Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter made some statements a few years ago that ring true today more so than ever. It turns out Trump is the scary instantiation of what he was talking about on this panel.
Supreme Court Justice David Souter gets it right
It is almost as if Former Justice David Souter could foretell the precipice that America was about to fall into when he had these prescient words.
The Supreme Court Justice made it clear that America’s democracy is at risk. What is sad however is that the risk is not external. It is internal.
There is no need to fear foreign armies are or any other external military threat. There is no need for concern from a threat of a military coup.
The biggest threat comes from the mounting ignorance of our population as it relates to the causality of the vast majority of our problems. The ignorance stems from our lack of basic civic knowledge in and of our country. In fact, we rarely teach civics anymore. As such, our population is progressively devoid of any knowledge of how the nation functions and the ability to assign appropriate blame and credit to those responsible respectively.
Souter’s words were prescient.
“What I worry about is when problems are not addressed,” Souter said. “People will not know who is responsible. And when the problem gets bad enough, as they might do for example with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown, some one person will come forward and say, ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’ That is how the Roman Republica fell.”
And then came Trump. We must not be blind to the parallels.
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