As America’s birthday approaches, I want to introduce you to Sam Albert. You won’t have heard of him; he wasn’t famous and he wasn’t a character instantly recognizable as a mover and shaper of history. But he was a fundamentally decent man.
Rachel Mills
Sam was a friend of my grandparents in Los Angeles, part of the crowd of Hollywood musicians and actors and writers who dabbled with left wing causes in the 1930s and 1940s, and, in consequence, ran into the crowbar and brass knuckles wielded against progressives by the demagogic Senator Joe McCarthy in the early years of the Cold War. He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee—essentially for having committed thought crimes—lost his work as a musician and ended up scrambling from one low-level job to the next for the rest of his career to make ends meet.
When I knew Sam in the 1980s and early 1990s, meeting him at my grandparents’ home during my once-every-two-year visits to LA from our family home in London, he was an old man, still rakish looking, his voice deep, his handshake firm, his mustache giving him more than a touch of Clark Gable; but, behind the twinkle in his eye, an incandescent anger against Joe McCarthy still burned bright. He couldn’t fathom how such a “bastard” had acquired such extraordinary power, the ability—and permission— to make and break people in cultural institutions, in politics, in universities, in the media, simply on a whim. And he couldn’t understand how a man so clearly venal and corrupt, so incapable of separating out truth from lie, right from wrong, could have come to exercise such a powerful sway over tens of millions of ordinary Americans.
A few years later, I attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, in New York, where one of my teachers was an aged and ailing Fred Friendly. Friendly was legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s producer, and it was largely due to the courage of that pair of crusading journalists that McCarthy’s sense of invulnerability was punctured. It was they who had convinced CBS to give them the go-ahead to broadcast a copiously researched half-hour takedown of McCarthy, on live TV, letting the demagogue’s own words, his own blustering, falsehood-laden speeches, his own bullying assaults on Congressional witnesses, damn him in the eyes of the viewing public.
Friendly had, if memory serves, recently had a stroke, and he was rather uncertain on his feet. His mind, however, remained sharp—and he used it to implore his young students to take seriously the watchdog role of journalists within American democracy.
I have been lucky in my life to have intersected, in however small a way, with the likes of Fred Friendly, and—after I graduated from Columbia and was interning at the Nation magazine—the intellectual combatant-extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens. These were men who brooked no hypocrisy and, like H.L. Mencken, the legendary Baltimore Sun editorialist, before them, loathed the hubris born of incuriosity. They were well-read, versed in American history, and believed deeply in the concept of the United States as an exceptional place that had found a way to generate exceptional opportunity for its people, and as a melting pot that, somewhat against the grain of history, had successfully absorbed tens of millions of immigrants—and, in doing so, had strengthened its core sense of self and created one of the most dynamic cultures and economies the world had ever known. But they were, at the same time, all-too-aware of its underbelly, of the roiling currents of intolerance and irrationality that, episodically, have bubbled to the surface with such devasting effect.
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These days, as I read about the weaponization of the federal government against one vulnerable group after the next—especially those immigrants deemed illegal, deemed invaders, deemed purveyors of crime and disease, deemed guilty of “un-American views” and deemed entirely outside of the protections of due process; as political figures attempting to stand up for decency and justice are manhandled and arrested by masked agents of the state; as political violence is increasingly normalized; and as federal agencies are purged of anyone deemed disloyal to Trump’s agenda and his royalist notion that l’etat, c’est moi, I wonder what the likes of Murrow, Friendly, and Hitchens would have made of this moment. I also wonder what Sam Albert would have thought of a figure at least as demagogic and as fundamentally fraudulent and indecent as was McCarthy now holding the highest office in the land.
Or, rather, I don’t exactly wonder. I’m pretty certain I know that they all would have had nothing but horror at the fact that Donald Trump, a man quite literally schooled in demagogic techniques by McCarthy’s henchman Roy Cohn, is at the nation’s helm. I am equally certain they would have looked with utter disdain at his lickspittle acolytes, at people like Hegseth and Noem and Bondi who are actively sabotaging a 250-year grand experiment in constitutional governance and participating in laying the legal and military and security-system groundwork for American authoritarianism. They would have instantly recognized such opportunistic figures as being of a kind with Hitler’s enablers; inherently little people who, in an effort to etch bigger marks on history than their mediocrity would merit, have hitched their wagons to an irrationalist, cult-like, political project.
What I am less certain about is whether they would have viewed the twice-elected mafia-don-like Trump—the second time he was, it’s worth reminding readers, elected while holding the baggage of two impeachments, dozens of felony convictions, dozens more impending federal and state charges, and a civil court finding that he was liable for having sexually abused the author E. Jean Carroll—as an aberration, a glitch in the matrix, or as an avatar representing the contemporary American id.
And that, to my mind, is the great question of the moment as America’s July 4th birthday rolls around. Who are we?
There will, of course, be all the usual red, white and blue pageantry on this day. Americans by their tens of millions will fire up their barbecues, open their beers, watch their favorite sports events, and many will unreflexively congratulate themselves on living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Donald Trump, who recently installed two 100-foot flagpoles outside of the White House, will almost certainly talk about the glory and the greatness of MAGA-America and the insurrectionist nature of those who dissent. Maybe he’ll even conjure up again stories of America’s Manifest Destiny—updated for the 21st century—and the historical necessity for landgrabs in Canada and Greenland. Henchmen such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, architects and implementers of the obsessive anti-immigrant pogroms that are scarifying cities around the country, will argue that America is finally being made secure again. Steve Bannon, intellectual guru of the hard right, will probably talk about a restoration of the American spirit. And Elon Musk will tweet out possibly ketamine-fueled rants about the dangers of the Woke Left.
The question is, what does all of that now mean and how does it square with the concept of an informed, engaged, democracy? Do we celebrate the strength of our democracy and its core, foundational, principles, or do we simply, like Romans in the age of Empire, celebrate the brute strength of the state, the raw power to impose a vision, no matter how sadistic and how antithetical to small-government philosophy that vision may be?
This Fourth of July, I ask you to consider the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, sent because of an “administrative error” to supermax detention in the CECOT prison in El Salvador, and finally returned stateside only to face what looks an awful lot like politically motivated human trafficking charges in Tennessee—charges that so disturbed a senior local prosecutor in Nashville that he resigned rather than put his name to them. I ask you to read about the more than 200 other young men also sent, without trial, to indefinite detention in CECOT, arguably the world’s worst prison. And I ask you to spend a moment thinking about the eight men whom the government attempted to deport to South Sudan in May (despite the facts these men weren’t from South Sudan and that South Sudan is one of the poorest and most dangerous countries on earth) who have now spent more than a month in an airplane hangar in Djibouti while courts wrestle with their fate.
I ask you, also, to think about Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student and green card holder whom, until his court-ordered release last week, the government had held in an immigration detention facility since March, not because he is a criminal but because he has political views about Israel and Gaza that the Trump administration finds offensive. And I ask you to ponder the implications of masked men arresting in broad daylight, and bundling into an unmarked van, Tufts university graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, again not for criminal activities but for writing an opinion piece critical of the US government’s position on Israel.
And then I ask you to consider the implications of Trump’s stunning threat to also deport US citizens to supermax prisons overseas.
I ask you to honestly consider whether it is a mark of faith in the democratic process to strongarm universities into firing faculty, expelling students, and abandoning international scholars marked for deportation by the State Department because of their political views.
I ask you to parse out who benefits when scientists lose grants because their grant applications contain words such as “climate change” or “feminism” or “environmental justice” or “inequality.” Or when they have to run their scientific findings by political commissars, as did their predecessors in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany, to make sure those findings line up with MAGA-science and ideology.
Who wins when the US Naval academy temporarily removes nearly 400 books from its library shelves because they delve into topics the administration considers taboo? Who comes out ahead when the country’s leading university is told it is no longer accredited to admit international students—and when other top research universities around the world then snap those students up?
I ask you, this Fourth of July, to consider what the Founding Fathers would have made of a president who, on a whim, federalizes the California National Guard and deploys 700 US marines into the streets of America’s second-largest city; who denounces all protests against immigration raids as being motivated by the spirit of insurrection; and who talks about “liberating” cities and states the leaders of which don’t subscribe to his particular nativist ideology.
And, regardless of whether one supports individual government agencies such as USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, what would the Founders have thought of the empowering of the shadowy Elon Musk-led DOGE techno-hit squads to vandalize beyond repair basic government function, to fire tens of thousands of workers without any thought as to their financial need or the urgency of the work they are doing? Surely this is something that Red and Blue America can agree on—that in a country where government is ostensibly of, by, and for the people, cuts to government services shouldn’t be arbitrary and the dignity of public service employees ought to be respected.
What would Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton and the others have made of the entirely ghastly spectacle of a hopped-up Musk cavorting about on a stage with a revved up chain saw, boasting about destroying government functions and firing tens of thousands of hard-working, family-supporting employees?
For that matter, how would the Founding Fathers—who, you may remember, were preoccupied with the separation of powers and with ensuring that no one branch of government grew too overweening—have understood the extraordinary accumulation of data that DOGE has sucked up from the Treasury, from the Housing Department, from Health and Human Services, from Citizenship and Immigration Services, from the Department of Justice, from the Defense Department, from Social Security and so on? Again, you can be Red or you can be Blue, but it’s hard to see how you square such centralization of data—on a scale that George Orwell, in his wildest dystopian moments, probably couldn’t dream of—with democratic, small-government impulses.
On the subject of Elon Musk and DOGE, let’s talk corruption: the staggering conflict of interest involved in Musk’s dual role as the receiver of billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts and as financial enforcer and hatchet man, with the ability to access whatever data he wants on friend and foe alike, hardly needs spelling out. The appearance of corruption in Trump using the White House lawn to hawk Teslas and to suggest those who protest outside Tesla dealerships are domestic terrorists is also obvious. Then there’s the issue of the Qatari jet, worth half a billion dollars, that is being handed over to Trump for use as a souped-up, snazzified, Air Force One. There’s the auctioning of dinner spots with Trump to the biggest investors in his $Trump meme coin. There are the dealings with the Saudis over golf courses, tournaments and leagues, all of which stand to benefit the Trump family financially. There are the real estate deals being fast-tracked by governments desperate to get on Trump’s good side. There is the hawking of Trump paraphernalia, of gimmicks such as his $499 gold-colored phone, all aimed at making the president a quick buck.
Never in American history, not even at the time of the infamous Teapot Dome scandal—when oil companies gave bags of cash to President Warren G. Harding’s Interior Secretary in exchange for his fast-tracking oil drilling permits—has the federal government so clearly been for sale to the highest bidder. Never has a president shown such overt disregard for anti-corruption laws or such disinterest in disentangling his personal and political business. Never has a president so cheapened the hallowed grounds of the White House with such banal efforts to monetize the presidency.
None of this is a continuum with America’s best and more durable democratic traditions and institutions, or with its loftier aspirations regarding the public face it presents to the world. It is, rather, more redolent of strongmen dictators, with their brooking of no dissent, their taming of science and of academia more generally, their belief that they get a free pass on corruption, their understanding of the military as personal enforcers to be deployed at will against political enemies.
We know where all of this leads. It’s a dark journey to a very dark place, one that is far removed from the ideals that ought to animate Independence Day celebrations. Sam Albert ended up a victim of McCarthy’s dark vision seventy-five years ago. How many victims will McCarthy’s descendant, Donald Trump, create before the country once more finds its moral footing?
Until it does, it’s hard to see what exactly we are supposed to be celebrating each Fourth of July.
