The President’s ambitious new immigration bill went down in flames yesterday as his bipartisan support base crumbled beneath him. Senators from both sides of the aisle caved into pressure from their constituents, thousands of which phoned and emailed Capitol Hill to voice their displeasure at Congress and the president over an initiative that all but granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens now living in the U.S. The saddest part about all of this is how poorly Washington sold this thing to the American people. I’m not suggesting the bill was perfect or that it offered any perfect solutions to what is both an ongoing gross exploitation of a working class of people and catastrophic failure to provide and enforce domestic border security, I’m saying that I didn’t know what the bill was about. And, chances are, neither did you. And neither did many of the millions of people up in arms about it.

Here in America, as around the world, we tend to vote our fears more than our hopes. Fear is a great motivator and, in act, a great equalizer. The Republican Party has made a relative art form of manipulating this country’s fear for decades now. I’m not exonerating the Democrats, I’m just saying the GOP is better at it, which is why they’ve remained in power so long—making us afraid of everything. Those tactics have come back to bite them with this stab at immigration reform. The paranoia that keeps the GOP faithful in lock-step overwhelmed any sense of reality about this reform effort. The half-baked public awareness campaigns didn’t help as, absent hard info about the reform bill, many if not most people turned inward towards imaginations pumped full of polemics and Socratic steroids—if we pass this bill, al Qaeda’s gonna get us.

The Republicans have no one to blame but themselves, since, after all, they were the electricians who juiced that particular Frankenstein. But what worries me, what truly troubles me, is not the downing of an imperfect peace of legislation—a reform bill that neither reformed nor liberated anybody—what worries me is the spiral such paranoid politic have put us into where, not knowing the truth, not knowing the facts, the American people defaulted to the illusory, the paranoia and fear. A fear that has spiraled beyond simple political usefulness and now threatens to overwhelm the very spirit of America as we huddle in disparate pockets of self-interest, clutching pearls and mumbling “Redrum.” We seize the flag—folding it neatly and hiding it from harm, creating phony laws about not burning it and so forth—rather than using it the way it was intended, as a weapon, waving it to rally the troops and then surging forward with it, tattered and battle-scarred, as we press forth as a unified people towards goals and objectives that are true to who we are as a people.

This was a reform initiative that neither reformed nor initiated anybody; it was mostly smoke and mirrors, providing a phony path to citizenship only the most affluent and highly-skilled illegal immigrants could benefit from. It was political stone soup, a shallow and perhaps even cynically flimsy piece of dung that was all sturm und drang. But it was a start. It got the wheels, finally, moving. It was lousy and imperfect, but it offered us a direction, something we could refine over time into actual legislation that might provide actual hope to actual people.

This is the real danger of the hardball politics of our time and the phony evangelical Christian movement: both are terribly disingenuous because they betray the core principles of what America is, of what a Christian is. First and foremost by defining, de facto, an American as a Christian (and, by strong inference, defining an American as a white Christian). Secondly, by defining a Christian as someone who defends what he has by force and huddles in closets while terrible wrongs are being committed to others. My biggest fear is not bin Laden or al Qaeda, but of the real monster threatening the American people: greedy and shortsighted evil men and women who have capriciously stripped us of who we are. And who have created, in our children, an entire generation of Christians who behave nothing at all like Christ, and people in America who have no apparent appetite for being Americans.

Just a little something to consider this week as you’re grilling burgers and waving your sparklers around.