Our Dilapidated Union
How strong is our democracy really?
The United States of America is a failed democracy.
Mon Dieu!!
That’s right. I said it. And we’re all living it.
(Just a quick note that, by “democracy”, I’m speaking of our national political system. The vagaries of state and local politics is too brambly a thicket for me to weed wack.)
To make my point, I’m going to rely on the definition of a “strong democracy” put forth by The Center for High Impact Philanthropy out of University of Pennsylvania. I’m doing this for two reasons.
1. It was way up there in my Google search query and…
2. It struck me (on rudimentary perusal) as solid and comprehensive.
Quick Caveats
[Side note #1: Google is shit these days. If you’ve found a better search engine (besides DuckDuckGo which I use) please let me know in the comments and thank you.]
[Side note #2: I need to acknowledge that I am the living embodiment of dilettantism which is to say I take big bites but don’t hardly chew. My method is that I have intuitions and big feelings and I do just enough research to justify myself. I do this for two reasons (I like counting):
1. I have neither the time nor the attention span to give my subject matter the deep dives required of professional thinkers. I’m a dabbler, a toe-dipper, a Dunning-Kruger fan boy. Big swings; many misses. Beware.
2. My interests are myriad and this newsletter is a space for me to splash about in the puddles just deep enough to sate my curiosity. I try to leave breadcrumbs (in the form of links and attributions) so that any of you can go do your own curiosity splashing. That’s the real goal of this venture - to share ideas that I find moving, interesting, or helpful so that you can partake and spread them, if you so wish.
Back To The Subject At Hand
A strong democracy requires:
“Empowered Citizens
The people are the principal actors in a democracy. Citizens are empowered when their rights are protected, they are informed, and fellow citizens and policymakers proactively engage them in the democratic process.
Fair Processes
As the mechanics of democracy, fair processes respect the principle of “one person, one vote” and hold policy-making institutions accountable through checks and balances.
Responsive Policy
As an output of democracy, responsive policy weighs all citizens’ interests and values equally, provides for the common good, and establishes institutions that empower individuals to protect their rights.
Information & Communication
These elements mediate the relationship between citizens, processes, and policy. Information and communication that are representative, accurate, and trusted ensure fair processes and enable citizens to hold policymakers accountable.
Social Cohesion
A shared sense of purpose and identity is implicit in the enduring phrase “we the people.” A democratic society’s members recognize each other’s right to a voice in the political process and are willing to collaborate for common ends.”
Let’s Take A Gander, Shall We?
The above seems clear and straightforward and is basically a 7th grade civics lesson. I’m on board. But let’s go one by one and see if our nation’s democracy stands up to scrutiny or crumbles under its own hubris and rot (you know where this is going!).
– Empowered Citizens
“The people are the principal actors in a democracy. Citizens are empowered when their rights are protected, they are informed, and fellow citizens and policymakers proactively engage them in the democratic process.”
Do any of us believe this to be true anymore? I mean our very system – with its Electoral College – disenfranchises the common voter from electing our Chief Executive. But when it really comes to “principal actors,” we have to look at lobbyists. Lobbyists are very clearly the policy drivers in our national politics. Politicians are, like most of us, mostly dilettantes when it comes to the complexities of how enacted laws impact our shared reality. Lobbyists are self-interested experts and politicians rely on them to explain, and often write, the laws they pass. Secondly, lobbyists primarily represent moneyed interests. The banking and pharmaceutical lobbies have a lot more scrilla, and thus a lot more sway, than Mothers Against Drunk Driving or a public education lobby. Consider, The American Council on Education spent $219,987 so far in 2024 while Pfizer Inc. alone has spent $7,150,000, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks lobbyists. That may be an apples to oranges comparison, but it surely means our politicians are gonna pay a lot more attention to the oranges than to the apples.
At the end of the day, we elect representatives to enact policies that support our interests. So while I do believe citizens are the principal actors when it comes to choosing which butt goes in which congressional seat, we the people are certainly not principal actors when it comes to the policies those congress people enact. The moneyed interests have us beat on that front.
– Fair Processes
“As the mechanics of democracy, fair processes respect the principle of “one person, one vote” and hold policy-making institutions accountable through checks and balances.”
As a general principle, our “one person, one vote” is intact. The issue is that certain persons have power beyond a single vote. The moment our Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case in favor of moneyed interests, the very notion of “one person, one vote” was caput. As Justice John Paul Stevens said at the time, “[The court's ruling represents] a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government." And what’s the outcome? Well it would appear that Elon Musk (an immigrant) is the Wormtongue running the incoming administration and we have him to largely thank for the potential government shut down during the holiday season.
[Sidenote #3 - My impulse is to write a long screed about America’s courts and the rock quarry of evidence that people with money have access to a different justice system than people without money. There’s literally nothing fair about our courts, outside of small claims. But I don’t have the time nor the fortitude and you don’t have the stomach for it. For those interested though, just read up on the tip of the iceberg over at The Innocence Project and note that every innocent person on death row is poor.]
– Responsive Policy
“As an output of democracy, responsive policy weighs all citizens’ interests and values equally, provides for the common good, and establishes institutions that empower individuals to protect their rights.”
Hahahahahaha. The Citizens United case alone proves that our system is not interested in weighing citizen interest equally. As does our energy policy, our education policy, our healthcare policy, and our justice policy. Everywhere one looks, money influences policy more than public outcry.
Consider the Keystone pipeline. Since its conception in 2008, environmentalists, local Native American tribes people, and local landowners have fought against the project going forward. I have family members who spent time in jail for protesting this project. Finally, in 2021, President Biden rescinded a permit for the project. And yet, despite over a decade of outcry from the people who would be most directly impacted by the pipeline, and the fact that the project owner has literally pulled steel out of the ground, incoming President Trump has plans to greenlight the project once again, piping 830,000 barrels per day of Alberta oil sands crude to Nebraska. Again, moneyed interests are carrying the day.
– Information & Communication
“These elements mediate the relationship between citizens, processes, and policy. Information and communication that are representative, accurate, and trusted ensure fair processes and enable citizens to hold policymakers accountable.”
I don’t even know where to begin with this one. I mean all of these subjects are worth multiple book length explanations and analysis, but this one in particular strikes me as the fundamental problem. Since Reagan’s defenestration of the Fairness Doctrine, our media world has become a sodden sump of rot, muck, sludge, and excrement. The rise of the internet and social media has exacerbated the situation.
And guess what you AI apologists? AI is going to hypercharge mis- and disinformation in a way that we can’t even grasp. Imagine every internet troll having access to tech that can produce deep fake videos as fast as a twitter comment! It’s gonna get rough and it’s already a nightmare. And, as social trust in information further erodes, the ground is laid for even more lies. We’re talking exponential sewage here – and all of it in the name of profit. Clicks and eyeballs are the engines of our demise. Fuck me, we’re so so fucked here folks. And we don’t seem to have a population that’s paying enough attention to even know that they’re uninformed. Dunning-Kruger will be the death of us.
– Social Cohesion
“A shared sense of purpose and identity is implicit in the enduring phrase “we the people.” A democratic society’s members recognize each other’s right to a voice in the political process and are willing to collaborate for common ends.”
Did you hear that you Demon-rats, you commie libtard feminazis? Get on board with God, Guns, and Family or get the fuck out. Love it or leave it, you miscegenating cross-dressing cucks.
Watch who you’re blaming for your problems, you hillbilly racist illiterate nutjob. Crawl back to your backwater backwoods trailer trash meth-riddled shithole and continue fucking your sister, you confederate cosplay cracker.
Yeah. Not scoring a lot of points on the Social Cohesion scale. I have a whole side of my family who are conservative christians. They’re lovely people. And while we used to simply avoid talking about politics, we now don’t really talk. Certainly the younger generation appears utterly uninterested in engaging their more liberal elders. They might say the same about us. I don’t know. I don’t talk to them anymore.
This division is due in large to cultural segregation as cities attract the more liberal minded and the outer burbs and beyond attract the more conservative minded. And thus the bubbles grow. But it’s also due to the fact that outrage brings all the boys to the yard and they’re like much better than yours. Zuckerberg and Murdoch and David Remnick and whichever College President you choose prefer us divided as it increases their influence, power, and bank accounts within their bubbles.
Bleakism
Woof. That got dark.
Here’s the thing though. In my view, the average American voter has been questioning our system since around 2008. When the economy crashed and the banks were bailed out and regular people were not bailed out, Americans got pissed. We had the Occupy Wall Street movement, the rise of right wing militias, the George Floyd demonstrations, the Me Too movement, the first election of Trump, the election of Biden as a renouncement of the election of Trump, the anti-science/pandemic movement, the suspicions about voting integrity, and the second election of Trump as a renouncement of the election of Biden.
[Sidenote #4: I don’t think people like Trump. I mean magaheads do. But they’re like 20-30% of the total population. Most people just don’t like how things are going. They didn’t like it under Obama or under Trump or under Biden. The only mandate is to fix the root issues…and yet the powerful who benefit from the status quo won’t let our political leaders do what they’re elected to do.]
You can disagree with the reasoning behind some of those movements or fully support them, but the key is that all of them share a distrust in how power is wielded in our society. All of them are seeking a change that empowers the average citizen in relation to the state and corporate oligarchs.
Basically, Americans know our democracy isn’t working very well. And we elected Trump again in the hopes that he would right the ship. But so far, our incoming POTUS has been enjoying the fawning attention of our oligarchy; from Bezos to Cook to Altman to Zuckerberg to Musk the big tech leaders are buddying up to Trump. “The first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
And that doesn’t bode well for him. Because the American public wants Trump to be its defender, and instead he seems to be supporting the existing oligarchy – the very oligarchy that America openly distrusts and has distrusted for almost 20 years. If he refuses to enact actual populist policies and instead solely punches down against the American people, he will lose support.
At the end of the day, I believe Americans are mostly apolitical. They deeply believe in the pursuit of happiness which mostly means financial security. Policies that make financial security more difficult to achieve will be met with anger. Just look at the outpouring of support for Luigi Mangione. Americans don’t really support cold blooded murder, but they recognize that CEOs who make money on denying people healthcare are culpable for the misery they sow. And getting a small taste of payback excites them.
Eventually, America will be forced to accept that its people want a socialist democracy (the best path yet discovered to ensure financial security for the most people). Whether the titans of industry and the super wealthy will allow that or not is another question entirely. But if they continue to resist it, as they are doing right now, it’s gonna get real ugly.
Internets of the Day
– Quotes of the Week:
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.” – Mark Twain
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good
– Went to the Mechanic This Week: Took my 20 year-old car to the shop because the oil pressure light was intermittently coming on. Turns out I only needed to replace the sensor and it cost a mere $200 for parts and labor. What a win!
The Bad:
– Went to the Mechanic This Week: That said, the engine appears to be leaking oil from every nook and cranny, so many nooks and crannies, in fact, that the mechanic was afraid to start looking too closely. “Just keep adding oil,” he said, because…
The Ugly:
– Went to the Mechanic This Week: Actually fixing the leaks would basically involve pulling the engine and replacing a host of gaskets and O-rings and would likely cost upwards of $3k. Moral of the story: Sometimes the world is good, bad, and ugly all at once.
Finally:
