As we witness President Trump’s daily attacks on the rule of law, constitutional rights and democracy, I recall an incident from 1964, the year I graduated high school.
In the early morning hours of Mar. 13, 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was raped and stabbed to death outside her apartment building in Queens. The New York Times reported later that nearly 40 people saw or heard the attack but did nothing to stop it. It shocked the nation that no one had the courage to intervene. Psychologists called it the “bystander effect.”
Whether or not this account is entirely accurate, it provides an apt analogy to what we are witnessing today, as a criminal president and his allies assault our republic. The elected leaders and institutions assigned to defend us stand by and watch travesty after travesty, as though helpless to stop it.
Those of us who have served in the military — and especially those who have been in combat — may be especially sensitive to the experience of leaders and fellow citizens freezing in the face of attack. We delegate the defense of freedom to warriors. We expect them to risk their lives against foreign threats.
However, those warriors count on the people back home to do their part against domestic tyrants who subvert democracy, take away freedoms, destroy institutions, and corrupt the ideals that defined us for 250 years. Cowardice betrays America, whether it happens at home or abroad.
The bystander effect is evident in Congress and the Supreme Court, whose jobs are to prevent the rise of dictators, oligarchs, theocrats, authoritarians and wanna-be kings. Our lawmakers and black-robed justices appear to fear retribution, and losing the jobs they aren’t doing in the first place.
It has been our custom that each generation of Americans should leave its children better and more secure lives than the one they inherited. However, we also have an obligation to the past, including those who rebelled against the world’s most powerful monarch generations ago, the 70,000 men who died in that rebellion, and the more than 1 million men and women who have died in America’s wars since.
Yet, with Trump and the radical right rapidly advancing the destruction of the Republic, our most powerful institutions aren’t lifting a finger. Elections are meant to be the remedy for such inexcusable cowardice, but the Trump machine is moving to permanently destroy representative government and the electoral system before voters can save them.
What is equally disturbing is that 77 million Americans allowed themselves to be duped into handing the presidency to a convicted felon who tried to steal an earlier election. Those who voted for him cannot claim ignorance of his conduct, as they knew Trump’s victory would allow him to escape trials on the dozens of additional charges against him.
Trump regained the presidency with many promises to America’s “forgotten middle class.” He is not keeping them. As I write this, more than 41 million Americans suffering from food insecurity have been made pawns in the federal government shutdown while the president spends hundreds of millions of dollars on a cavernous, gilded ballroom no one else wanted. The money would be better spent on food banks.
Our Constitution begins with the promise of justice, tranquility and a more perfect union. Now, retribution and bullying have replaced justice, saccharine sycophancy has replaced public service, and there has not been a tranquil day in American politics since Trump entered the arena in 2015.
So, here we are. Now we understand Benjamin Franklin’s wry comment that the founders gave us a republic if we could keep it. The men who created the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, who stood up against a king’s abuses and who died for our liberties, and the generations that sustained the American dream through a civil war, two world wars, and the Great Depression, all counted on us to “keep it.”
Perhaps they made a mistake. They assumed or hoped that succeeding generations would appreciate how blessed they were and would be principled enough and courageous enough to keep the U.S. safe from despots, degenerates and bigots. The founders created the tools for us to defend democracy. We must look deep within ourselves and our country and ask why those who have these tools are not using them.
William S. Becker is a former official at the U.S. Energy Department and founder of its Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development during the Clinton administration. He is the author of “The Creeks Will Rise: People Coexisting with Floods,” which tells the story of a community that moved away from a floodplain and proposes several FEMA reforms.
