The nation’s current socio-political quagmire and blatant religious ethno-cultural racism, as painfully and brazenly demonstrated by this election season, brings to mind just how severely America has failed to live up to the tenets of its 18th-century Declaration of Independence and the principles of the Scottish-led European Enlightenment.

Scotland is chiefly credited with creating the central ideals of modernity in the 18th century. Arthur Herman, in “How the Scots Invented the Modern World,” summarizes the Scottish lesson for the world: “History is the idea of progress societies like individuals, grow and improve over time acquire skills, new attitudes, and a new understanding of what individuals can do and what they should be free to do. The Scots would teach the world that one of the crucial ways we measure progress is by how far we have come from what we were before.”

Thomas Jefferson promoted the philosophy of reason as guiding humankind toward a more progressive future. Jefferson places “trust in the natural progress of reason” and in the “triumphs of reason over dogma” and “equality over hierarchy.” Human history has demonstrated that the truth of reason and logic, as interpreted by the senses of the mind and the evolution of thought and knowledge, has provided the pathway to gaining new experiences, greater wisdom and human advancement toward a higher order of civilization.

Scotland abolished slavery in 1777, prior to the colonists finalizing a constitution that accommodated and perpetuated Southern slavery. And it required almost a century before President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation legally abolished American slavery, but it did not eliminate the reality of human bondage. A Southern, defiant, pseudo-legal human bondage was created and practiced until being declared illegal via mid-20th-century civil rights legislation. As a result, blacks have been gradually but grudgingly granted limited equality, civil rights, and social and economic opportunity, but white supremacy and discrimination have persisted into the 21st century, isolating blacks within urban ghettos. America’s initial slave society, dominated by “race thinking,” transitioned into a white-supremacist biracial social order of sharply contrasting wealth, politics, education, religion and social status.

However, the Scots’ more enlightened philosophy recognized their future national advancement as being profoundly dependent on continuous quality improvement and the adoption of constructive and progressive human attitudes, values and behavior, and on providing equality, freedom and opportunity for all. And most particularly, they adopted an enlightened high priority for investing in a quality educational system, a new era of science and technology, and economic development prospects for innovative industrial and business development. Examples include James Watts’ steam engine and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” Scotland’s 18th-century philosophy paralleled that of Jefferson’s, the desired long-term outcomes to inspire and promote human achievement and well-being, and society’s continuing progress and advancement.

Among the originators of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Adam Smith and others identified the interrelationship between history and social change and a more civilized “new understanding of human nature and society”; that is, the forces of human nature that determine historic outcomes. “Our most fundamental character as human beings, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control we are ultimately creatures of our environment.”

While history is obviously affected by randomness and chance inherently found within the processes of nature, and among human actions and society’s processes of survival, the long-term course of history rests predominantly “on certain fundamental principles and discernible patterns.” Thus, the inherently evolutionary nature of human existence produces a steady stream of infinite consequences and complications, each of which is capable of altering the cumulative record of human events.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” In the case of America’s Southern-led conservative politics of today, regressive late-18th-century-styled thought, the “truth of faith,” and white one-party state politics devoid of the “truth of reason,” has continued to diminish American democracy and advancement, and human well-being. For better or for worse, a social order’s adopted “fundamental principles and discernible patterns” will inevitably drive cultural change within the limits of stagnation and progressive advancement.

In 2002, George M. Fredrickson, in “Racism: A Short History,” comments, “Americans tried to embrace the democratic universalism of the Enlightenment, while at the same time being proud bearers of a specific ethno-racial identity, that was sometimes conceived of as Anglo-Saxon, sometimes as northern European, but most often as simply European or white.” Further, he addresses how the evolution of “social forces” from an initial racist “way of life and then as a system of thought” was gradually transformed via “deeply rooted psychological factors. America was not born racist; it became so gradually as the result of a series of crimes against black humanity that stemmed primarily from selfishness, greed, and the pursuit of privilege.”

Clearly, a society that is not aggressively struggling with and successfully adapting to the inevitably more complex and challenging next phase of modernity will not only fail to realize adequate economic growth but will regress toward cultural stagnation, ultimately collapsing and ossifying, the fate of all past great Western civilizations. Such cultural stagnation is exemplified by America’s substantial post-1980 conservative social, political and economic shift, a white backlash motivated by fear, hate and despair, resulting from a threatening civil rights and freedoms movement. But this has been simply a new chapter in American society’s two-century continuum of racial democracy from the Southern plantation slave era to the modern urban ghettos.

America’s prevailing dominant white supremacy and religious ethno-cultural racism has promoted destructive human behavior and a culture of anti-intellectualism, anti-human rights, excessive greed and religious hypocrisy. This contradiction of the attitudes, values, integrity and morality of the Scottish-led Enlightenment provides an explanation for the political success of Donald Trump and the current, 90-percent-white, highly religious, business-dominated Republican Party.

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Tom Wallace, a resident of Loon Lake and Bonita Springs, Florida, is the author of “America is Self-Destructing: Wealth, Greed, and Ideology Trump Social Justice and the Common Good.”