Our ancestors and their democratic allies in Europe fought a World War to defeat the fascists who had taken over Germany, Italy and Japan. Those fascists believed that their might gave them the right to attack and take over other countries and murder millions of people.

Now 85 years later, we have a President who openly admires and seeks to emulate the worst dictators around the world, past and present, including Hitler. He is trashing our democratic allies and an alliance that has  kept the peace since World War II, so that he can curry favor with an enemy. He is siding with Putin, the fascist, and against an independent and democratic Ukraine. He is trying to sell yet another lie, that Ukraine was the aggressor and somehow the valiant people of Ukraine are to blame for this war. This is an abject betrayal of the values of our republic and our allies.

Putin, former KGB agent and murderer of many rivals and opponents, wants nothing more than for representative government to fail. He seeks through any and all means to undermine and discredit the western democracies in order to cement his own arbitrary power. Why are we helping him? In what universe does it make sense for our country to assist our enemy in our own downfall? Do we want to trade our freedom, as imperfect as it sometimes seems, and live as the Russians do, afraid of speaking out, afraid of our own government? Admirers of Putin should try living there!

The President promotes the big lie that he was wronged and that they (fill in the blank) are taking advantage of us, taking what is ours. He relentlessly stokes a sense of grievance and encourages hate, persecution and violence against his enemies. He seeks to abrogate the power of the state into himself, destroying trust in our institutions and eroding the foundation of representative government. He ignores the rule of law when it stands in his way. His Nazi-saluting billionaire buddy is currently taking a sledgehammer to our government. He vilifies and intimidates the press, unless if fawns on him, and fills the public space with disinformation and chaos. He does this while enriching himself and rewarding the super-rich who surround him. His ways and tactics are those of a tyrant. Though the political party to which he is allied is nominally the Republican Party, his actions and his party’s blind obedience to him are the opposite of republican.

Does our government need drastic reform? Have both political parties failed to represent the interests of working people against the relentless accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands? And have we subverted the affairs of other countries to enrich our friends and chase phantoms? Yes, yes and yes.

But we cannot give up on representative self-government. We need to continue the never-ending work to make it better. At its worst and most dysfunctional, democracy is still better than any other form of government. We owe it to the millions before us who fought and died to defend and animate the ideals enshrined in our constitution, to continue to fight for those ideals. Complacency is not an option.

Louis DuPont

Monkton