Opinion: With America so divided and threatened, who are we, really?

Our Constitution opens with the claim “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …” But does this “we the people” claim hold true today? Our political parties across our history have contested fiercely for election victories. But now we face a set of midterm elections in which our sense of national unity has been intentionally shattered by many on one side.

As the midterm elections approach, we tremble because a number of Republican candidates for governor, U.S. Senate and state secretary of state continue to mouth the lie that Democrats stole the last election, that President Joe Biden is not our true president and that they, if elected, will refuse to ratify any future statewide popular vote count that swings Democratic. Donald Trump and so many in the Republican Party, who now genuflect to him, push a message that Democrats are bent on destroying America. This messaging is echoed nightly on Fox News.

But who are we really? America today has the world’s largest economy — annually roughly $23 trillion in gross domestic product — and the world’s strongest military fueled by spending roughly $800 billion per year, a sum greater than the next nine nations combined. Our diverse college and university system is the envy of the world, and our technological creativity and massive cultural outreach in literature, music, theater and films touch people worldwide. We are generally a creative and hardworking people.

How did it come to pass that the world’s oldest, wealthiest and militarily strongest democracy is now so deeply threatened by those who would turn us into an autocracy or tear us apart in some civil war? How did we slumber so negligently during decades of this gradually mounting homegrown threat?

We failed to establish societal, legislative and economic restraints on corporate- and financial-sector wealth. We failed to appreciate how the internet and the revolutions of new social media — Facebook, Twitter and the rest — can spread helpful communication and wonderful family photos but also weaponize the power of lies and disinformation.

By failing to see the power of these historic changes, we clung to a naive notion that the leading actors of our political parties are generally honorable and actually, when pushed, genuinely patriotic. We naively believed that governmental customs and norms would be followed because they always have been.  We naively believed that our famous system of checks and balances could stop really bad actors.

The Federal Communications Commission in 1949 established the fairness doctrine that required that TV and radio companies for their privilege of being granted broadcast licenses must present controversial issues of societal importance and do so in a fashion that offers a balanced range of voices on both sides.

But in 1987, this doctrine was ended during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which opened the door to cable news channels taking much more partisan stances in programming. Fox News, founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1996, embraced a strong right-wing editing that often misleads on current events.

An absolutist expansion of what is justified by the First Amendment as free speech is perhaps the key threat to America today.

And the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case held famously that corporations now are “persons” and that corporate campaign contributions are “protected free speech” so that political campaigns can be overrun by political action committee money fueled by corporations and the uber-rich who require in return that politicians do their bidding.

Our top national security threat today is homegrown. It derives energy from Trump and his acolytes employing social media messaging about lies that the last election was stolen.

Is this who we as a people want to be?

William French is an associate professor of theology at Loyola University Chicago. ©2022 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.