Baskets

Louis XIV built the church whose bells awoke me this morning. We’re in the village of Marly-le-Roi, which must have been a sleepy hamlet in the Sun King’s time but is now a Parisian suburban outpost butting up against Versailles. This is our final stop before returning to the States, a prospect I am both looking forward to and dreading.

Martha told me that Louis XIV is actually Europe’s longest-reigning monarch. He ascended to the throne at the age of 5 and sat upon it for 72 years. He outlived his son and grandson. His successor, Louis XV, was actually his great-grandson. And then it all went to shit with Louis XVI, whose head ended up in a basket.

When I was in high school, I remember my history teacher telling us that a revolution is defined by the speed with which it occurs. I’m not sure that’s correct, given that our American revolution spanned a dozen years or so. The French Revolution took around three years to unspool. The pace of the actions currently underway in Washington DC feel revolutionary, although it’s difficult in this moment to see where it’s all headed.

Great show.

The optimist in me sees the opposition stirring, court cases being filed, people beginning to take to the streets. The pessimist in me sees all of this happening and worrying that when it turns violent – and it will, eventually, turn violent in some capacity as border czar Tom Homan promised Fox News this weekend – our Burger King will declare martial law. At that point, the Constitution becomes nothing more than a quaint relic of our original rebellion.

For years, I’ve been arguing that the US should convene a new, year-long, traveling Constitutional Convention. It should be an exercise in which each state sends a handful of delegates to represent them in a debate about who we’ve been, who we are, and who we’d like to be. It could be an incredible opportunity for the American people to witness and participate in a consequential re-examination of the nation’s founding document. At the end of that convention, the delegates could either write a new Constitution (to be ratified, of course, by the states) or offer amendments for the old one (to be ratified, of course, by the states).

Nothing may come of it or much may come of it. The point would be to replant the seeds of our highest ideals into soil that’s been degraded by two hundred and fifty years of infighting, acrimony, and greed. Now, though, I think it’s too late. Or, perhaps, too early. Regardless, as the past said to the future, “Now is not the time.”

I first started thinking about this back in 2012, when I was co-writing the book America, You Sexy Bitch with Meghan McCain. At the time, Obama was running against Romney and it felt like nation’s anger with itself could not get any worse, a sentiment that now feels laughable. We wrote the book as a balm, a way of celebrating what one Democrat and one Republican both loved about the nation we called home. I wouldn’t write such a book today because I don’t think it’s possible.

At the time, I wrote about how America felt adrift, as if we’d lost our mission statement. I advocated for a recommitment to our highest ideals. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. That recommitment could take the form of a new national service program or a new focus on investing in the kind of creative, breakthrough thinking that served America so well during the Cold War to be recast as an investment towards all of humanity. Let America embrace its role as the world’s sole superpower to lead the planet towards greater opportunities and cooperation for everybody. Let us lead, I thought, where we could do the most good. Clean energy, for example. Or medical technology. Space exploration. All of the above.

Yeah, it sounds naïve to me now, too.

Back then, I didn’t understand the deep hatred that a preponderance of white America has for those they deem unworthy. The rise of the Tea Party in 2007 should have been my first clue that I thought too-well of my fellow Americans. At the time, many of us were decrying the obvious racism against a Black president animating the movement’s emergence. “It’s not racism,” the Tea Party told us, “Only a concern about taxes and health care policy.”

Folks, it was racism.

When I say “racism,” I don’t mean to say that their focus was denigrating other races. It wasn’t. Nor was it directly about elevating the white race above others. That’s too simple. Instead, the racism behind the Tea Party was more nuanced. Their fear of a new healthcare system, for example, wasn’t directly about race until you understand that their animosity against Obamacare was rooted in the fear that the undeserving were going to steal the hard-earned money of the deserving. I will leave it to you to figure out who they felt to be deserving and who they did not. (Whom? I’ve never understood the difference.)

In 2016, Vox conducted a study which concluded that Tea Party membership closely aligned with racist attitudes, writing: “The common thread in these studies is that the Tea Party’s opposition to Obama empowered racist attitudes and brought them out of the woodwork, most dramatically among the party’s Southern members but also in the larger population who simply admired the Tea Party’s efforts — whether these racist attitudes were dormant, hidden, or coded.”

MAGA inherited the Tea Party credo but did away with its subtleties. (To be clear, there was nothing subtle about the Tea Party.) The party currently purging the federal government of minorities and women took the messaging of 2007 and turned it up to 11. They are disemboweling the entirety of the second half of the 20^th century in order to restore the Gilded Age of the 19^th. You’ll recall that the Gilded Age is defined by a period of great wealth accumulation for the wealthiest and crippling poverty for everybody else. Huh. Come to think of it, weren’t those exactly the conditions that led to the French Revolution?

Might be a good time to start investing in baskets.