Is American constitutional democracy over?

Sam Smith – I covered my first Washington news story in 1957. Since then, in a period covering about a quarter of America’s official history, I’ve seen attempts to undermine democratic laws and principles but in no case did these match what is going on under the Trump regime. 

In fact, the conventional media is even beginning to write stories about threats to our Constitution which used to be scribbled only by alternative journalists like me. Now conventional commentators are, for the first time, at least mentioning that the Constitution and democracy are under attack. 

We have never had a president as dishonest and ill-directed as Donald Trump. And while it is a good sign that a few in the conventional media are realizing that our democracy is under serious assault, it’s not yet part of a general consciousness. 

My father worked for Franklin Roosevelt so even as a kid I was aware of what a functioning democracy was like. Words like decency, cooperation and concern were more frequent than lie, illegal and offense. And certainly you didn’t have folk like me pondering whether we were in an era that could properly be called the Second Civil War,

Lately I’ve been trying to see what cultural factors have helped put us in this crisis-ladened period. 

It seems that America started its downfall during the era of Ronald Reagan who had successfully taken the country’s mind off such shared activities as cooperation and  assisting others. 

But there were non-political changes as well such as the rise of TV and the Internet. As Wikipedia puts it:  

The global internet took shape in academia by the second half of the 1980s, as well as many other computer networks of both academic and commercial use … By 1989, the Internet and the networks linked to it were a global system with extensive transoceanic satellite links and nodes in most developed countries. Based on earlier work, from 1980 onwards Tim Berners-Lee formalized the concept of the World Wide Web by 1989. Television viewing became commonplace in the Third World, with the number of TV sets in China and India increasing by 15 and 10 times respectively  explains it. 

One little discussed aspect of TV and the Internet is how they changed our relationship with friends and neighbors. What the ever wise Joe and Jackie down the street had to say had been replaced by the words online. Just one example; the final episode of M*A*S*H in 1983 had 60.2% of all households with television sets in the United States watching it.

Having spent major periods of my time split between local and national news I’m well aware that the latter doesn’t tell you enough about how life really works these days. Real people doing real things really matter.  

And knowing our real status, which is now the collapse of constitutional democracy.