What Do We Pay for Our Bad Faith?

What punishment does American hypocrisy deserve?

America put itself forward as the land of the home of the free. That our system of equal rights and liberty were the best in the world. 

Even those who knew better, those who had endured our wrongs, came to America looking for what they had been told was good about us.

As Mr. Lincoln said,

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

 Now, we have leaders wanting not to govern a country of equals, but rule a nation of serfs. Unfortunately, there are wide swathes of this country wanting to be ruled, so long as there is an inferior caste for them to lord over: women, people of color, immigrants; liberals. 

We have turned away from Lincoln:

... It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Now we are allying with dictators and against governments "of the people, by the people, for the people". 

What price shall we pay for our lack of faith in America?

Reading Morten Høi Jensen’s Mannhood: The Coming Revival of Democracy (Liberties), thinking I would only learn something about Thomas Mann, not make me think about America democracy under Trump, inspired this post. Yes, it is worth reading for those interested in Thomas Mann; but also to remind us of what we were, what made us great in the eyes of the world:

More than just a performance, however, and still more than an attempt to canvass support for Roosevelt’s foreign policy, The Coming Victory of Democracy is a moving and courageous expression of faith — faith in the future, in democracy, in America. “Here it will be possible — here it must be possible — to carry out those reforms of which I have spoken; to carry them out by peaceful labour, without crime or bloodshed,” Mann said. In his closing, he declared his intention to emigrate to America, and his conviction that, given the situation in Europe, “many good Europeans will meet again on American soil. I believe, in fact, that for the duration of the present European dark age, the centre of Western culture will shift to America.”

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