It’s all done
It’s all over
The evil loses
The good wins
There’s nothing to be done
So why are we born?
Why do we walk the earth?
Why do we appear to feel, think, and act?
Why do we seem to make decisions?
It is all over
The evil loses
The Good wins
1. Prayer
Dear God,
Help us now to all together see things as they really are.
Every person in the country and the world.
To see life from the inside out and from the outside in:
Out through Reality into the various realities; in through the various realities to Reality:
This insight sloshing back and forth, from what is prior to our ideas and feelings, through our ideas and feelings, out into this shared dreaming space that of course also melts into what is prior our ideas and feelings; and sloshing back again through our shared dreaming space, and through our ideas and feelings again into the Love that chooses everyone and that shines through everything — including each conscious moment. A Love prior to our ideas and feelings. An infinite joyous giving: The one Reality: An infinite giggle of kind delight.
Such a funny joke: The Infinite can’t help but be both everything and nothing: both every possible configuration of our interwoven daydream, and the infinite perfection prior to all specifics = perceptions = illusions.
Let us together go down a little lower level, into the heart of it all; and together surface; and together see the gist of this our shared moment; and together hold both what is prior to our ideas and feelings and what our ideas and feelings bump into and create.
Because what is a human if not a deep and wide conscious link between the Love that chooses and is enough for everyone & this mixed affair of collaborative poetic interpretations called “life”?
And what is the goal of human life if not to get better and better at living in and through and for the Love prior to our ideas and feelings? Of course, such an interpretation of the infinite into the finite must be limited, must be approximate, must be in need of constant self-awareness -critique and -refinement, must be life-long poetic search for the song that is kind and gentle and honest and clear and wide-awake enough to see Godlight in ourselves, in everyone and everything, in the space between, and in the mirthful joyful infinitely-giving with infinite-delight formlessness shining through everything, including each conscious moment.
Be that as it may!
Let us try to look each other in the eye and speak the Truth and the pertinent truths while there’s yet time for us to together decide what happens tomorrow.
Amen?
Amen.
Amen!
Amen?
God? What do you think?
Ideas for your little pebbles down here?
Please God, help to me to win
But to win for real
from the inside out
the kind of winning where everyone wins
the kind of victory where we all see things not as I would have them be seen, but as they really are.
If there is no government in which people can share the common faith that they are all children of Love
and that they all can relate meaningfully to that Love and to each other
If there is no system of government in which the people can together find the kind of spirit-affirming win-wins where my success can go hand in hand with your success
Then what good is government?
But wait, for we’ve seen good government
We’ve seen it
Somewhere
Where was it?
2. So lucky!
Our liberal democratic republic is a spiritual good because it makes public virtue compatible with a safe, happy, successful life where you can provide for your family. Contrast this with a top-down crime-state like Putin’s Russia, where standing up for honesty, fair play, competency, and goodwill in government can get you killed — even if you’re not longer living in the country*.
*[Putin is doing something almost nobody is noticing by Lilia Lapparova for The NY Times on Sept 23, 2024
… Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.
But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence, away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent or inadequate prevention of the countries to which they have fled.
It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.
…
]
With protections for individual rights, equality under the law, checks and balances on individual powers, and temporary and ballots-checked leadership roles; in liberal democratic republics, the majority serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government; while also together gently/fearlessly (fear is harsh and sharp and confused; but love is gentle and clear) shaping the direction of their shared government as they — thanks to freedom of speech and freedom from government retaliation — together gently/fearlessly shape their shared conversation.
In this way, liberal democratic republics focus on the fun, rather than the horror, of government.
It’s fun to play a game where in the end everyone goes home friends and to a safe home where they are loved and where they can look after those they love. That’s fun. Sometimes somebody goes a little far and somebody’s feelings are hurt, but in the end, no one is trying to destroy anyone else or the game that keeps everyone safe by keeping power-struggles in the realm of ideas rather than letting them descend into violence and the winner-take-all logic of criminal states.
Fun!
Leaders, bureaucrats, and law enforcement officers in a liberal democratic republic are free to do a good honest job and avoid corruption because they don’t have to appease a top-down criminal organization in order to feed their families and keep themselves and their loved one’s safe. And when given the opportunity to be a healthy, contributing part of such a system, most people leap at the chances. Via the same logic that keeps most rich people from bothering to break into other people’s houses to steal their jewelry: It’s not worth it! All things being equal, people would rather live in an environment where they don’t have to steal, cheat, and commit acts of violence against others in order to succeed.
The great thing about a liberal democratic republic is that it’s core values are compatible with the universal values without which none of our worldviews can be meaningful to any of us (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing). In a liberal democratic republic can stand up for honesty, fair play, and competency in government without sacrificing your standing, safety, finances, or anything! So wonderful! And so wholesome! This permission to stand up for what is true and good and fair and just doesn’t itself make people wise, but it makes it possible for people to publicly behave in ways that are wise and honest and kind and good and competent — not just for a glorious moment before they’re silenced by their own government, but day after day, year and after year; and while still getting all the little treats that make life pleasant: enough to eat, a safe place to live, safe drinking water for your family, not being bankrupted for your political opinions et cetera, eating in restaurants without having to worry about assassination attempts, et cetera.
Oh how lucky we have had it!
The terrible thing about tyranny is that it’s core values are not compatible with the universal values without which none of our worldviews can be meaningful to any of us (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing). A tyranny is dedicated not first and foremost to serving the people, but rather dedicated to maintaining power at the expense of the people’s freedoms; that makes it difficult to either change the system, or to even be publicly virtuous (for example, publicly exposing dishonesty, fraud, and corruption in government) without risking the safety and security of yourself and your loved ones (because the leadership itself is a criminal organization!).
That was the great miracle of 1776. No, it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t include everyone. But the idea has grown. The joy has spread, and by spreading to more people, it has deepened in everyone.
Liberal democratic republics don’t silence disagreement or oppress dissent; and so politicians, bureaucrats, law enforcers, and regular citizens can all stand up for honesty, fair play, and competency in government and still have nice, normal lives with loved ones they can look after and care for.
Why in a liberal democratic republic, even leaders can just do their jobs and tell the truth — knowing that if they abide by the laws of the land (which apply to everyone in the nation, since leaders are just citizens who temporarily serve as leaders); they won’t lose their wealth, security, and standing when they lose power.
Add together this miracle of safety from government oppression / from a government that allows individuals to use violence to oppress their political opponents PLUS majority rule and the possible evolution of popular sentiment; and you get a place where the governments and citizens can evolve together, can grow together, can together become better shepherds of the universal values without which no one’s worldview is meaningful to anyone (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing).
How lucky we’ve been.
Let’s not pretend away the joy we’ve been given.
Let’s not pretend we’ve not been blessed.
Let’s admit we’ve had a nice run.
But let’s also note that this shouldn’t be rare, this should be normal, this should be public life.
Yes: Humans should seek to create, protect, nourish, and grow representative governments with checks and balances on individual powers and protections for basic rights like the right to criticize the government without fear of reprisal.
After all, suppose you were told you could choose to be middle class in a liberal democratic republic or an oligarch in a kleptocracy like Putin’s Russia, would it not be a sin against humanity and yourself to choose the latter course?
And then imagine what a crime it would be if you would choose to make the United States of America a kleptocracy so you could be an oligarch and, at least until the whims of the insane* helmsman turn against you or swamp the ship, be on the side of top-down oppression!
*[For are corruption and madness not of one piece? Don’t they both attempt to steer through human life without respecting the rules, values, and core-faith without which no human action can be meaningful to any human? Nihilism is living without meaning is living without the Love that gives life meaning, that makes it possible to understand, believe in, and care about one’s own feeling, thinking, and acting.]
There’s so much more joy in a system that allows people to stand up for those values without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us.
And forcing people to choose between standing up for honesty, fair play, and competency in government or protecting their loved ones is an evil trick.
Also:
I mean:
The universal values are aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing; but what are they really doing? Aren’t they helping us to unfold the Love without which nothing is Okay and with which everything is Okay?
The Love that chooses everyone is prior to our ideas and feelings, so we can’t translate It literally/directly/definitively into our ideas and feelings; and equating the Truth with our ideas and feelings about the Truth (whatever we call that inner sense of “Truth” — for even nihilists clutch their professions of “No Truth!” with the desperate grasp of “This is the Truth!”) causes us to focus more on our own notions than on the Love that chooses everyone.
So we’re lucky that we cannot make sense to ourselves without abiding by the universal values — they can serve as guardrails to help keep our underlying spiritual effort (living in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone) on the right track.
What I mean is:
In a liberal democratic republic, we are safe to stick up for the universal values, and that is the same as being safe to stick up for our ability to live in and through and for Love.
No, being allowed to do the right thing doesn’t mean we will do it.
But still: It is a spiritual good to create and sustain a system of government that rewards rather than punishes people who do their jobs with honesty, clarity, integrity, good will, competency, and who feel compassion for and look out for other people.
3. Difficulties
What’s going on in the United States of America?
What has caused her democracy to wobble?
And what can be done to help it find its feet again?
US added to list of backsliding democracies for the first time from the Guardian published November 2021:
The US has been added to an annual list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time, the International IDEA thinktank has said, pointing to a “visible deterioration” it said began in 2019.
…
Alexander Hudson, a co-author of the report, said: “The United States is a high-performing democracy, and even improved its performance in indicators of impartial administration (corruption and predictable enforcement) in 2020. However, the declines in civil liberties and checks on government indicate that there are serious problems with the fundamentals of democracy.”
The report says: “A historic turning point came in 2020-21 when former president Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States.”
In addition, Hudson pointed to a “decline in the quality of freedom of association and assembly during the summer of protests in 2020” after the police killing of George Floyd.
Why the US is a failed democratic State by Lawrence Lessig for the NY Review of Books in December 2021:
At every level, the institutions that the US has evolved for implementing our democracy betray the basic commitment of a representative democracy: that it be, at its core, fair and majoritarian. Instead, that commitment is now corrupted in America. And every aspiring democracy around the world should understand the specifics of that corruption—if only to avoid the same in its own land.
The corruption of our majoritarian representative democracy begins at the state legislatures. Because the Supreme Court has declared that partisan gerrymandering is beyond the ken of our Constitution, states have radically manipulated legislative districts.
…
These gerrymandered states then spread their minoritarian poison in two distinctive ways. First, they have taken up the most ambitious program of vote suppression since Jim Crow. Through a wide range of techniques, Republican state legislatures are making it selectively more difficult for presumptively Democratic voters to vote, by reducing the number of polling places in Democratic districts, by ending early voting or voting outside of ordinary working hours, by deploying biased ID requirements that selectively allow forms of identification commonly held by Republicans (gun club registration cards) while disallowing those held by likely Democratic voters (student cards), by understaffing polling places so voters must queue for hours to vote, and by many other creative techniques. In Georgia, the legislature has even made it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote. What possible legitimate state interest could that law serve?
The second way that minoritarian state legislatures spread their poison is by gerrymandering the United States House of Representatives. Partisan gerrymandering was first perfected in its modern “big data” form by Republicans in 2010, and the Democrats then spent the following decade trying to get the Supreme Court to put a stop to it. When the Court announced it would not, there was little left for the Democrats except good government initiatives, aiming at moving the redistricting process away from the most egregiously partisan influences. That did some good—until the 2020 election signaled to Republicans that their party faces virtual annihilation if the majority gets its say. …
Lessig then predicts that the 2022 election will be egregiously gerrymandered so Republicans will win power in the House with or without popular support. Republicans did take control of the House. I don’t know how much of the gerrymandering happened after the 2020 election, but the House races in 2022 were very impacted by gerrymandering. See this January 2023 Brooking’s Institute Report: Three Takeaways on redistricting and competition in the 2022 Midterms.
To continue with Lessig’s overview of our government’s current failure to represent the majority of the voters:
… While the Court has upheld limitations on direct contributions to political campaigns, it has simultaneously held, in its infamous decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), that any limitation on independent spending violates the First Amendment. Lower courts have then read Citizens United to mean that any limits on contributions to independent political action committees would violate the First Amendment as well. These rulings together gave rise to the so-called Super PACs that now dominate political spending, and enable strategic coordination of influence that is more effective than spending alone. In 2020, for example, the ten top Super PACs accounted for 54 percent of outside spending.
… The ultra-wealthy donors supporting No Labels were able to “hand out $50,000 checks,” its cofounder, Andrew Burskey, bragged. And those checks, he explained, represented the most valuable money in any political campaign. …
…
… Large contributors give members two things at the same time: first, and obviously, money; but second, and even more critically, time. A $50,000 contribution gives members of Congress the chance to breathe, even as it naturally obliges them to the interest of the person who enabled that chance.
The legislative branch, of course, is not the only minoritarian institution within our republic. Because of the way states allocate Electoral College votes, the executive branch is effectively minoritarian, too. … All but two states give the winner of the popular vote in their state all of the electors from that state. This means that the only states that are actually contested in any presidential election are the “swing states,” at most a dozen or so of the fifty in the union. Those swing states represent a minority of America—less than 40 percent of the electorate depending on the election.
Lessig then discusses how the Supreme Court’s 6-3 tilt towards conservatives does not represent the larger population. Of course (with McConnells’ help [by refusing to confirm Obama’s replacement choice for Scalia and then rushing through a replacement for Ginsburg]) Donald Trump nominated three of those six conservative justices, after he lost the popular vote but won the electoral college.
…
“Yet, without doubt, the most extreme institution of minoritarian democracy in America today is the United States Senate. … ”
Lessig notes that the Senate is anti-majority by design (to get the smaller states to sign the Constitution), but that for the first 100 years of the nation, this anti-majoritarianism was considerably less pronounced because (1) the difference in size between the largest and the smallest states was not so extreme [“The largest state in 1790 (Virginia) was thirteen times more populous than the smallest (Delaware). Today, the largest (California) is sixty-eight times more populous than the smallest (Wyoming).”] and (2) the filibuster:
… The original Senate rules expressly protected the power of the majority, a simple majority, to vote on any bill whenever it wanted. It was only when Senator John C. Calhoun, the proslavery Democrat of South Carolina, began to muck about with those rules fifty years after the Constitution was ratified that the will of the majority was placed in jeopardy.
Furthermore, until very recently, the filibuster didn’t kill legislation (with the exception of 1965 civil rights and anti-lynching legislation), it just delayed the process. And, up until very recently, filibustering required a senator actually had to stand and speak on the Senate floor. Today, the majority party just tells the party leader to please table the bill.
The effect of the old filibuster was to keep a bill on the floor of the Senate as the filibusterers were debating. That allowed their dissent to be better understood, if not in the Senate, then at least by the public. The effect of the new filibuster is exactly the opposite: its effect is to block any debate until a supermajority allows it.
…
Even this description, however, masks the real corruption in the system. The norms that limited the filibuster to important issues are gone. Both parties killed those conventions over the past twenty years, the Republicans more aggressively than the Democrats. The filibuster has now become a routine hurdle that any significant legislation must clear. What that means is that we have now introduced a procedural requirement into the passage of legislation that makes the process more institutionally minoritarian than that of any legislature in any comparable representative democracy. Senators from the twenty-one smallest and most conservative states, representing just 21 percent of America, now have the power to block any non-budget legislation.
…
The essay is both beautiful and long, we conclude our perusal of what we take to be the main points with this quote from near the end:
Today, we confront a Republican Party that has effectively declared war on majoritarian democracy. At every level, the leadership of that party challenges the fundamental idea of majority rule. Rather than adjust their policies to appeal to a true majority of Americans, Republicans have embraced the minoritarian strategy of entrenching what has become, in effect, a partisan, quasi-ethnic group against any possible democratic challenge. They rig the system so the majority cannot rule.
Hmmm.
Here is the Conclusion of the Brookings Institute’s October 2023 Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States:
The effort by President Trump to subvert the 2020 election is the most obvious, but far from the only, example of democratic backsliding in the United States. State legislatures under GOP control have moved to reduce voters’ access to the ballot and to politicize election administration. President Trump also engaged in unprecedented efforts to undermine the independent civil service. The Supreme Court has increased its authority over election adjudication, narrowed the scope of voting rights protections, and seems inclined to support some politicization of executive branch administration. Hyperpartisanship and gridlock leave Congress poorly positioned to provide checks on executive and judicial power.
Project Democracy now ranks the US Democracy 2.5 out of 5, placing us between Poland (2.3 Significant Threat to democracy) and India (3.5 Severe Threat to democracy). It considers five areas critical to the health of democracy to be facing significant threats here in the US (Treatment of Media, Executive Constraints, Elections, Civil Liberties, and Civil Violence); our political Rhetoric has graded as a severe threat.
From the Introduction to Project Democracy’s January 2022 Report Advantaging Authoritarianism: The US Electoral System
… In particular, [the report] interrogates how specific features of the U.S. electoral system may be structurally favoring political extremism, such as by exaggerating one party’s electoral wins over the other, diluting minority voting power, weakening competition between the major parties, preventing an electorally viable new center-right party, and rewarding extreme factions at the ballot box, among other effects.
The report concludes with a number of possible structural reforms.
Why not ranked choice voting PLUS multi-seat districts (apparently multiple winners per district used to be common-place in the US) PLUS reforming or eliminating the primary system (which tends to select for more extreme candidates)? Why not tweak the system away from a winner-take-all game where a relatively small number of more extreme primary voters effectively choose for the whole nation to a system that reflects the majority’s sense of where we are and where we should head as a nation?
Anyway, whatever the details: Why not some focus our effort on nudging the system to select for more, rather than less, representation of the people in their government?
After all, if the leadership in a representative government decides that the only way to remain in power is to represent less and less of the people, then you are well on your way to losing a representative form of government; and if you do lose representative government: Forget about it!, because once the leadership decouples itself from the people’s voice, it doesn’t matter what policies you like: Maybe today the government outlaws abortion; maybe tomorrow they outlaw having more than one child.
But of course, as the report itself points out, while structural issues are exacerbating democratic decline in the United States of America, they are not the only factor. And as Lessig pointed carefully laid out, the Republican Party is increasingly dependent on enforcing a system of minority rule. Still, until right about now, it seemed like the Republican Party was still committed enough to democracy to not outright steal elections. But more on this later.
Now we consider the wealth gap in the USA today.
From a July 2024 article in Project Syndicate by Susan Stokes about a recent study by her and her colleagues at the Chicago Center on Democracy report:
Our global analysis of democracies reveals a startling regularity: the more unequal a society, both in terms of income and wealth, the greater the risk of democratic backsliding. National income (GDP per capita) has a smaller effect, while a democracy’s age and the strength of its public institutions have no discernible influence. Inequality is the key factor
…
For example, Sweden, which is more equal than 87% of democracies, had about a 4% risk of democratic erosion in 2017. On the other end of the spectrum, South Africa, the world’s most unequal democracy, had a risk of around 30%. As for the US, which remains more unequal than 60% of all democracies (despite recent wealth gains at the bottom of the distribution), the risk was 9%, more than double that of Sweden.
To understand how economic inequality erodes democracy requires a closer look at the differences between the US and Sweden. Most notably, both countries have a prominent right-wing nationalist party. The Sweden Democrats – the Swedish equivalent of the MAGA-dominated Republican Party in the US – have gained support by opposing the country’s relative openness to immigration over the past two decades. They now play an important role in the center-right governing coalition after finishing second in the 2022 parliamentary election, ahead of traditional conservative parties.
Despite this, Sweden is not displaying the symptoms of democratic erosion that are becoming increasingly pronounced in the US. Politicians do not call the press the “enemies of the people,” attack judges and prosecutors, threaten to purge the civil service, or question the integrity of elections.
Presumably such behavior would not resonate widely with the Swedish public, because, in a country with a relatively small gap between rich and poor, confidence in public institutions remains comparatively high. Swedes across the board have benefited from the country’s generous welfare state, which the Sweden Democrats have buttressed by pushing for increased social spending in areas like public health and education. Overall, Europe’s nationalist right tends to be more supportive of social policy than legacy conservative parties.
Here is the abstract of an article I did not read:
Research suggests that economic inequality reduces political trust after the public recognizes the inequality and perceives it as a failure of the political system in Western democracies. This study challenges this presumed “output evaluation model” (OEM) both theoretically and empirically. We provide an alternative mediator evaluation model (MEM) contending that objective inequality affects political trust through government-performance mediators, without requiring accurate public perception of inequality or specific regime types. With nationwide economic inequality and public opinion data from China, we examined both the OEM implication and four MEM mechanisms through impartial governance, responsiveness, judicial fairness, and anti-corruption efforts. Findings indicate that the mediating mechanisms, rather than direct inequality, shape political trust, with robust evidence even after addressing endogeneity. This study broadens the understanding of the intricate relationship between systemic conditions and individual perceptions, offering significant insights into the dynamics of trust in political institutions in a general sense.
[Why Economic inequality undermines public trust: An analysis of mechanisms by Shuai Jin, Yue Hu, Tianguang Meng in Oxford University Press Summer 2024 Public Opinion Quarterly.
The idea that inaccurate perceptions of negative factors like income inequality can drive public opinion, reminds me of Anne Applebaum’s The New Propaganda War (Atlantic Monthly in May 2024)
While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China. That method of internet management—which is in effect conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases. …
…
The Chinese regime also combined online tracking methods with other tools of repression, including security cameras, police inspections, and arrests. … With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China has gotten closer to its holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words democracy and Tiananmen from the internet, but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.
But despite all their success at oppression, the Chinese government still faced protests in 2022. Per Applebaum, these protests, and others like them, have prompted autocratic regimes to turn their propaganda outward.
If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.
More on this article later.
Anyway, distorted perceptions are doubtless in the mix, but we do have a real problem with income inequality in the US.
From America is Heading for a Collapse by Peter Turchin for The Atlantic Monthly in June 2023:
How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?
All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. … two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.
He goes on to say that for fifty years in the United States, the wealth gap has become unsustainable and there has been an overproduction of Americans with advanced degrees.
He concludes with:
We are still suffering the consequences of abandoning that compact [the unspoken deal between labor and capital originating from the New Deal era: material gains would be distributed more equitably, but the fundamental system would not change (i.e. no violent revolt from the workers)]. The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.
[From How Harris Can Win, guest essay by political philosophy professor Michael J. Sandel, published in The NY Times July 27, 2024]
…
By 2016, four decades of neoliberal governance had created inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s. Labor unions were in decline. Workers received a smaller and smaller share of the profits they produced. Finance claimed a growing share of the economy but flowed more into speculative assets (like risky derivatives) than into productive assets (factories, homes, roads, schools) in the real economy.
…
Mr. Biden’s ambitious public investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, jobs and clean energy recalled the muscular role of government during the New Deal. So did his support for collective bargaining and the revival of antitrust law. It made him one of the most consequential presidents of modern times.
…
When he [Biden] broke with the era of neoliberal globalization, reasserting government’s role in regulating markets for the common good, he did so with little fanfare or explanation. He did not acknowledge that his own party had been complicit in the policies that had deepened the divide between winners and losers. Perhaps he was guided more by political instinct than thematic vision; perhaps he did not want to highlight his break with the market-friendly philosophy of the president he had served. His American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act — in the end, it all made for impressive policy but themeless politics. His presidency was a legislative triumph but an evocative failure.
Yes, Biden didn’t crow up his radical shift away from the neoliberal policies of the last forty years. But isn’t he — aren’t we — in an awkward spot? For the same forty years that have seen the rise in neoliberal policies that have put so much wealth into the hands of so few have also seen the Supreme Court’s undermining of meaningful campaign finance laws, the explosion of the lobbying industry, and our political system’s increasing addiction to money. How can politicians dependent on money tell the super-rich that for the sake of democracy they should accept policies that limit their ability to accumulate and centralize wealth? I mean, I think it’s clearly better to be middle class in a healthy liberal democratic republic than an oligarch in a repressive regime; but I don’t have a billion dollars, and even if I did, might I not worry that if I went along with more redistributive economic policies, I might lose money and still not improve the health of our republic — and so succeed only in making myself more vulnerable?
But have you read The Antitrust Revolution — Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech by Barry C. Lynn for Harper’s October 2024 issue?
I was like, “What?! I never thought of that!”
And it seems I was not alone in this.
The author begins by discussing how James I used the power of monopolies to enforce his absolute power. He argues that the Founders designed the constitution to fight against that kind of concentration of economic power. And he discusses how FDR’s policies broke up the concentration of economic power that had been strangling the nation. And he explains how the Reagan administration undermined anti-trust laws by arguing that the purpose was merely to keep consumers benefitting from competitive advantage, rather than to work against the concentrations of economic power that monopolies create and are. Big Tech, he argues, has the power to destroy businesses and people, and it needs to be reined in. And the author says that liberalism is not just ideas about equality under the law: it is a system for organizing government so that no individual or group gains too much power over the rest, and so anti-trust laws are critical to democracy and equality under the law. Wow! Why didn’t I think of all that on my own? Is a child of the eighties necessarily a sucker of the eighties?
Oh, and guess what: He says that he helped convince the Biden administration to enforce anti-trust laws! Who knew? This was all news to me.
4. The slide to evil (Not even close to being completed)
Can you feel the evil coming?
Can you taste it?
Do you care?
Can we learn to see, to taste, to care
in time?
republicans get more and more used to winning by gaming the system
Fox and et cetera create an alt reality in which everything the democrats do is somewhere between ridiculous and evil and where all traditional media sources are lying to you and where the liberal is some terrible bogey man
40 years of Neo-liberal policies create real income disparities
our system has a tendency to exacerbate democratic black siding with minority rule, winner take all elections, and an increasingly powerful executive who is chosen by very few voters in state-run elections under the jurisdiction of state-elected politicians
The dependency on minority rule, fervor against liberals, real income inequality and thus a real bipartisan failing from the nation’s elites, an every-truth-is-political mindset: all this plays into Trump’s hand
The state run media — when Fox decided to become Trump’s state run media, for profit and without any executive order
The executive-corrupted judiciary — the SC and the Florida case
The Unique, damaging role Fox News plays in American media:
1. “Fox News has unique partisan power”
Poll findings: ” … Among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, a variety of sources — CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, the Times, The Post — were identified as a main source of news by at least 3 in 10. Among Republicans, though, only two were: local television and Fox News.”
2. “The Network shapes how its viewers see the world”
Results from an experiment in which researchers paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN:
The experiment “found evidence of manifold effects on viewers’ attitudes about current events, policy preferences, and evaluations of key political figures and parties,” Broockman and Kalla write. “For example, we found large effects on attitudes and policy preferences about COVID-19. We also found changes in evaluations of Donald Trump and Republican candidates and elected officials.” Participants in the experiment even grew to recognize the way in which Fox News presents reality: “group participants became more likely to agree that if Donald Trump made a mistake, Fox News would not cover it — i.e., that Fox News engages in partisan coverage filtering.”
3. “Fox News has a grip on political leaders that has no peer elsewhere”
Go on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and you are guaranteed not only a large group of heavily Republican viewers but also a chance to shape the network’s and the right’s narrative for the next 24 hours. Maddow does this for the left on occasion; Carlson and his colleagues do so regularly.Go on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and you are guaranteed not only a large group of heavily Republican viewers but also a chance to shape the network’s and the right’s narrative for the next 24 hours. Maddow does this for the left on occasion; Carlson and his colleagues do so regularly.
Analysis: Fox News has been exposed as a dishonest organization terrified of its own audience by Oliver Darcy for CNN on February 17, 2023
Trump was enraged that Fox News was the first network to call the critical swing state of Arizona for now-president Joe Biden. And he couldn’t stand that the network, rightfully, declared Biden as the winner of the presidential contest.
In the days and weeks after the presidential contest had been called, Fox News’ audience listened to Trump and rebelled against the channel. Fox News shed a chunk of its audience while Newsmax gained significant viewership.
Behind the scenes, Fox News executives and hosts were in panic. Jay Wallace, the Fox News president, described Newsmax’s surge as “troubling” and said the network needed to be “on war footing.”
Rupert Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman, emailed Suzanne Scott, the Fox News chief executive, telling her that Newsmax needed to be “watched.” Murdoch said that he didn’t “want to antagonize Trump further” and stressed to her, “everything at stake here.”
The hosts were so alarmed by Newsmax’s rise, they were enraged when their colleague, White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, tweeted a mere fact check of Trump’s election lies.
“Please get her fired,” Carlson told Hannity. “Seriously What the f**k? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
And of course, before Donald Trump demonstrated that a blatant disregard for truth was compatible with political success in the United States of America, the groundwork for a post-truth / all-truth-is-political “reality” had been laid by media and social landscapes where people can isolate themselves from any narrative that contradicts their pre-established certainties.
And before Donald Trump taught the GOP that winning elections is more important than preserving government for by and of the people (otherwise known as, “representative government”),the GOP was already (by [as mentioned above] making voting more difficult [particularly after the SC paved the way by undoing many civil rights era voting protections], and by leveraging the small-state’s pre-existing disproportionate advantage [two senators per state; the electoral college] with the filibuster and by gerrymandering safe seats [this latter trick is, of course, also exploited by democrats]) both used to and dependent upon maintaining power over many while representing only a few. Indeed, the primary system (which tends to select for more extreme candidates), the impact of small donors (who tend to be more extreme), the impact of lobbying, the gerrymandering of safe seats, the emphasis on national rather than local politics, the self-sorting of the population into left and right, the growth of executive power, the shrillness of the news cycle: So much has been driving us apart and making both sides identify the other part with that other party’s more extreme voices and/or with their own party’s tropes about the opposing party.
But there’s always troubles. Where did the worm turn? Where did the decision to “fight like hell” whether or not one has the votes originate? Or is it just the way things have piled up and interacted?
This form of government allows the citizens to serve as a final check on madness, corruption, and political evil in government, while also together influencing their shared local and national conversations and governments — all without fear of government reprisal or government acceptance of political violence, and thus safely in the realm of ideas –.
And by creating a political landscape where politicians know they serve a short time and only at the pleasure of their constituents, and bureaucrats are shielded from political tests and are thus free to be professionals rather than political animals; this form of government allows the citizens and the government to together learn from and correct their mistakes, and (since people who fight for honesty, accuracy, competency and good will in government are protected from government and personal reprisals; and since on the whole, all things being equal, most people prefer their leadership be faithful stewards of the power entrusted to it) it selects for honesty, accuracy, competency, and good will in public life.
We all have different beliefs. But we all know that our own feeling, thinking, and acting can only be meaningful to us to the degree that we feel, think, and act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing. Why? Because to the degree we fail to feel/think/act this way, we cannot understand, believe in, or care about our own feelings, thoughts, and actions — we cannot meaningfully travel with our own considerations to our own conclusions because we are attempting to make decisions without following our own inborn, indelible rules for feeling, thinking, and acting.
Furthermore, we all know that except to the degree our feeling, thinking, and acting is centered on an infinite, eternal, spiritual Love that chooses everyone 100% (and thus — in that absolute completeness — equally); we cannot understand, believe in, and care about our own feeling, thinking, and acting. Why? I don’t know. That is the nature of who we are deep inside. We cannot be meaningful to ourselves except to the degree that we abide by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, … joyfully-sharing) because these are the values that help us remain grounded in and flow meaningfully out of the kind of Godly Love that we need to be grounded in and meaningfully interpret into words and deeds in order to understand, believe in, care about, or even stand our own feeling, thinking, and acting.
Finally, since we cannot meaningfully participate in life unless that life is self-awaredly grounded in a Reality of a Love that chooses everyone without fail and, being infinitely greater than our own little notions, cannot fail to carry everyone safely back into Itself; we cannot meaningfully believe that others are not essentially like ourselves. In short: Except to the degree we are able to live the commandment to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength and our *neighbor as ourselves, we cannot understand, believe in, care about, or stand our own feelings, thoughts, words, and deeds.
*[i.e. everyone, since the metaphysical Reality we require to be meaningful to ourselves is one in which an infinite spiritual Love shines through our every conscious moment, as well as through everything and everyone else.]
This is all psychology, not metaphysics. As such, it is self-evident — and does not require philosophical, theological, and/or scientific support. Search yourself.
Do we live in a Reality of Love? Is all there really is an infinite eternal joyful giving? Is this life just sketches upon a spiritual Love that creates, sustains, shines through, and ultimately is all things? Do we all together don this interwoven daydream that the Love might create, sustain, love-lift, and ultimately explode-through overcome dissolve and resolve back into Itself all possible configurations?
Or something along those lines?
Who can say? Human minds and hearts are finite, and the Love we seek to relate to and to interpret into feeling, thinking, and acting would have to be infinite for It to be what we seek. Furthermore, humans are NOTORIOUS for confusing their own feelings/ideas for great and eternal Truths.
You see this all the time: Even people who claim they know of no Truth, generally clench either (irony of ironies!) that very notion, or other combinations of feelings and ideas as if they were great and eternal Truths.
Granted: We do have the case of some ancient skeptics who reported finding — without looking for it, and quite unexpectedly — a wonderful calm and freedom after they successfully suspended all judgements (which, again, they did not at all in pursuit of inner bliss, but merely procedurally — as the only way to reliably avoid emotional/intellectual errors). But that doesn’t prove that skepticism is True, it merely points to what the mystics have long claimed: The Truth is wider and deeper than, is prior to our ideas and feelings — including our ideas and feelings about the Truth.
What can we say? Only that to be meaningful to ourselves we should seek a spiritual Love that chooses everyone shining through everything (including each conscious moment), and we should try to organize our ideas and feelings around such a Love, and we should work to poetically translate that Love into feeling, thinking, and acting (we cannot literally/directly/1:1 translate what is wider and deeper than our f/t/a into our f/t/a, and pretending we can creates no end of trouble). And we can further say that the universal values, and the universal spiritual practices (prayer, meditation, study, reflection, fellowship — all centered around the practice of humility, loving-kindness, faith in Love, and seeing things as they really are) can help keep us within the bounds as we attempt to follow the path required for us to be meaningful-to-ourselves, the path of Love.
And so as individuals we seek to organize ourselves better and better around the Love that chooses everyone. And why not? We can — through more awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, compassion, and generosity of spirit — get better and better at translating our own feelings (which are wider, deeper, and vaguer than ideas) into ideas (which are wider, vaguer, and deeper than words) and words. Why couldn’t we — assuming It exists — use a similar procedure to get better and better at translating the Love that chooses everyone into feeling, thinking, and acting? Obviously, the translations can never be literal, direct, 1:1, or final; but must instead be an ongoing poetic work, requiring constant self-awareness, -analysis, -critique, and -adjustment.
Anyway, worth a shot.
And more than that: We all do this already to some degree. To some degree we all know that, if we are to be meaningful to ourselves, we need to discover and meaningfully relate to a Reality that is a True Love. And to some degree, we all feel ourselves working on that project, sometimes with more or less self-awareness, sometimes with more or less discipline, sometimes with more or less inspiration, sometimes with more or less interest, sometimes with more or less success. But still, we can never fully avoid the only game that means anything to any of us. Although, we can sometimes pervert the quest to a worrisome degree.
Anyway, so much for individual human psychologies. What about groups of humans? How can they relate meaningfully to each other?
Dear United States of America,
We have been writing political essays and poems for eight long lonely years.
And now we feel like failures.
We do not seem to have stopped the evil.
All we’ve managed to do is guarantee that if this Donald Trump and this GOP win this election and our government does slip enough towards tyranny that those who speak out against Donald Trump face financial, reputational, legal, and/or worse peril:
I say:
All we’ve managed to do is guarantee that we’ll be enemies of the people to the degree that Donald Trump’s false equivalency of “Donald Trump = The Country = The People” is forced into reality via the same old boring and cruel might-makes-right and leaders-define-reality logics that are always there, but that we have been lucky enough to keep out of power for a while now.
And time is up.
Anyway, please vote for Kamala Harris and then please work with her and the rest of the nation to improve the health of this wobbly democratic republic. Ours is a two-party system. One person will win this election, and selecting Donald Trump to lead the nation and dash around the world with the button that can destroy the world: That would be a mistake.
Now, let us review some of what we have in our own lonely desperation scratched into the forever-aether of the info-age.
In Trump and the Evil, we can review what we’ve written about Donald Trump, representative democracy, and political evil.
In Readings, we can review other peoples’ writings that we think particularly relevant to this moment.
What a big man
What a big man nation
So strong and cool and manly
Got the back of your Don
He’s just another thug do’in what he’s gotta do
Except that actually, that kind of mafia logic makes sense maybe a little in smaller communities where you can’t trust the police and so people band together against all outsiders, including the law.
But what you are doing is voting to hand the power of the government over to a man who has tried to steal that power already and who has in the interim managed to corrupt his own political party and has had time to find the ideas and people to help him successfully replace our wobbly but still functional democracy (a place where people who stand up for honesty, fair play, and competency in government might not always win the day, but at least they don’t routinely find themselves bankrupted, imprisoned, or worse by the government; just go spend a little time in Russia, if you think kleptocracies are cool, or if you imagine we’re already living in one) with a criminal organization that routinely abuses the power of government to fix elections, silence dissent, and oppress political opponents.
You go into a secret ballot box in a nation of three hundred million, daydreaming that you’ve got the back of the Big Man
I guess you’re now part of the Big Man club?
Maybe even he’ll have your back too?
But the Big Man has only his own back, and the backs of those friends, family members, and cronies who stay loyal, who stay on their knees, who keep slobbering on the ring of the man who would be king.
What you are doing is voting for a serial abuser, who thinks “true” and “false” are meaningless tools to get your way in the only thing that matters, which is winning wealth, power, and prestige, and using those spoils to spoil yourself most of all and then the people who rub your belly and make you purr, and then your loyal cronies.
Don’t you feel it? Don’t tell me you don’t know how it works. A man puts his hands on your shoulders. That’s step one. He leaves them there a little longer. That’s step two. He massages your neck and tells you how glad he is to see you. That’s step three. And on and on he goes, always a little further. Because this what an abuser knows: People can get used to anything. And getting used to something is almost identical with submitting to it.
Donald jokes that they’re gonna have to give him more terms to be president. Donald threatens political foes with legal woes, and in his first term in office there is an unprecedented pattern of him threatening legal repercussions for failing to submit to his will, and the US government actually proceeding against Donald’s “enemies of me = enemies of the people”. Donald lies in a manner and degree unprecedented in our politics, and he rails against the “fake news” that has the temerity to fact-check him. He says they will be punished. Out of office he suggests he’ll be a dictator just on day one, and he’ll fix things so his supporters never have to vote again, and he drops hint after hint and doesn’t backpedal them meaningfully when given the opportunity.
Not too much happened in his first term as far as successful retribution goes: the courts and system is still strong enough to thwart his attempts to use the government to crush dissent.
But from the point of view of an abuser, he’s doing quite well:
First, he added a lot of judges, at least some of which seem willing to bend legal logic in order to respect Donald’s prime logic of loyalty to Donald being equivalent to loyalty to the nation; second, he got us used to the idea of a post-reality politics, where the only “reality” is who has power and what they make everyone else accept; third, he got us all used to having his hands on our shoulders and massaging our necks and sliding down under our shirts. Yes: He did a good job of warming us up, of getting us used to his touch, his demands, his special privileges over us. Most people aren’t allowed to spend months trying to overturn a fairly lost election, but King Donald is special: Look, look how his GOP bows to him: That proves that he’s allowed to do anything to all of us because he’s got a posse willing to look the other way while he forces himself upon an entire nation; they have signaled to him and us that he can continue reaching down our shirts, putting his hand on our waist: A little more every day: Yes, his GOP will stand by and either dutifully look the other way, or — for followers of a certain disposition, and supposing the Big Man’s Okay with it — join in the fun.
What abusers know is that you just need to spend a little time every day getting people used to the idea that you’re in charge, that you have special rights and privileges over them, that it is futile to resist, futile to pretend that you can say No to whatever they decide you need to give them.
Donald Trump has the instincts of an abuser.
And he has been prepping us for more and more and more submission to his ego, his drives, his will, his everything.
Oh
but such a Big Man
Such a Big Man Nation
Yes you are!
All grown up, got your big boy pants on.
Yes you do:
It’s a man’s world, ain’t it?
And we’re not gonna let some dumb broad rule over us!
That would be pathetic.
To have a woman be the boss of us!
And look at her show off!
Thinks she knows about politics and government and shit.
And thinks that’s what makes a good leader.
What makes a good leader is being strong, and that’s something only men can do.
Because they don’t just have strong arms and legs and genitals, but also strong brains and hearts!
Yeah?
What about the strength required to put your country before yourself?
And the man currently falling apart into grievance-drunk rants on stages all across this great land:
He doesn’t even have the strength to pretend that he believes this country is about anyone except himself and those who swear loyalty to him.
The strength needed here and now is the ability to go beyond oneself enough to work within democratic norms, rules, and laws to serve the whole nation while protecting a system of government that keeps us all safe from tyranny — not the “strength” to ramble incoherently, scapegoat immigrants, and praise those who clap for you as you threaten to destroy any who oppose you.
Representative democracy assumes that the people will work together and share enough reality to serve as a final check on madness, corruption, and political evil in their shared government. That’s their job. This system of government is anchored in the voters. The voters act as a foundational branch of government. They don’t write the laws, they only choose their representatives, and so their task is to choose representatives who have demonstrated the willingness and ability to be faithful stewards of their government: Yes, we vote for politicians who we think will enact those policies that will be best for us and for the nation as a whole, but most fundamentally, we must make sure our representatives will be good stewards of our shared democracy — otherwise, we lose the joy of living in a nation where we can be both publicly virtuous (fight against dishonesty, corruption, meanness, and incompetency in government) and protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm (in a tyranny, you can only be publicly virtuous to the degree your virtue doesn’t contradict a top-down criminal organization that is interested first and foremost in maintaining and exploiting power over you and everyone else), and our specific policy desires become moot anyway (maybe today the Big Man’s team outlaws abortion; maybe tomorrow they decide to mandate it after your first child, or maybe even always for certain groups).
And all people already always share enough reality to work meaningfully together: We all know that none of our worldviews make any sense to any of us except to the degree we feel, think, and act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully-together; and we all know that we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we live in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone. So we all already know we are in this together. Donald loves the lie that half the nation is at war with the other half. But the truth is, this is one nation, and deep inside we all know we agree enough on the essentials to share enough Reality and enough reality to work together as a final check on madness, corruption, dishonesty, cruelty, and bad-faith in government; even as we work together to gently nudge our shared nation and our shared conversation towards the better and away from the worse.
What if instead of asking ourselves what xyz politicians had done for us, we asked ourselves what have we done to create the conditions that will select for and enable politicians who can help the whole nation go forward together? Part of the beauty of a democratic form of government is that it has built into it an incentive for us to all work together to find what’s best for everyone — here again we see a healthy representative democracy pragmatically working with those universal spiritual values without which none of our values mean anything to any of us: We humans are all in this together; a nation divided against cannot stand; and if my success harms you, it also harms me.
What if instead of griping about how our politicians aren’t doing a good enough job, we take a good hard look at the playing field that we have helped to create? And what if we choose candidates based on who can work with us to create the nation we would like to see here and now? We could choose Donald Trump to help us get rid of our ability to meaningfully influence our own government; or we could choose Kamala Harris to help us figure out how to protect our government from overreaches like the one that Donald Trump is guilty of.
Anyway,
God belongs to no one.
Instead,
we all belong to God.
No nation and no individual owns God.
And God loves everyone infinitely, so it is silly to pretend that God chooses some more than others.
Maybe some are fated to be wiser and others more foolish.
But God still chooses everyone 100% and God is so much bigger than we are, that none of us, no matter how shitty, can escape God’s Love and God’s salvation.
So let’s stop pretending
that we or Donald or anyone has special rights and privileges over anyone else
It’s an evil lie
And he should take his hands out of our shirts, away from waists.
And the great thing about this wobbly but yet-functioning representative democracy, is we now have a chance to gently — without violence and/or ourselves committing crimes against our fellows — take his hands off our bodies.
Author: I don’t know
Editor: Tire of alone
Production: Bartleby and Amble
Copyright: Andrew M. Watson
I need you to understand this
The difference between crime as outside the system, and top-down crime
I need you to understand that Russia is a kleptocracy where the government procedurally oppresses and steals from the citizens, and that Donald Trump admires, emulates, and pursues that.
I need you to understand the difference between a system where you can stand up against lying, cheating, and stealing; and one where you cannot because the leadership itself is a criminal organization.
I need you to think this through now.
This election is about protecting the ability to stick up for honesty, competency, and decency at all levels of government.
This election matters.
You think thugs are cool.
You think the big Donald is just doing what he has to do like everyone else.
You are wrong.
What is cool is a system where a person can stand up and tell the truth and do the right thing and not have to worry about ending up in a body bag.
What is cool is what we already have.
If you don’t think so, go to Russia: Try it out.
See how cool it is.
It isn’t perfect here
but you can still stand up for what is right and win
And that is invaluable
And that is what this election is about
A man corrupts himself; then his party
What’s next if you give him power over the most powerful nation in the world?
At some point if you keep letting evil in, evil will take over
And then those who just want to tell the truth and do their job and do the right thing: They are the ones who are punished, who are crushed, who lose
Supporting such a circumstance is evil.
It is not complicated
What is the poem through which everyone sees this moment as it really is, from the soul out into the salient details?
What is the essay that makes us all together be honest and kind with this moment?
God is a firecracker
We are a glass jar
And the shattered glass
flies everywhere
The jar is no more
God is a scrub sponge
We are a glass jar
And all the spots disappear
We see through ourselves
Help us God to see things as they really are together
That we might together move and think and act wisely
Here and now
A song of joy
Divine Love fits into politics how?
What is the proper role of God’s Love in human organizations, in nation states even?
Editor’s Note: This poem we were finishing when we looked at each other and said, “This isn’t going to work. This will not help the nation to see and feel and react to things as they really are. And time is running out!” So we just stopped writing the poem right then and there in that spot. It’s not that we don’t think the poem’s any good. We’re not sure. We haven’t read it. It just seems like we need to try a different tack. The winds here: What are they are? What is the most helpful way to maneuver within the strange swirls?
Let us US play now the higher game
Let Love to hearts to minds speak clear and true
Let’s dance upon that holy honest plain
Both real and Real we share — Yes: me and you
When Vance excuses lies as painting true moods
And Trump proves lies with lies, let’s not be wooed
But seek instead eternal Love and simple facts:
Old fashioned, careful facts that seek not victory but wise gentle acts
Let us US choose now the higher calling
Do Haitians live off cute little housey cats?
Do immigrants poison our blood with all theirs?
Are newsmen who call out Trump’s lies dirty rats?
How many clues do you need, USA?
George Washington had the support to stay
He left to clearly say that that’s the only way
A government of the people can survive
The Donald that US tradition tried
Republicans in office then with him
Resisted and protected Biden’s win
The GOP now silences such voices
I fear a top-down crime from such choices
If rewarded with power. They seem dark forces.
How many clues until we remember
That governments are weapons too — can fortunes melt and flesh tremble — ?
But Kamala I don’t know what she stands for
But Kamala I don’t know what she’s good for
But Kamala what’s she ever done for me?
I think Kamala would be what we make of her
I think Kamala would be what we help her be
I think Trump will be what his foolish pride his wild urges his contempt for constraints on his power his disregard for the norms, standards, and laws of democracy his lie-based communication style his us-versus-them hellhole reality
Combined with an administration purged of those who refuse to sacrifice our representative government for the sake of narrow political gain
Would be
The difference is a group of people who subscribe to the notion that this is a democratic republic and the leaders serve temporarily and at the will of the people and for the entire nation
Versus
A group of people who aren’t so sure that any of that matters so much, and who are led by and are now eager followers of a man who thinks that winning is the whole point of life, winning no matter what you break, no matter who you hurt, no matter
The difference is leaders working to maintain a system of government that answers to the citizens
Versus
Leaders who’ve decided to side with truth-as-whats-expedient and might-makes-right and the-ends-justify-the-means
The difference is towards less or more political evil
The difference is clear
Kamala Harris would need our help to be elected and to govern well
Donald Trump would shove us out of the way to litigate and confuse his way into office and to use any means available to maintain and wild power, which he likes because it makes him feel important and it gives him the ability to shove those who talk back into the dirt and to give little treats and special words to good little dogs who sit and roll over and lay down and beg as the master directs
No one knows for sure
What A or B entails
But if you keep giving a man who has tried to undermine the peaceful democratic transfer of power and who did when in office work against democratic norms and standards and who has managed to sideline those in his party who would stand up to him and elevate those who would do whatever he asks of them:
I think if you keep handing power over to that kind of a team, you will find that you have less and less say in what your government does in your name with your resources in your lives and in the world
What do you want America?
Do you want to pretend you’re king of the world?
Or do you want to admit that you’re lucky to be alive
And you’ve been so lucky to be allowed to not fear your government
And Trump oggles Putin and Putin is not content to just silence dissent in his own borders but is actively hunting down ex patriots who step out of line
How long can it last this world with nukes everywhere?
How many picnics in the park with the sun and family fun are left?
I don’t know
But
I vote for admitting that we already share the values needed to share this government
I vote for admitting that carefully vetted news sources exist and they should be preferred
I vote for admitting that we don’t know all the details of God and soul and sin and virtue;
but we all know that none of our worldviews make any sense to any of us except to the degree we are aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing;
and we all know that none of our worldviews make any sense to any of us except to the degree they help us to translate spiritual Love into feeling thinking speaking acting living.
I vote for agreeing to work together to preserve an strengthen those norms, standards, rules, and laws that keep our government beholden to and serving the citizens of the nation, rather than beholden to and serving those who use the power of government to maintain power.
Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson
Stop Trump
Heal democracy
Save the country
A plan a system a spirit
How?
How evil is Donald Trump?
How evil is it to support him?
No, not like that: Donald’s trajectory is towards political evil, so he should not be given power
That is all
Helping Donald Trump get power here and now is what type and degree of evil?
I don’t know
I am so confused
Why would anyone do anything but take this giant weapon away from this reckless selfish fool?
Wake up and smell the coffee
Smells like somebody burnt the coffee
And then put the grounds in a blender
with some shit and some vomit and some piss
And used the “pulse” button
to get all creamy homogenous
And then poured it on everybody’s breakfast cereal
But the kicker is the logic:
“We ran out of milk.
I didn’t have time to go to the store.
I blame you, since it’s just us here, and I’m not perfect but I get up every day and do my level best.”
Wake up and smell the coffee
Smells like somebody forgot to add the water
And so the pot burned
Smells like an explosion of glass
tearing apart the family
leaving blood and guts all over the linoleum floor
And then forgetting about it for a few days
as the bodies decompose in the mild fall weather
and the flies can’t contain their jumping joy
and the cats overcome their five minutes of squeamishness
And everyone digs in for days on end
And the cats are now eating rotten flesh
And their little pukes add a note of acridity to the general putridness
But the kicker is the logic:
“We ran out of milk.
So I didn’t want to use any liquids.
I blame you, since it’s just us here, and I’m not perfect, but I get up every day and I do my level best.”
Pacing cobbles ‘fore a wooden gate
Facing left then right; pacing late
’til he spies a churning cloud of noisy dust
Filling road and meadow like a swarm of crazed locusts
A moonlit night, his lantern bright: An easy catch!
A danger espied in time’s no threat, he must merely fetch
his fellows, rouse the town to lower their defenses
and
hole up a careful minute ’til this violent madness passes
He runs he shouts he points he says look how ominous
Shutters clatter open. “Oh, yeah! Wow! That is obvious!
If we let that in, we may never again choose who comes and goes
Certainty’s a thing for memoirs, but we’ve got enough to know
what must be worked and won
before the rise of the sun.”
And so they spilled out onto the street but someone said
Now, wait, that watchman’s from the other side. Let’s go back to bed!
The throng jostled forward and back until the people got sleepy
and some made learned speeches about how the watchman’s real creepy
They set the meeting time for sun-up and promised an honest debate
Morning came and the orators were ready guide the many, to shift their weight
“I tell you what! They say that a cloud of crime is coming near.
But we all know that that’s not something that can happen here.
I mean, the colors of that beautiful swirling orb are ours —
of course that watchman’s faction would invent this spurious charge!”
They debated as the cloud grew darker larger louder more lethal
But soon Faction A declared Faction B to be the only real evil
And those with no time for politics shrugged their shoulders and said
“Well, he said, she said, in the end, everyone puts truth on its head.
So who can say? Anyway, they’re right about one thing: this doesn’t happen here.”
Faction B trembled. They panicked. They grew desperate to share the fear
that they were certain was sensible to feel.
But there weren’t enough of them to turn the wheels
that release the latch to drop the gate
before the storm enters and it’s anyway too late.
Whose fault?
The ones who lied?
The ones who preferred elaborate lies to the plain truth?
The ones who panicked and couldn’t make their case clear enough?
The ones who “knew” that everyone was lying anyway?
I don’t know.
Maybe they’ll get lucky.
Maybe the storm will die down.
Maybe it’s a mirage.
Maybe it can’t do too much damage anyway.
Maybe.
But
The citizens had one duty
To pay a little attention
To be a little honest with themselves and others
To close the gate when an obvious danger threatened all of them
But I think Faction A is trying to close the gate mostly
on the days when people from Faction B might want to come home
And otherwise, any talk of shutting the gate is clearly just
people from Faction B trying to cheat
Author: BW/AW
Editor: AW/BW
Copyright: AMW