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?