As we watch Donald Trump's terrifying rise against the placating pundits, "Oh, he won't last," "He'll drop out." "There's no way he'll win," and so on (I warned in November and December that they had to kill his campaign before February--the first primaries--and everyone around me, ostensibly trying to calm me down, said he would be gone by then. Man, I hate being right), I realized that the American people take their political system for granted. We worship the Constitution and its authors as almost demigods (even as some of them--namely, Thomas Jefferson--are tossed down the memory hole in school textbooks), despite the fact that they left us a government that has become exploitable and unable to solve even the most basic problems.
The American electorate holds two contradictory viewpoints:
1) Things are bad
2) Things cannot get so bad that we lose our democracy.
1: They are
2: They can
The irony in the belief that things cannot possibly get so bad is that people end up becoming complacent, and allowing--through inaction or negligence (through this belief itself)--things to get that bad.
2: They can
The irony in the belief that things cannot possibly get so bad is that people end up becoming complacent, and allowing--through inaction or negligence (through this belief itself)--things to get that bad.
Voting, by itself, is necessary but insufficient. It is impossible for the average person to be engaged in every issue, and legislative procedures are insufferably boring, but average Americans should do it, because not only is it the only real contact the People have with their government (short of paying taxes or being arrested), it is also the only contact they have in which they can express their opinions to their government (short of being disgustingly wealthy and pumping dark money via Panama into an enormous and nebulous network of underground SuperPACs).
Insofar as the American electorate is functionally and authentically alienated from its government, the government is being exploited (Zephyr Teachout, in her excellent book, Corruption in America, used the term "plundered"), and, of course, it does not have a defense mechanism. It is nothing more than a computer program reading instructions:
Votes (or money) supporting one or other policy go in, legislation goes out. It doesn't matter where the instructions come from, whether the Native Americans in Nevada go to the ballot, or Sheldon Adelson's massive bank account filled with misbegotten cash fills their pockets, the legislation acts on whatever it's given.
Worse, it is nigh impossible to compel the government to fix itself. Campaign Finance Reform would be nothing short of a Ragnarok, the ultimate Class War. Despite the fact that even legislators themselves hate asking for money, they have not been able to pass even the smallest legislation to help alleviate the issue (again, John Oliver on Congressional Fundraising). Why might this be? Because liberating them from the incessant need for outside cash injections also liberates them from the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, who desperately need them (the Koch brothers plan to pump $889 million into the general election). It is worth noting that one of the arguments against voting for Bernie Sanders is that he won't be willing to raise money for down-ticket Democrats if he's elected. Passing CFR would eliminate this.
In the beginning, both legislators and the People were always on the alert for corruption. Zephyr Teachout begins her book with a story about Benjamin Franklin rejecting an adorned snuffbox given to him as a gift of good will by France, because he believed that he would then appear beholden to France against the will of his constituents. As time went on, specifically, after Citizen's United, as well as the legalization of corporate lobbying, our government--continuing the computer metaphor--caught multiple, severe viruses, which give it bad instructions. Things are now so bad--the instructions so jumbled and malicious--to the point where it boots up, but freezes when trying to load a program.
The cacophony of instructions being loaded into the government-computer have ground it to a complete halt. Often, what does get passed, is so awful that the people can hardly believe it. (How the ACA got passed is nothing short of miraculous.)
The primary purpose of a democratic government is to advocate on behalf of the people it serves. Unfortunately, save for the actual casting of votes during elections, the voters themselves are not the ones who influence decisions on the floors of the legislature, and as John Oliver explains, members of Congress only contact those who contribute at least $1,000 to their political campaigns. As he further points out, those who can afford to contribute $1,000 (or more) to a political campaign are not the kinds of people affected by, say, police brutality, contaminated water supplies, or workplace discrimination. Whose interests do our legislators have in mind when they sit on a committee for financial regulations?
Considering the massive train derailment that our government has become (not unlike the scene in Emile Zola's The Beast Within), it is no wonder that, in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Presidential Election 2016, it is not impossible for "the process" (hey, everything else about our government is completely FUBAR, how could our elections emerge unscathed?) to fail to filter out something like Donald Trump, or fail--without pressure from corporations with lucrative jobs in the state on the line (great, so corporate power saves the day, just what we need...)--to stop discriminatory and self-destructive laws from being passed.
Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can't Happen Here in 1935, which was about a dictatorship arising organically within the United States in the middle of the Great Depression. In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy held the second American Inquisition, the Senate Committee on Government Operations, modeled after the 1938 House Unamerican Affairs Committee (the first American Inquisition; I had mistakenly believed that he was part of the HUAC), at which, it should be noted, Ayn Rand testified for the committee. There is no reason to believe that Joseph McCarthy could not happen again, and Trump's ascent to the Republican nomination would be nothing less than the coup de grace upon the pile of rubble our government has become.
The point is that, in writing the Constitution and forming the government, the founders left some major things missing, things that, because of their experiences in Europe, they absolutely should have seen coming. However, Jacobin points out that the founders were all rich, educated, white men, which means (at least, according to that article) that they could have purposefully overlooked the pitfalls of constantly hounding for political campaign contributions in order to influence later policy decisions through campaign contributions. Or, another possibility might be that it didn't cost both legs and an arm to run for political office in the 18th century. On the other, other hand (how many hands do we have? Am I the xenomorph queen?), they were chiefly concerned with the fidelity of the government to the people, and their omission of this important aspect of government construction is simply unknown (my dad likes to say that they considered politics a dirty business and that no one wants to do it, but because it's dirty, there are certain kinds of people who want to do it: those we don't want to do it).
Blind faith in our government's ability to withstand all attacks to its integrity will render the People docile and complacent, and the very things that the voters believe impossible will--to their horror--be made manifest.
Insofar as the American electorate is functionally and authentically alienated from its government, the government is being exploited (Zephyr Teachout, in her excellent book, Corruption in America, used the term "plundered"), and, of course, it does not have a defense mechanism. It is nothing more than a computer program reading instructions:
Votes (or money) supporting one or other policy go in, legislation goes out. It doesn't matter where the instructions come from, whether the Native Americans in Nevada go to the ballot, or Sheldon Adelson's massive bank account filled with misbegotten cash fills their pockets, the legislation acts on whatever it's given.
Worse, it is nigh impossible to compel the government to fix itself. Campaign Finance Reform would be nothing short of a Ragnarok, the ultimate Class War. Despite the fact that even legislators themselves hate asking for money, they have not been able to pass even the smallest legislation to help alleviate the issue (again, John Oliver on Congressional Fundraising). Why might this be? Because liberating them from the incessant need for outside cash injections also liberates them from the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, who desperately need them (the Koch brothers plan to pump $889 million into the general election). It is worth noting that one of the arguments against voting for Bernie Sanders is that he won't be willing to raise money for down-ticket Democrats if he's elected. Passing CFR would eliminate this.
In the beginning, both legislators and the People were always on the alert for corruption. Zephyr Teachout begins her book with a story about Benjamin Franklin rejecting an adorned snuffbox given to him as a gift of good will by France, because he believed that he would then appear beholden to France against the will of his constituents. As time went on, specifically, after Citizen's United, as well as the legalization of corporate lobbying, our government--continuing the computer metaphor--caught multiple, severe viruses, which give it bad instructions. Things are now so bad--the instructions so jumbled and malicious--to the point where it boots up, but freezes when trying to load a program.
The cacophony of instructions being loaded into the government-computer have ground it to a complete halt. Often, what does get passed, is so awful that the people can hardly believe it. (How the ACA got passed is nothing short of miraculous.)
The primary purpose of a democratic government is to advocate on behalf of the people it serves. Unfortunately, save for the actual casting of votes during elections, the voters themselves are not the ones who influence decisions on the floors of the legislature, and as John Oliver explains, members of Congress only contact those who contribute at least $1,000 to their political campaigns. As he further points out, those who can afford to contribute $1,000 (or more) to a political campaign are not the kinds of people affected by, say, police brutality, contaminated water supplies, or workplace discrimination. Whose interests do our legislators have in mind when they sit on a committee for financial regulations?
Considering the massive train derailment that our government has become (not unlike the scene in Emile Zola's The Beast Within), it is no wonder that, in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Presidential Election 2016, it is not impossible for "the process" (hey, everything else about our government is completely FUBAR, how could our elections emerge unscathed?) to fail to filter out something like Donald Trump, or fail--without pressure from corporations with lucrative jobs in the state on the line (great, so corporate power saves the day, just what we need...)--to stop discriminatory and self-destructive laws from being passed.
Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can't Happen Here in 1935, which was about a dictatorship arising organically within the United States in the middle of the Great Depression. In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy held the second American Inquisition, the Senate Committee on Government Operations, modeled after the 1938 House Unamerican Affairs Committee (the first American Inquisition; I had mistakenly believed that he was part of the HUAC), at which, it should be noted, Ayn Rand testified for the committee. There is no reason to believe that Joseph McCarthy could not happen again, and Trump's ascent to the Republican nomination would be nothing less than the coup de grace upon the pile of rubble our government has become.
The point is that, in writing the Constitution and forming the government, the founders left some major things missing, things that, because of their experiences in Europe, they absolutely should have seen coming. However, Jacobin points out that the founders were all rich, educated, white men, which means (at least, according to that article) that they could have purposefully overlooked the pitfalls of constantly hounding for political campaign contributions in order to influence later policy decisions through campaign contributions. Or, another possibility might be that it didn't cost both legs and an arm to run for political office in the 18th century. On the other, other hand (how many hands do we have? Am I the xenomorph queen?), they were chiefly concerned with the fidelity of the government to the people, and their omission of this important aspect of government construction is simply unknown (my dad likes to say that they considered politics a dirty business and that no one wants to do it, but because it's dirty, there are certain kinds of people who want to do it: those we don't want to do it).
Blind faith in our government's ability to withstand all attacks to its integrity will render the People docile and complacent, and the very things that the voters believe impossible will--to their horror--be made manifest.
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