Opinion: America, who are we?
America currently faces an existential question: Who are we? Recent attacks on individual liberty put the health and soul of our nation in jeopardy.
Liberal democratic republics like the United States are founded on a commitment to individuals. The commitment to individuals is plain in The Declaration of Independence, with its assertion that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'
Government founded on an inviolable commitment to individuals signified a new type of government — one that was restrained and could not idly compromise individual rights for the whims of a ruler or even the good of the whole. If it worked, it would mean citizens could pursue their interests without fear of tyrannical or capricious government intervention. It was a bold idea. Would it work?
The question raised by many observers was whether such a government could sustain the cohesion of society. Would commitment to individual rights lead to chaotic fragmentation?
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim did not think so. He argued that liberal democracies are held together by their shared commitment to individuals. He described this commitment as a kind of religion, in which society takes the individual as something sacred: 'Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honor inspires us with a feeling of horror, in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.'
Thus, Durkheim argues, whoever 'defends the rights of the individual, defends at the same time the vital interests of society; for he is preventing the criminal impoverishment of that final reserve of collective ideas and sentiments that constitutes the very soul of the nation.'
Let us suppose that we fail in this endeavor. This is not difficult because our own history is replete with both successes and failures. America's founders secured liberty for many but not for the enslaved (4 million in the South during the Civil War). Constitutional protections did not protect Native Americans who were forced from their lands. During World War II, Americans bravely fought the Axis powers, while forcing Japanese Americans into internment camps. Given our mixed record, is it any wonder we are a divided nation?
If we fail in our sacred commitment to individuals, what holds us together, and what do we become? The answer is sobering. We become a nation without shared values. We become a nation that believes in freedom only for some. And who are these fortunate souls? Those who hold power. They use their power to protect their own while allowing the rights of others to be compromised whenever convenient.
If this sounds dramatic, consider the writings of non-white Americans for whom the promise of liberty was only a dream. During Jim Crow segregation, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, 'the democracy which the white world seeks to defend does not exist. It has been splendidly conceived and discussed, but not realized.'
In a similar vein, Langston Hughes lamented that 'America was never America to me.' For these Americans, America was a splendid yet unrealized promise.
Today we see the executive branch attacking individual liberties. Legal residents are being deported to international prisons without just cause. International students are having their visas revoked for exercising their First Amendment Rights or minor violations like speeding or fishing without a license. American citizens are being arrested by immigration officers, despite committing no crime. To top it off, the president has floated the idea of deporting American citizens who commit crimes.
Thus, as Americans, we again face the question: Who are we? Are we a people who truly hold our founding principles sacred, or are we a nation of egoists who will tolerate injustice as long as we get ours? Now is our opportunity not only to correct injustice, but to heal our nation by reaffirming our shared commitment to the sacred ideals which hold us together. Let us be the America worth believing in.
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Contributor: The scars from unrest can run deep, for protesters, residents and even authorities
The heavy-handed responses by the Trump administration to ongoing protests in Los Angeles reveal how little imagination our politicians continue to have when it comes to grasping the causes and consequences of social unrest. Last Friday, in response to increasingly bold and reckless raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Angelenos began large-scale protests. They mobilized in support of family members, friends and neighbors being unscrupulously removed from their communities, often without sound legal justification. As a behavioral epidemiologist who studies psychological trauma, I spend a lot of time speaking to people about their mental health and what motivates them to act. The aim is to understand what keeps them up at night and what helps keep them grounded, to get a sense of what they'll do next. It's an intuitive process. Concern about increasingly untethered ICE raids are clearly one of those things that has kept thousands in Los Angeles up at night, and it directly contributed to the swelling protests and the isolated, unfortunate instances of property destruction and looting. Scholars also research the aftermath of unrest. Studies of protests from around the world show that rarely do participants leave emotionally unscathed. For both protesters and those protested against, feelings of indignity, frustration and despair often persist well after the protest sites are abandoned. These types of outcomes are even worse when violence — from the protesters, law enforcement or military elements — is part of the equation. Protests like those in L.A. this week aren't spontaneous. Their genesis is usually rooted in the perceived denial of their civil rights or physical and psychological safety. A protest is a way of expressing feelings of rejection. Some argue that demonstrations are sometimes a response to collective trauma. Whatever the spark for the larger social uprisings, most researchers and activists rightfully see destructive riots and looting as primal, unhelpful outgrowths of protests. Vandalism and hooliganism distract from the purposes of constitutionally protected demonstrations — and this blurring is an especially grave danger in an era of mass media and hyper-polarized audiences here in the U.S. Depending on the quality of your news sources, you might have the sense that Los Angeles is a war zone right now — even though on almost every block, quotidian life is proceeding as normal, and where there has been destruction, it has been minimal. Reality is not all that matters, however; the perception among many Americans is that L.A. has been consumed by riots and lawlessness, which is precisely President Trump's hope. He further hopes that people with this misconception eventually come to see very little distinction between an impassioned protest and a riot. Once that happens, he knows they're more likely to broadly tolerate and acclimate to the kinds of strongman responses that we're currently seeing. Americans also disagree widely on when protests are appropriate. A poll conducted in 2023 by YouGov found that people are more likely to find protest tactics acceptable when those tactics are in support of a cause they favor. Apparently, many people wish for those who disagree with them to package their dissent as unassumingly as possible, ideally making it invisible and inaudible. But some politicians seem almost giddy when their political enemies demonstrate. 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Fortunately, so far, there have been very few injuries reported in the current demonstrations, and no deaths. There is no sense yet of the property toll, which is sure to draw a lot of attention from those intent on demonizing the protesters and their cause. Our real focus should be on the psychological toll. One large study of mental health outcomes following various protests determined that the prevalence of major depression in the affected community increased by 7%, irrespective of how personally involved an individual was in the protest. The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder ranges from 4% to a stunning 41% in areas affected by protests, riots and revolutions. And those impacts also radiate to the law enforcement officers who intervene. For example, in a study of LAPD officers following the 1992 riots, 17% subsequently showed symptoms aligned with post-traumatic stress disorder, including avoidance and emotional resignation. Similar results were observed among law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014, following riots there in the aftermath of the murder of a Black teen, Michael Brown. More recently, U.S. Capitol officers reported PTSD-like symptoms after the Trump-inspired insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. A major trope in American politics and among free speech advocates is that dissent makes for a healthy democracy. But too much of anything — especially dissent — has become an albatross on the American psyche. And there are deepening consequences to our seemingly never-ending dissent: It's likely to continue coming in the form of protests and riots. In the eyes of the average American, the U.S. has been in a perpetual state of unrest for at least the last decade. In the last five years alone, the U.S. has been convulsed by coast-to-coast protests — in the aftermath of Floyd's murder in Minneapolis at the hands of police, in response to Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza, and now in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S. over ICE's feckless immigration raids. When the smoke clears, psychological trauma lingers in those who were on the protest grounds, and even those vicariously exposed to it through social media and TV reports. If the response to protests or riots is militarization, and we normalize it, Pandora's box will be opened. It perhaps already has been with Trump's quixotic decision to send unneeded troops to L.A. The militarization of a community, whether in the form of short-term interventions or long-term occupations, is rarely received well by those who must live with it. At best, we consider intrusions by policing officials a necessary evil. At least when it comes to our own communities, most of us appear to prefer to live in spaces that are reasonably policed but still governed by elected representatives. We're at a precarious moment now when we can envision how that could be lost — as we see Trump's effort to militarize Los Angeles and America more broadly through ICE and other authoritarian intimidation tactics. However one feels about the backlash against ICE, or the federal government's reaction to those protesters supporting their immigrant neighbors, most of us likely agree that the political theater and the clashes in the street are bad for the nation — and preventable. With the ultimate hope of removing the need for protests like these, I'm reminded of what a research participant once told me: We have just as much capacity to create trauma for one another as we have to eliminate it. Jerel Ezell is an assistant professor and the director of the Center for Cultural Humility at UC Berkeley. He studies the racial and cultural aspects of politics. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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The Trump-Musk feud that wasn't: Media distracted by another MAGA spectacle
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Earl Stephens writes in a new essay, 'Right-wing media will trumpet 'Hail to the Victors' and Democrats will be pointing at the smoking carnage of what was, while what is actually happening is even worse than it was 24 hours before": Two weeks from now, all this will be forgotten, and we will be smack in the middle of the next existential crisis that will demand all of our time, while even more of our rights have been incinerated, and billionaires like Trump and Musk have even more of our money. While Donald Trump's 'big beautiful bill' is being forced through Congress by his MAGA Republicans, he has federalized thousands of National Guard troops and 700 active-duty United States Marines to help put down protests in response to the ICE deportation raids in the Los Angeles area (and per Trump's Executive Order other parts of the country as well). This is a violation of long-standing norms and laws governing how the United States military should not be used against the American people. 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Federal cuts aren't efficient, they're dangerous
West Virginia has declined to join other states suing the Trump administration to block the cancellation of AmeriCorps programs. (AmeriCorps photo) 'The needs will go unmet.' That's what Habitat for Humanity of Kanawha and Putnam executive director Andrew Blackwood told West Virginia Watch in April when asked about the cuts the Trump administration made to AmeriCorps that month. In total, an estimated 32,000 AmeriCorps service members were told to stop working. AmeriCorps members, of course, often do vital service work in distressed areas for low pay. You name it, and an AmeriCorps member has probably done it. After school programs, disaster clean up, home repair, the list goes on. It's an important service program that steps in to fill gaps that our local and state governments and nonprofits simply can't afford to do. That's why it was so disappointing that West Virginia didn't join the multistate lawsuit to challenge the program's termination. Our attorney general J.B. McCuskey, who early into his role has already joined lawsuits to challenge other states' own laws, couldn't be bothered to provide a comment to West Virginia Watch. A spokesperson for Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who would be the first to tout his bona fides in suing the Obama and Biden administrations when he was West Virginia's attorney general, said, 'The governor believes most matters can be solved through collaboration and communication rather than lawsuits. The governor will continue to fight to protect all West Virginians and will work diligently to help all those impacted.' Well that's great and all. But I wonder if he would repeat that now, after a judge ruled that the AmeriCorps members can return in the 24 states and Washington D.C. that sued the administration in April. Those two dozen states will now have the young (although many older Americans join AmeriCorps, too), eager people returning to work and helping the communities they've chosen to make home, doing projects, supporting their neighbors. A win for them; a loss for us. Unfortunately because of our elected leaders' decision not to join the lawsuit, West Virginia won't be one of those states. To be fair, the governor's office has a point. Most matters should be resolved through collaboration. But it never should have gotten to this point in the first place. This year we've seen story after story of programs, grants, employees and offices being cut all across the country. Some people, organizations, cities or states sue. Others hope that their senators, congress members or governor will get down on their knees and beg the administration to spare their states from the cuts and pain. Sometimes, sometimes, it works. Usually it hasn't. We're not a healthy, efficient democracy if you have to routinely beg someone to change their mind after, arguably illegally, killing your job, grant or anything else. Here in West Virginia we've seen a grant terminated that would help the state address its long history of PFAS contamination. Our very own Department of Environmental Protection wanted that grant. They applied for it. They won it. Then, they saw it taken away. Health professionals who work on black lung disease and other issues at NIOSH in Morgantown had their jobs cut. It took congressional and advocate pressure, and ultimately, a lawsuit, to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to change his mind. That should never have happened. But it did. I could go on with things in West Virginia or what I've seen and heard from friends in other states. We already live in a state where some of our most basic services for some of our most vulnerable people are heavily reliant on the work of volunteers and government grants. The reality is our politics today makes simple 'collaboration' a pipe dream, especially when doing so would require members of a certain political party to publicly acknowledge that these vital services are more than just the woke ideologies they want them to be. So many of these vital services — from efforts to improve our drinking water, protect miners' health and feed families to programs that provide coaching for our kids, improve homes and safeguard our national parks — face political threats. It's going to be hard to ignore the ramifications of these cuts and the impacts they have on average West Virginians for long. The legal system has, unfortunately, proven to be one of the only effective tools we have to stave off the worst of these consequences. We can't let it go on like this forever. This can't become a genie that stays out of the lamp. If we allow future administrations, whether they're Democrat, Republican or another party, to casually and unilaterally upend systems, no one will be safe. What's to stop a Democratic president from attacking programs that are seen to help 'red states?' Our electeds must do a better job at speaking up — and actually doing something — for the West Virginians who stand to lose the most when funding for programs that serve our state are cut. The madness has to end, and it's their job to stop it. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
