I have been trying to understand how a narrow majority of we Americans came to the notion that we would elect as our president for a second term— after we had already experienced how inept he was in a first term — a man whose chief aspiration is to undo 250 years of a hard-won and miraculously won independence built on a declaration that all men are created equal. I have more to say about that declaration later, but let it stand for the moment that it was that argument so eloquently made that stirred farmers and tradesmen with no military training to go up against what at that time was the world’s greatest nation and the world’s greatest army.

But we did. And we won.

We said to the world we are going to create a nation where all men are created equal. But we didn’t mean it. We didn’t men it then and we don’t mean it now.

The American story up until approximately the first world war was a history of expansion. Said another way, it was the history of Northern European men and their families escaping whatever load on their backs they had come to hate. And visualizing a future where fortune favored the bold, they were aggressively coming to a freshly discovered land ripe for the taking.

Sure, there were people already there, but they were obviously crude, uneducated by European standards, not inspired to advance much beyond a primitive lifestyle, and not worldly enough to see that these new arrivals would simply run them out of land and campfire. And they were marked — if we are honest here (me being as sarcastic as possible) — by the devil with an un-pure skin tone. The only pure skin tone being white, a feature which clearly sets those with it apart as superior beings.

Continuing with the theme of tongue-in-cheek honesty, it is clearly the intent of God and nature that for white males there is a manifest destiny…they are destined to rule. Anything that stands in the path of this destiny must be shut down, if not by reason and rule then by chaos.

And that, I suggest, is the precipice upon which America stands today.

Ironically, the same political theory and system that seemed to promise the white male a clear path to his manifest destiny — democracy, governance by a vote of citizens — also necessarily carried with it the concept that the tent welcomes everyone…pluralism. The notion that everyone — diverse groups, diverse nationalities, diverse cultures, diverse beliefs — can and should and must coexist in a democracy. Not everyone will win all the time, but everyone has a voice. That in fact, a system claiming to be a democracy without a fundamental acceptance of pluralism isn’t really a democracy. It falls short.

When you look again at our “founding documents”, it is clear that the notion of pluralism was immediately a part of the American plan. The Declaration of Independence (1778) unequivocally declared “All men are create equal.”

But, they didn’t mean it.

The Declaration Of Independence was first and foremost a justification for rebellion. And the document wasn’t law; it was a philosophical statement about what this new government, if the rebellion was successful, would hold true to.

And then, there was the Constitution (1787, eleven years later) of this new government. Unlike the Declaration Of Independence that voiced a philosophical reason for separation from England, the Constitution was law and equality became a much touchier subject. Indeed, the concept was avoided entirely until the Civil War forced the nation’s hand and Congress passed the 13th and 14th Amendments. The first abolished slavery and the second ensured equal protection.

It wasn’t until the 15th amendment in 1870 that black men were granted the right to vote, and it wasn’t until 1920 — 144 years after the 13 original colonies declared themselves separate from any other nation — that women were allowed to vote. Finally, the Constitution itself recognized that all men and women are created equal. One hundred and forty-four years after representatives of 13 colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast stood up and declared that “We the people” hold that “all men are created equal.”

Even then, even after finally acknowledging that some of us can no longer be bought and sold as property and can vote, even after finally acknowledging that we the people include women, even after all that, we didn’t mean it. And still don’t.

The reason we don’t is because of that concept of pluralism…everyone is welcome and equal. But, and this is huge, if pluralism means that I the white man is blocked from my manifest destiny, or even that I have to share my fundamental rights and privileges with other than those in my tribe, I will become increasingly angry about this pluralism idea. Angry in small ways and then in large ways. And I will bide my time until the conditions favor change, and then I will rain down chaos through political nihilism on us all until I get my status back — even if my status is that of a nihilist.

I was born into, actually at the start of, an era in which America was emerging into full bloom.

Whether anyone was saying it or not, by March of 1945 as World War II was charging to a crescendo ending, there was a sense that America had saved the world from two powers that had hoped to dominate the globe with fascist purification.

America-in-Full-Bloom, this new mega-power, was about to set the standard for what a modern-day democracy should look like and how it should behave. Turns out, it wasn’t what all Americans thought it would be. For a while, all went well. Prosperity abounded. There was plenty for all. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue wasn’t whether there was enough for all. The issue increasingly became that I — the northern European white man who came and conquered, bled and died, sacrificed and won was now having to share the bounty with those I, in fact, did not consider my equal.

But those were the days when politics were mostly about which party was in office. It was still a nation that believed in the rule of law no matter which party had the political advantage. Actually true, so long as the rule of law didn’t force a predominantly white population to share, for example, public schools, housing, hospitals or accommodations.

And it didn’t.

Since 1896 when the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, separate but equal was not just the law. It was the legitimizing of the notion of moral superiority practiced by whites over people of color.

In my isolated southern part of Missouri, it was one thing to say — and attest to believing — that God made all men equal. My father, an elder in our local protestant church believed that. He believed he was equal to anyone else. That did not extend, however, to believing that the Chaney brothers — Ike and Zak — two black brothers who owned adjoining farms just a mile or so from us were equals to us or the other white farmers in our community outside Springfield, Missouri, in the 1940s and 50s.

I know with certainty, he did not.

Ike was acceptable — but still not equal — because he kept a farm neater than ours or any of our neighbors. There was a begrudging acceptance that he was a good example of what a farmer should be like. His brother Zak, whose place was a leave-it-where-it-was-last-used organizational nightmare, was exactly what you could expect from a…and Dad would use the “N” word without any sense of misgiving that it was insulting, demeaning or derogatory.

The unvarnished and also derogatory truth is that until he was in his late 30s,

Dad was a card-carrying member of what many would refer to as “poor white folk”. And while that tribe convinced themselves they were at least superior to people of color, they were in some ways just as marginalized. As the economic collapse hit America in the 1930s, it was the economic hands-off policies of Republican President Herbert Hoover that stood by as America fell into a depression that put families like the one my mother and father were trying to raise, out on the street; or in their case, down by the river in a tent because that was all they could afford for housing. It wasn’t until 1941 and after taking a job with the federal prison system as a guard that he could count on steady income. Ironically, it was the Democrats who would, with the help of a world war, pull the country into a position of world dominance. And in the process, would lift Dad and Mom into the safest years of economic fortune they would ever know.

However, just as America was taking its place at the top of global leadership, there was change on the horizon that would test and is testing whether democracy and it’s attendant concept of pluralism is a rhetorical notion or something that can prevail against the worst instincts from those we call “fellow Americans.”

Just nine years after I was born, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the concept of separate but equal schools for blacks unconstitutional. Little Rock, Arkansas, was forced to open its schools to blacks (Brown v. Board of Education) in a dramatic and symbolic way. This was democracy saying everyone matters. Pluralism. The concept that says if anyone is welcome, no one is more welcome than others.

And that, it appears, has become unacceptable to those white American males who see themselves as equal to one another but superior to all others. This steady pealing away of their singular right to privileges and power that they have also somehow associated with an attack on their masculinity has pushed them into their own darker and darker rheims of reality. And, it seems, for those who believe they have been unfairly denied their true position in the world order, they have begun to wield what power and authority they have left to them to regain status — political nihilism. I have observed the steady increase in an attack on the notion of pluralism by those who sense they have been the victims of this fundamental piece of democracy. What they are after is democracy for the privileged (read white, born in America to parents born in America, and mostly men).

And it would appear that this “they” is an unlikely coalition of enough from the rich-and-powerful group with enough from the far-from-rich and the powerless population to first gain control of America’s governmental structure and then use it to disrupt, distract, and dismantle a system that while far from perfect in its history has self-corrected sufficiently to be held in high regard by the rest of the world. I assume their intent is to create a government of the stupidly advantaged and the stupidly disadvantaged that will restore their manifest destiny through the rule of chaos.

The rule of chaos. That’s where we are.

For those of us who are forced to stand amongst those who we call fellow Americans, but who appear to be driving us toward a very dark future, we have questions. How do we walk back from this precipice? And who will lead us? Are we at the conjunction of unskillfully administered democratic pluralism and out-for-myself political nihilism? How will be function as a nation when the law of the land is the law of chaos?