Lloyd Kramer

The right to vote in free elections creates the permanent foundation for America’s democratic system of representative government. Voting rights build our democracy, and they are connected to all the other ‘unalienable” rights in the United States, including the rights to free speech, a free press, and a free public education.

The North Carolina General Assembly recently allocated state funds to build a monument and statue that will honor the evangelist Billy Graham on the grounds of the state’s historic capitol building in Raleigh.

Contemporary campaigns against the influence of foreign people and ideas thus revive political fears from earlier times, but they also extend these fears into the twenty-first-century exchanges of international organizations, global commerce, transnational travel, and cross-cultural research at modern universities. The new Isolationism, in short, is using old fears to undermine the future influence and social-intellectual power of the United States.  

Americans have excellent historical and political reasons to celebrate this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that the Continental Congress approved on July 4, 1776.

I just returned from a seventeen-day trip to France, where I participated in a Symposium on Lafayette’s role in the early history of French-American relations and gained new insights into how President Trump is destroying America’s reputation among Europeans who have long respected and supported democratic institutions in the United States.

All great empires and dominant national states have eventually confronted the limits of their power and struggled to manage their declining influence in global affairs. This familiar pattern of world history is now shaping political transitions and fears in the United States, but our MAGA president and his political allies are demolishing the structures of America’s global power with an ahistorical efficiency that few declining “great powers” have ever matched.

America’s illegal war against Iran has become the most recent example of how Trumpism resembles Napoleonic authoritarianism by launching foreign military assaults during a time in which the government continues to arrest and imprison people who live within the nation’s political borders.

It’s a long journey from the mountains of North Carolina to the ICE-covered, winter streets of Minneapolis. One of our state’s native sons, however, has made this personal and professional trip to secure his place in contemporary American history as the recent “commander-at-large” of the United States Border Patrol.

Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually...