We in the United States were once on a path of gradual, if uneven reform, expanding human rights protections and equality of opportunity. Achieving these ends came to entail protecting or expanding access to safe drinking water, clean air, nourishing food, reliable health care, and good public education. Of course, we often fell short on these goals, but we understood that they mattered. The question was less whether they were desirable and more about how to achieve them. Or so many of us thought.

Now our federal institutions have been captured by a party of extremists hell-bent on violating human rights and limiting opportunities for all but the most prosperous. The grotesque bill Congress has just passed will help them realize these goals, making a mockery of our best political traditions, not least our Declaration of Independence, now 249 years old. Our elected leaders, many representing heavily gerrymandered districts and most beholden to moneyed interests, have chosen to exacerbate already unprecedented economic inequalities and to limit or eliminate equality of opportunity.

If we do not course correct, if we do not vote these bums out of office and demand or do better ourselves, we can look forward to the end of comity. Instead of gradual, if often bumpy or unsettling change, we’ll get brutal, systematic oppression followed eventually by violent, institution-destroying revolution. Imagine something like the French Revolution or the Russian/Bolshevik Revolutions instead of the American Revolution. The last of these, in many respects, sought to defend rights and institutions, if at enormous cost to the people we continued to enslave, expropriate, and drive off the land. By defending and reforming our system of government, our leaders avoided the bloody fate of King Louis XVI, and the country grew, redefining itself to include ever wider circles of people.

Can we return to a path of reform? Or will we allow our leaders to exacerbate our differences to the point where too many conclude that violent revolution is the only way to re-establish liberty and justice for all?

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