Revolution Now?
Fighting for Democracy is our patriotic duty
We may have differences, some may be smarter and some less so, by degree. But as Hobbes put it in Leviathan, “every man is contented with his share”. Nobody is going to say, “you are really smart, so I’m going to change my opinion and think what you think.” Our ability to change the minds of others is severely limited. What makes it worse is that it is incredibly difficult to accept that others don’t even share the same reality. The same set of facts can be interpreted in vastly divergent ways. When I think “if only I could educate them. If only I could explain it a little better then they would agree and I could change their mind.” That is when I fail to understand that we are not even in the same reality. The propaganda of the last twenty five years changed their mental landscape. In their world government is the problem. Welfare queens are taking the money out of the pockets of the middle class to live high off the hog on taxpayer giveaways, immigrants are responsible for the drugs and criminality plaguing the country, and DEI, gays, jews, transgender and people of color are ruining the fabric of society. If they would just shut up, and women would return to traditional roles, everything would be great again.
It’s not easy to see how this works. In our minds the facts are clear. But they are only facts because we interpret the data we receive in a certain way, and we can’t fathom that another set of sensory organs is going to perceive the data differently and create an entirely different narrative to explain it. We want to think that we are somehow more fact based and scientific in our analysis. That we know how things really are. But this is not science. The data is not all quantified and exempt from opinion.
Political thought is by it’s nature abstract. It is notions of how one ought to live, and how institutions can be created to rationalize communal life. These things are produced from bits of cultural history and mythology. It’s Washington chopping down the cherry tree and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. It’s Kennedy’s “ask not” and MLK’s “I have a dream”. It’s Reagans, “Government is the problem” and Bush’s “They hate our freedom” and all of the dross spewed by the Rush Limbaughs, and Tucker Carlsons, and Rachel Maddows, and all of the others that have millions of ears to listen to the narrative that they concoct. There is no question that new technologies have made the tools of propaganda much more efficient and dangerous. It should not be a surprise to anybody that our enemies have used the new technology to divide the country and sow malicious disinformation throughout society. This has been standard operating procedure since after the second world war and is practiced by every major power, including (and especially) by the United States of America (You can read Philip Agee’s “Inside the Company” here https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-DAzR701tP2dL_DNu/inside-the-company-cia-diary-philip-agee_djvu.txt.)
The Mueller report (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5955118-The-Mueller-Report/) and the 5 volume Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 election (summary https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find) laid bare for the American public how the Russian government worked to subvert our elections. The Russians have been working for more than seventy-five years to sow discord and division in the world in order to undermine democracy. In the 1970’s I experienced this directly while traveling in the then USSR, where I was told that we were still enslaving the blacks in America, as if we were all southern bigots and that was the predominant American attitude. As a liberal American I rejected this notion entirely, but the kernel of truth that it contained would be enough to connect with some subset of Americans. There was certainly an enormous, and justifiable, grievance in the population of people of color, and the racists would be motivated in the opposite direction. Race is still a useful issue for sowing discord, as is anti-semitism, and xenophobic reactions to immigrants.
From Nixons “southern strategy” onwards, the political sphere has increasingly been overtaken by the cultural sphere in choosing our political leaders. The cultural issues are shaped by the narrative we listen to far more than any quantifiable data that we see. The right wing has steadily increased their influence over what people think in the cultural sphere by funding print, radio, television, and digital media to spread its views and divide the country. The right wing narrative is full of the echoes of the fascist propaganda that preceded the Nazi’s rise to power. “We are the greatest country in history and we have lost our way.”, “It is the fault of the others”, “They are the enemy”, “only by returning to what made us great can we defeat them.” If you are living in the heartland of America and you perceive the world to be in decline, and you are searching for the reasons why this happened. This is a plausible narrative that resonates with the American mythology of how our greatness was a product of men imbued with the pioneering spirit and a lot of hard work; and if you also suspect that women, and people of color, and immigrants are not as smart and capable as white men, then you are more than likely to accept this reality as your own. Especially if you are surrounded by others that have also accepted this.
Overlaying all of this political argument is an economic reality. Our government has played a huge role in the economic life of the country since before the second world war. Infrastructure, research, and education has been the backbone of the system that built the American dream. The security and relative wealth of the large middle class created the space for the advancements in civil rights and protections of human and environmental rights that have shaped the history of the last sixty years and have been the signposts of progress for some of us. There has always been a competing narrative. That the constitution is only about protecting our property rights and about limiting the governments ability to interfere with our liberty. In this view every new government tax, regulation, and law is a restriction on god given liberty. These are all plots by greedy politicians and lazy minorities to get something for nothing. In this view taxation milks the energetic and successful for the benefit of the lazy and undeserving. What’s more, it is against the divinely ordained order of things, and when individual liberty is maximized everybody does better. They acknowledge that some will fall by the wayside, but hold this to be inevitable and argue that fewer will suffer by this mode of government than would under any other form. In this view it is simply realistic to accept that there are winners and losers.
When this side wins out, inevitably, inequality creeps in until it is clear that the system is not fairly benefiting everybody. It is massively benefiting a few at a great cost to the many. When the situation devolves past a tolerable point the system becomes unstable and susceptible to the populist message of a demagogue on the right, or a revolutionary on the left.
The one plain fact that everybody agrees on is that the system is broken. Corporate and monied interests have controlled our politics and our elections since at least the 1980’s. Year after year they have delivered the same corporate controlled stooges to the political stage. Everybody knew it was a broken system for decades, but few understood where things were headed. Most believed that reform was only an election or two away. But each election made the situation worse. The next election, if it comes, is not going to save us. Neither are any of the other democratic safeguards. Congress is filled with the cowardly and corrupt and the few courageous voices are not enough to win the war. The courts are slow, unreliable, and lack robust enforcement tools to win the day. Our military is traditionally apolitical. But this could change, and not necessarily for the better.. None of us has ever been in this position and it is hard to imagine what must be done, and yet, the answer is contained in all of what I’ve just said. We must rely on ourselves. We the people are our only hope. Our government has turned against us, not the other way around, and now we must rise up and retake the government and remake it as we believe it was intended to be. We must utilize our constitutional rights to free speech and to assemble, and we must take to the streets until we force the change we want to see. The current administration must be impeached or forced to resign by peaceful civil disobedience that overwhelms the government’s ability to suppress or ignore. This is the people power that has worked in other countries around the world that have faced similar crisis. In Ukraine, when the President of the country, Yanukovych, did a turn from the West towards Russia and Putin, large scale protests began. Four months later, after the demonstrations turned violent, Yanukovych resigned and fled to Russia. It is hard to imagine any better example of the appropriate and necessary response to the situation we are in. We have already had a level of illegality and scandal far surpassing what others would endure. The time to get into the streets will come. It may be the marches called for in the next week, or it may be the next crisis, I don’t know when it will happen, but I know what it will take. It will take all of us.
In the longer run we will have to carefully examine some of our fundamental democratic ideals that make us vulnerable to those with ill will towards us. Our freedom of speech cannot be so absolute that we have no defense against those who would use propaganda and lies to destroy us. Our technology cannot be completely devoid of safeguards from malicious misuse. It will not be at all easy to find the means to correct these ills. The way is fraught with peril. Limitations on speech beg the question, “who will say what the limits are?”, and can this then be weaponized by political factions against their opponents when they come to power.
It’s good to remember that our constitution was not written by a single stroke of the pen. The ideas that informed it came from a long tradition of political debate. It would probably seem strange to the framers of our constitution that the debate has not continued over the last few hundred years. The rise of communism and fascism have been the only challenge to democracy and they have not been defeated by wars of words and ideas. Communism has not lost, even if the Russian version failed, and fascism was defeated in the second world war only to rear its ugly head again in recent times. In the scheme of human history the story is not over. We are still fighting for democracy every day and we must never become complacent. It’s time to rework the armor that is the American constitution and strengthen democracy to withstand the weapons wrought in the industrial and cyber revolutions. We are not a country of landed gentry whose wealth derives from the labor of slaves or our own small industries. We are dominated by corporate wealth and power that is able to harness the safeguards of property written into the constitution to seize power and direct the laws to their benefit. The people have become “human capital” to be owned and manipulated. We are valued only as consumers and given entertainment, celebrity, and sport, to distract us from our servitude.
Our society has become devoid of any value other than profit and greed. It is hard to believe that this is what the majority of us want the world to be. We will need to start new conversations about ownership of technology. The lesson to be learned is that since the industrial revolution human society has been manifestly changed by technologies that are privately held and beyond our control. Regulation has had some effect from time to time, but has failed to protect society from the existential threats that technology poses. The new constitution must recognize that society has an interest in the control of technology for the benefit of mankind and to assure that it does not pose a significant threat. It must contain safeguards for other values. We need to protect the environment from harm. We must guarantee that all citizens have safeguards from homelessness, hunger, and ill health. These things will not guarantee that democracy prevails, but they are the measures that can be taken to prevent the rise of antidemocratic forces due to grievances which are the result of greed and corruption wrought by unrestrained capitalism.
In the fight against Communism that raged after the second world war the idea of “class” in society was expunged from the vocabulary of the United States, except to speak of the rise of the middle class. It is time to recognize that we have been on the losing side of class warfare that has been waged by the 1%, the corporate class, the military industrial complex, the financial interests, or what ever else you like to label it since the 1950’s. The 1980’s began to see the tide turn in their favor, and this past election brought them total victory. However, democracy is not a country, nor is it a territory that can be taken. It is an idea, and it is not lost so long as we are willing to keep fighting for it. The way forward is not simple and our victory is not assured, but we are being called on now to show that Americans have the courage to defend the ideals of democracy that so many around the world have died for. We must get off of our entitled, complacent asses and become the light that the world has looked to for guidance. Our founding fathers, and our brothers, and sisters throughout history, gave up their safety and comfort to oppose oppression and the rule of those who did not represent their interests. Now it is our turn to do no less.