upward transfer of wealth while further decimating the social safety net. The federal deficit will explode (appropriately enough for the holiday), but for Trump and his party that’s a feature, not a bug. They will use the resulting debt as an excuse for deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Other recent headlines—“Trump Claims Sweeping Power to Nullify Laws,” “Supreme Court Lets Trump Deport Eight Migrants to South Sudan”, etc.—underscore the wholesale dismantling of the edifice of government itself.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Trump is not an aberration in modern American politics. He’s its culmination. The Republican right has been working to destroy government for decades, while Democrats have vacillated between acquiescence and ineffectual opposition. And they don’t just want to dismantle the apparatus of government; they want to eradicate the idea of government as an expression of social cohesion.

That’s why Trump’s “hate” remarks shouldn’t surprise us. It’s just a more direct way to express a vision (or anti-vision) of government that’s been articulated by Republicans since Reagan. It also reflect the right’s fundamental hatred of society itself. Consider these 1987 remarks by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a hero to the Republicans:

“... they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

Trump’s many hateful remarks reflect the same hostility toward “society,” that latticework of mutual caring which weaves us all into a single whole. Most of us think the idea of society is something beautiful, like a tapestry woven on a golden loom. But to them it’s a net that restrains them from grabbing everything for themselves—which means it must be shredded and destroyed.

They don’t seem to understand that their acts of destruction are also self-destructive. The society they hate enabled them to operate in physical and legal safety, not just in North America but around the world. They’re dismantling the empire that made them powerful. They are at once the symptom of its decline and its accelerant.

The result? There are no certainties, but there are probabilities: China will continue to rise. The US will continue to decline. American society will fracture even more, with anarchic and sometimes violent results.

That doesn’t mean the rest of us should give up. There will be victories as well as setbacks. Those victories could become the seeds of a better society risen from the wreckage of this one. The explosions, literal as well as figurative, are just a distraction. Creation isn’t as noisy as destruction, but its results are more enduring. The real work happens quietly, at first.

But hey! If you want to blow sh*t up today, knock yourselves out! It’s going to be a long, hot summer.

Note: An upside-down flag is not disrespectful; it’s the universal symbol of distress.