The Era of Democracy Has Closed.
Democracy is the luxury of elites who have plenty to share between them, who feel they are safe to share their power. Then, who is “elite” in this “democracy” can be defined (grudgingly) to include non-property owners, non-men, non-whites, non-cis-gender, the non-wealthy, even non-nationals! Who is elite, and for whom democracy operates, can be defined to be an entire nation, as long as the actual elites feel ok with sharing. But then when sharing seems to interfere with holding onto power, so also do the customs and expectations of “democracy” seem unnecessary. All they need is a little army to scare the bejeesus out of the rest of us.
Fortunately for the elites (a selection of those with power, money, and lacking humanity), as the Non-s proliferate and demand shares of the fruits of a democratic society, some regular folks freak out. As they see their vaunted freedoms, their nest-eggs, and their privilege, having been premised on the captivity and social slavery of some of these Non-s, drains away from their own debt slavery and low wages, they get less willing to share. They see all these OTHERS, all these Non-s, gathering around, and they see Non-s not accepting their captivity under the knee of the police, they see the water rising around them, in many cases very literally, while their bosses and their role models escape in their yachts, sometimes literally, and they see the value of their wages going down, and their health care getting too expensive to use, they see their homes going on sale, and they feel ground down by the need to keep multiple jobs to pay their bills, and they’re not better off than their parents, and they’re feeling super-stressed, and when they don’t understand why they are feeling all these things, when they look for a reason for this stress, the words of a demagogue are soothing.
Don’t practice humility, don’t be vulnerable, don’t ready yourself to take responsibility for the crimes of your kith and kin, don’t ask “What can I do better?” Blame everyone else. Blame the OTHER. Blame the Non-s. Blame for your embedded guilt for the acts of genocide and slavery of your ancestors, blame for your embedded guilt for having what you need, everyone else. But don’t blame the elites. Don’t blame them with the bullhorn. Don’t blame them with the checkbooks. Don’t blame them who can do something about it. They have what you want. And why would that include democracy for everyone else?
And while some people freak out because the Non-s are coming for their share, the Non-s might have some pent up rage, and hate at them who hold them away from full humanity, freedom and access to the privileges of America’s promise. So there might be some tension in the air. And danger of riots.
And if we get Donald Trump for another term, it may be a very long term, it may be the terminal term, not just because he has so cleverly crafted his rhetoric and used his powers of manipulation, but because his actual constituents, his favorite people, tell him, “Naw, we don’t really want to share anymore. We’re done with this farce.”
I think they think they won the argument. How is it that “democratically” controlled town boards cannot set building standards for the residents of their towns, so that when fires rip through, those houses will not be destroyed? I think that they’re happy with a democracy that will kill itself on the altar of personal freedom and prefer to die in an inferno. If a scientific fact cannot be accepted by the democratically elected Congress, and that Congress cannot write legislation to fight global warming, and the government can’t govern and can’t promote the domestic tranquility, and allows the government to rule without regard for the Constitution, by Jesus, the job of democracy has been done!
Because who needs democracy, when you’re only ever asking “Where’s mine?”. All you really need is to be in the army of the elite. Now how do we get rid of these pesky “democratic” customs?
So Americans have fought for the rights of democracy, they have grown to think that democracy is a real thing, an American custom, something indelible, something indestructible. But as more folks reach for it, it becomes more and more of a nuisance for the oligarchs. They like their privilege and the idea of privilege doesn’t sound bad to them, and they know that the real effect of the machinery of democracy is to limit privilege (democracy is contrary to the rights of property, because the electorate can vote them away, says the Cato institute, so we’re better off without it), so the time has come to demolish democracy. They’re tired of sharing power with Non-s and even their army, and they’ve convinced their army of disillusioned its only because of the Non-s that their lives are at risk. Never mind the Oligarchs have been systematically squeezing the workers since the founding of the republic. Never mind the real progress for the American worker and the American middle class was made by unions at the expense of the oligarchs. The Oligarchs know they have won the war of rhetoric. Now all that remains is to disassemble the machinery of democracy.
How do we preserve the remnants of Constitutional democracy we have? how do we claim the democracy we want? We don’t do the things we have always done. We don’t just go the voting booth and vote for the lesser of two evils. (We must do that first). We must redefine what democracy means. We must do things the Oligarchs won’t like, won’t allow, and will use their power of the bullhorn to drown out.
We must march and strike, occupy the streets, and shut down the economy. We must end the monopoly of the media held by rich elites who use it to appeal to our brothers and sisters in the heartland, who use it to denounce our hopes for justice and a truer democracy, who use it to appeal to fear, and divide us. We must march and strike for solidarity of the people against the Oligarchs.
We must make sharing an explicit requirement of OUR democracy. We must write into law policies that damages extreme wealth, that eliminates poverty, that push everyone, each and every Oligarch and every bit of white trash and every lost soul and every Non toward the center of the American wealth spectrum. We must guarantee that every person can find a way to get what they need, and never be in fear of want. We must decide that hoarding political power, wealth, food, opportunity, and ecological services, is no longer morally acceptable. We must reinvest in the communities of the oppressed, so they can raise themselves up. We must guarantee radical equality.
For one of the first steps in this march toward the New Democracy, the rich can give their money to brain trusts for the New Democracy, can spend all of their money building new housing, new schools, and Green Economy infrastructure. The rich can use their privileges to demand that the privileges rigged into the system, be disassembled, so that everyone can be paid for the work they do what they earn when they do it. The rich can demand that their taxes be raised until their money dwindles to the wealth of a middle class family, so that middle income people feel their burdens are shared by those with much more. So we can all have health care, all can have affordable housing, all parents can have the child care and education for their children that a only a well paid professional class of caregivers can produce.
We must in fact begin to rebuild the role of America and the World, and declare that thenceforth, the wealth of America is the wealth of the world, and that democracy is the promise of humanity and of life on Earth, not just of America. We must declare that in the democratic world order, the creatures matter, and the protection of habitat is the justice that extends to even the voiceless.
We can begin this march by committing ourselves to the maxim “I can only be safe myself if I am safe for you.” And then to march the slogan, we must stop hating on each other. This lesson from the prophet Jesus redounds brilliantly to this moment. We must listen to those who oppose us, we must listen to those who have served the Oligarchs, and we must embrace them as members of the clan of common prosperity and common sacrifice. We must respect the rights of everyone to disagree, and if someone still hates, we may simply put boundaries around the hurt they can do. We must remember we are all capable of fascism, and to keep the brilliant eye of compassion awake.
We must give up on our own personal importance. We must re-imagine our own personal value as the value we derive from the happiness and survival of everyone we know — including those we hated on. Please stop hating. Time is running out. When you are staring into your own death, do not your priorities get reset? When you are staring into the death of your planet and all that you love, could it be time to reset how we, as humans, do things?
In fact, every other path leads to global flood and global inferno, leads to the planet purging us, and all of life as we know it, in a great raging fever. Maybe now is the time to try something new. Maybe the era of democracy has closed. Maybe the era of the New Democracy has opened.
It’s merely up to us.
