Digest 14
Reflections on the Elections.
Plato in his Republic has Socrates comment on the demise of Greek democracy: “The fatal flaw in democracy is the incorrect assumption that all citizens are equally capable of self-government.”
Stipulated. 7O million votes for an incompetent, mentally ill, bombastic, lying, wanna-be dictator and if you need more evidence than this, you are reading the wrong blog. Our country is overrun with citizens who are manifestly incapable of self-government, at least for now, while events have created a pandemic of fear that is not all that different from the Corona virus. Fear tightens the mental sphincter, permitting almost nothing to enter or leave, except that which panders to the fear itself.
Socrates went on to state that oligarchs take advantage of the above situation by hiring sophists who use their rhetorical skills to convince those “incapable” citizens to vote against their own best interests. And if that doesn’t sound familiar, I respectfully suggest that you take a look at issue #5 of this Digest, on advertising. It would be hard to find a better example than the results of the voting on Initiatives in this last election, when several perfectly reasonable proposals were defeated, largely as a result of the millions spent to hire our modern version of sophists to create misleading and false ads. $220 million spent on Prop 22 alone, to preserve the immoral profits of “gig” companies, overturning the will of our representatives.
The most disheartening aspect of this Election is the fact that even if Trump fails in his pathetic attempts to overturn his opponent’s win, those 70 million who voted for him will still be around; and if the runoff elections in Georgia fail, we will still have Moscow Mitch and the turgid Republican Senate standing athwart any hope of progress. BTW, is it just me or does anyone else look at McConnell and think he would be perfectly cast in a B-grade horror movie as one of the walking dead? Just a vagrant thought….
To be fair, many of the Trump voters do have legitimate grievances: they have been left behind by our Plutocratic government (the economic sponsors of both major parties). There was a time when they had the support of the Democratic Party, but that is no longer true. When Hillary called them “a basket of deplorables” she was simply expressing the beliefs of most of the economic (coastal) elites who now dominate the Party.
A little history: in the 1968 Presidential Elections, George Wallace ran a campaign supporting law and order and states’ rights to enforce racial segregation. This strongly appealed to rural white Southerners and blue-collar union workers in the North, constituencies that had traditionally belonged to the Democrats. Wallace carried five states. This so angered and appalled the elite in the Democratic Party that they began to systematically abandon these voters.
By 1992, when Bill Clinton ran with the support of the new Democratic Leadership Council, the Party began to welcome many of those who had been known as Rockefeller Republicans (aka “moderates”), who were being ejected by the growing Conservative (Reactionary) majority in the Republican Party, which was enthusiastically embracing a new “Southern Strategy” to attract the former Democratic voters.
The ubiquitous electoral maps now being shown repeatedly on TV tell the story in red and blue: a starkly divided country. Hard to see any chance of uniting it again, at least for the foreseeable future.
Sociopath: “a person. as a psychopath, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.” Random House Webster’s College Dictionary.
Does that remind you of anyone? Start at the top, continue through most of the elected Republicans in Washington and around the country, all the way down to all those who refuse to inconvenience themselves by observing the recommendations of Public Health officials to prevent the spread of the Corona Virus. Selfish, to be sure, but also manifestly antisocial. They just don’t care (as the First Lady advertised on the back of her jacket as she boarded a plane that would take her to observe the jailed children at the Mexican border).
On a recent broadcast, Christiana Amanpour interviewed a man from Vice News (I can’t remember his name), asking him why he thought America’s rate of infection from the virus was so much higher than that in most other countries. He replied that too many Americans have a “juvenile concept of personal freedom.” Kind of like a three year-old who has just figured out how to get out of the playpen and start walking around, but with no idea how to behave or what the dangers might be.
Now, words such as “freedom” and “liberty” mean very different things to different people. Responsible adults understand that there are attendant obligations that come with those ideas. Sadly, too many Americans do not. If we had leaders who modeled these ideas correctly, and parents and teachers who inculcated them, it would be different. And we do have them, but clearly not enough. Social media are making the problem much worse, but that’s a subject for another issue.
Meanwhile, Biden and Obama are still living in a fantasy world in which existentially frightened sociopaths can be cajoled into cooperating. Please. Don’t. Believe. It. Our good nature is taken for weakness and stupidity by Reactionaries who have pretty much won their “Revolution.” (See issue #11). Power respects only stronger power. Not military or armed power, just substantial social disapproval, which is ultimately more effective. Moral power, if you will. Martin Luther King type power. Little by little, bona fide Christians, including Catholics and Fundamentalists, Moslems and Jews must be at the forefront of creating that kind of power. Although this is not possible now, with the two major parties so solidly ensconced, some day we really do need to have three major parties: Progressives, Moderates and Reactionaries (they can continue to call themselves Republicans if they wish.) The most likely winner would be the Moderates, but they would have to negotiate with Progressives and Reactionaries to get anything done.
I have been writing about the decompensation of our society. Trump and the Reactionaries are but symptoms of that devolution. Absent organized moral opposition, things can only get worse. I have been saying for some time that things have to get worse before they can get better (the dark before the dawn), because as long as most people are relatively comfortable with what they have, they will resist meaningful change, but I had not anticipated they would devolve so rapidly.
Our “civilization” is going through a rite of passage, and the outcome of these rites is never certain. Changes are coming thick and fast, which only frightens the Reactionaries more, so those of us who think we know better will have to get it together soon.