Manifesto

THE BERNHARD PERSPECTIVE

This is the United States of America,. And in this country, it is the people who are sovereign. And only the People. That is the basis of the covenant between the people of this country and their government as secured by the Constitution of the United States. 

First and foremost, we are a nation governed by the rule of law. No-one, not even the highest official in the land, is above the law. That is part of the covenant. 

One of the historic rallying cries of the American Revolution was “No taxation without representation.” The essence of this bedrock assertion is that the government cannot do anything to its citizens, without their approval. That approval, those laws, come from the voice of the people through their elected representatives. No civic leader up to and including the president, can declare that anything is law simply because they say so. 

Equally important as our political sovereignty are the personal freedoms guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights. From the First Amendment we are free to think, believe and with certain restrictions say as we wish. Period. In the words of Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1943, “If there is any fixed star in our Constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”  

Having just thrown off the “yoke of tyranny,”  and with a profound suspicion of a strong central authority, our Founding Fathers created a government consisting of three equal branches, each with checks and balances on the others.

That, too, is part of the covenant between the People and their government. 

With the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government they had created. His famous reply: “A Republic. If you can keep it.” Our founding Fathers presumed this would be possible as long as the government was run by honest and honorable men. And indeed, for almost two-and-a-half centuries, this has been the case. 

Our democratic institutions rely on the compliance of its citizens and leaders with and within the law. They are not capable of dealing with the existential threat of tyrannical defiance. Our nations founders presumed and relied on the intentions of good men to hold the reins of power and authority. Alas, this is no longer true.

Donald T**** is not good man. 

He is a 34-count felon convicted of business fraud. Several of his businesses and charities have been terminated as little more than scams. He is a deadbeat, thief, grifter, compulsive liar, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic narcissist. Ignorant of culture and history, unschooled in letters or the arts, he is crude and totally lacking in any of the social graces. Such a creature has no business anywhere near the reins of power. 

A comprehensive assessment of T****’s presidency does not suit the purpose of this missive; a brief compendium will suffice. Donald Trump has among other things used a secret police organization to kidnap people off the streets and drag them from their homes, incarcerate them in foul concentration camps and deport them without any pretext of due process. He has made war on a country which posed no threat to us, bombed and destroyed its elementary schools, hospitals and universities and killed thousands of innocent civilians.

He has blown up fishing boats for sport, torpedoed and captured ships in international waters, killed survivors and left others to drown. He has withheld food and medication from tens of millions of the world’s most vulnerable, blockaded fuel to a country with the intent of precipitating mass starvation and dedicated the Department of Justice to protect himself and his rich friends and purveyors of an international sex trafficking ring from prosecution.  

In all these things Donald T**** is unabashedly guilty. And since he holds in his hands what he believes is the power to corrupt or even cancel upcoming national elections, there are no assurances that the cancer of Donald T**** presence in government can be removed by Constitutional means.

But that does not mean the people are without options. It does not mean we must submit. We are sovereign in this country, Donald T**** is not. In spite of what he may believe, this is our country. Not his.

If he will not relinquish his grip on the nation according to the Constitution’s mandates, we can take back from Donald T*** what is ours and ours alone. That path forward was described eloquently over 60 years ago by a young graduate student in Berkeley, California. His name was Mario Savio: 

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who own it, to the people who run it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all

There will be risk involved. There will be violence and most likely even death. To quote Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Dictators do not go quietly, and there is truth in the words of Sun Tzu when he said “An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.”

No matter. If we love our country and our freedom, we must accept that risk. It is on us, the People, to redeem the promise of our Founding Fathers and sanctify the sacrifices of those patriots who, in the cause of freedom, pledged in the Declaration of Independence their ”lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.” Can we do any less? 

Freedom isn’t free.