.... In America's Politics And Democracy
by Frank Thomas
Doug Sosnik’s article, Trump Is On Track To Win Reelection provides some startling insights into Trump’s power expansion strategy. He is playing upon working class feelings of voicelessness and powerlessness in having a say about what the government does. So he spews a flurry of one-liners and sows confrontation, chaos, divisiveness to appeal to his working class base. For Trump (and Steve Bannon) it’s about destroying all of today’s so-called Washington ‘establishment’ to advance an agenda of power and “making America great again” … his promise to a desperate core of supporters starving for change at almost any cost and disregard for truth.
In reality, Trump’s only idealogy is himself. He is cynically and recklessly inflaming racial, ethnic and religious tensions. He’s widening the partisan divide in basic political values related to immigration, racial discrimination, environment, and for those in need. From the very start, he has been exploiting and profiting on the social, political, economic frustrations that have been building up for some time. Employing disruptive “shock effects” to rally his core supporters, Trump is amplifying the social-polarization that has been long in process under our two-party “duopoly” and money-corrupted political system so blatantly dysfunctional in serving the Common Good. (see Inside the ‘adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump)
When significant numbers of Americans don’t think they have a political voice or influence on policy, this is a crucial warning our nation is in danger of ceasing to be a constitutional republic and rather is on course towards an authoritarian oligarchy. This suits a president fine who casts himself as the “Omnipotent One” backed by “His” people as the “Only One” who can save the republic – civility, conflicts of interest, rule of law be damned. Trump is essentially the symptomatic reflection of the last 40 year step-by-step disintegration of the reasonably balanced, reflective, give-and-take in our political-societal communications and policy making.
As summed up by one observer, we now have a current situation where everything is a hyped-up display of whacky bravado and arrogance, empty of a modicum of honesty, sincerity or genuinely stable leadership. We now have a “government by tweets”, with off-the-cuff, ridiculous, scary intimidating utterances or thinking that is only intensifying feelings of a hostile, nihilistic political environment where demeaning, hateful language to rebuke critics, grab headlines, to shock and divert attention is culturally alive and seemingly becoming normal.
As I’ve felt for many years, “something” ominously deep, dark and dangerous is perpetrating a profoundly socially polarized U.S. This is reflected in a society overwhelmed by increasingly staggering inequalities in income/job opportunities, an endemic money-corrupted political system absent the appropriate governmental “checks and balances,” a cultural obsession with global warring interventions – all magnifying our national debt and withering away our democracy. In a recent NY Times article, Roger Cohen noted the ominous “something” also alluded to by Bob Dylan: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is.”
Here’s Mr. Cohen’s cogent take on what’s behind that “something”:
“The “something” is a violent reactionary current. It is rightest, nativist, nationalist, and, yes, a “we the ordinary people” reaction against globalization, against migration, against miscegenation, against the disappearance of political borders and the blurring of genders, against the half-tones of political correctness, against Babel, against the stranger and the other, against the smug self-interested consensus of the urban global elite. … The most dangerous thing would be to fail to take these rightest, xenophobic currents seriously, to assume they will go away because logically they should; after all, the world has moved on. But not all the world: wired metropolises yes, vast peripheries no. The worst form of liberal arrogance is to dismiss the forces that brought Trump to power and are feeding resurgent nationalism around the world. Nobody was ever persuaded by being made to feel stupid.”
Another part of the core causes of that “something” – and likely the most fundamental factor especially in the U.S. – can be found in a 2014 research report by Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern ’s Benjamin Page and recent research report by Kathern M. Gehl (CEO of Gehl Foods) and Michael E. Porter (Prof, Harvard Business School). Both studies show how broken our political and electoral systems are – thus systemically undermining our democracy to an extent our founding fathers would find truly shocking. Gilens and Page’s 2014 report concludes: “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interest have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or organized interests, they generally lose. … The 45th American president must be someone with a vision matching the magnitude of the 21st century enormous challenge to refocus government policy on the Common Good, the values, interests, equal opportunities, and needs of ordinary people.”
Gehl and Porter’s 2017 study also lambastes a U.S. political system no longer designed to serve the public interest. They conclude: “How did we get here? In part by stealth. Over the last several decades, the American political system has been slowly reconfigured to serve not the public interest, but rather the interest of private, gain-seeking organizations: our two major political parties (duopoly) and their industry allies. These players have put in place a set of rules and practices that, while largely unnoticed by the average citizen, have enhanced their power and diminished our democracy. … The key to fixing it is to see our political system as the multibillion dollar industry it is – a business with significant economic benefits for its participants. At its center is the duopoly: the two major parties. Around them has arisen what we call the ‘political industry complex’ – an interconnected set of entities that participate in and support the industry: special interests, lobbyists, pollsters, consultants, partisan think tanks, super PACS, and, yes, the media too. Virtually all the industry players are connected to one side or the other – the right or left.”
Gehl and Porter point out that John Adams, our second President and one of the most astute thinkers among America’s founding fathers, even warned the new nation against slipping into a ‘duopoly’ saying, “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other.”
And that’s exactly where we are today with an unproductive diametrically opposed, money-bought two-party governing paralysis. How to come out of this spiral where the average citizen has a near Zero impact on public policy – making our democracy a travesty, creating millions of angry voices and menacing societal tensions? Other than reforming the pervasive political money corruption – Gehl and Porter offer following (briefly stated) reform ideas critically essential for restoring and strengthening our democracy:
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Institute nonpartisan primaries
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Institute nonpartisan redistricting
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Don’t let private parties control the House and Senate
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Reduce barriers to entry for independent candidates
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Embrace some form of the Senate ‘fulcrum strategy’ to break the current political gridlock
Unfortunately, the chaotic decision-making taking place under Trump, the repetitive astonishing gaffes, the pompous shooting-from-the-hip, the loss of “checks and balances” as result of a radically divided but controlling majority Republican Congressional membership (a somewhat divided but a weak minority Democrat Congressional membership), and a conservative Supreme Court … these factors and more give little hope of progress in implementing fundamental political reforms or of even sensibly and seriously debating them.
SUMMARY
At the age of nearly 80, for first time in my life I truly fear for our country’s future. Partisan antipathy and in-fighting within our two-party duopoly remains extensive – compounded by a president who is redoubling an already deeply embedded political confrontation and polarization malaise.
We are entrapped in a sickening inability to come together creatively, constructively, pragmatically on vital issues affecting all Americans: an accelerating national debt; affordable quality health care for all; middle/lower working class race to the bottom; the world’s richest country with one of the highest poverty and homelessness rates; human-induced climate change; decayed infrastructure and pre-college educational systems; obscene costs in human lives and massive expenditures stemming from the role of being the world’s policeman, protector, arms supplier, perpetual global war mongering by invasive military interventions to social-engineer unstable countries.
We are at a breakpoint in time where people feel politically disenfranchised; that the power of public and private institutions no longer promotes the Common Good. Whatever democratic sovereignty “we-the-people” once had has disappeared. Trump feeds off of and reinforces the resulting widespread anger and alienation. A frightening number of Americans are now welcoming the concentration of power in one man who’s so full of himself. Trump’s base supporters are impervious to his chaotic missteps and misstatements. A man hell-bent on stripping down to bare-bones Obama’s programs/actions as well as our body politic.
What better person now for this job than a wheeler-dealer who considers himself unrestrained by the traditional rules/values of presidential conduct. We are now placing our fate, and indirectly the fate of the world, in a disordered someone who sees himself as the omnipotent, nationalist savior of our country. Latin America’s long history with such self-possessed, unruly leaders has inevitably led to unimaginable social-economic bedlam.