Can American Democracy Survive?
by John Lawrence, October 21, 2020
Democracy is predicated on two things: an educated electorate and an ethical electorate. President Trump exemplifies the demise of both. The Founding Fathers were the most well read and educated people of their time, and also the most ethical despite the fact that a lot of them were Deists. Thomas Jefferson extracted Jesus' ethical principles from the Bible while leaving out everything having to do with belief systems. It's called the Jefferson Bible. Deists believed there was a Supreme Being that created the universe, but didn't interact with it. They also believed in Christian ethics while believing Jesus was only human, not divine. Today the ethos of America, while nominally Christian, is actually based on an extremely selfish version of Freedom. Christian ethics, as Thomas Jefferson believed, has to do with each citizen's responsibility to the demos, not with a solipsistic narrow view that the only thing that matters is yourself. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbor as yourself." This is the essence of Christian ethics that is a fundamental principle of democracy. Today's Americans, as exemplified by Trump, are more followers of Ayn Rand ("The Virtue of Selfishness") than they are followers of Jesus Christ's ethics. Americans have taken the value of freedom and have made it an absolute ideal instead of balancing it with equality and brotherhood as the French did with their slogan: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Americans have totally forgotten about Fraternite.
Consider how American history would have been changed if Jimmy Carter had been elected in 1980 and Al Gore (who actually won) had been elected in 2000. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House. Ronald Reagan took them down. If we had had a Jimmy Carter Presidency, we might have actually gotten a handle on global warming. Instead now it's too late to prevent destruction of the earth's environment even if we do everything right from now on. If Al Gore had been elected in 2000, we would have had a huge lead on dealing with global warming as Al Gore was a champion for an intelligent response to global warming. "An Inconvenient Truth" is a 2006 American concert/documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate people about global warming. The film features a slide show that, by Gore's own estimate, he has presented over 1,000 times to audiences worldwide. Instead we got George W Bush who lied us into war with Iraq and squandered trillions of dollars and countless lives contributing to a world in which there are 80,000 refugees and turmoil in the Middle East.
This is from Time magazine, October 19, 2020 by Justin Worland:
American Presidents typically use their annual U.N. General Assembly speech to argue that U.S. leadership can shape the world for the better. Instead, on Sept. 22, President Donald Trump took the opportunity to condemn the global fight against climate change. "They only want to punish America, and I will not stand for it," he said, addressing the assembly virtually from the White House. The U.N. instead should "focus on the real problems of the world," he added.
Trump's rejection of climate change as a "real problem" is nothing new. But his comments, coming just weeks before Election Day, underscore the threat four more years of his leadership poses to the planet.
The Trump administration has rolled back myriad U.S. environmental regulations, including a rule designed to reduce power-plant emissions, another requiring energy companies to stop methane leaks and yet another mandating that automakers build more efficient vehicles. Internationally, Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, a multilateral deal meant to curb climate change; his decision will become official the day after November's election. (His rival, Joe Biden, has promised to undo Trump's environmental deregulation.) Trump has also pushed other countries to invest in fossil fuels. "There has been nothing like [this] Administration on the environment in the last 50 years," says William Reilly, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush.
Climate experts consider the Trump years to be lost time - while also warning that we don't have four more years to waste. Scientists say we need to keep the rise in average global temperature well below 2 degrees C to avoid catastrophe - think collapsing ice sheets that raise sea levels and make many coastal cities uninhabitable, in turn driving mass migration.
What is driving Trump's antipathy to the remediation of climate change is a desire to maximize U.S. economic output, increasing U.S. GDP and making him palatable to his voters who selfishly value short term prosperity over long term habitability of the earth. Those who selfishly value their own perceived immediate well being over that of their children and grandchildren. This is exactly the kind of rejection of Christian values (aside from any actual Christian beliefs which many Trump voters claim to have) that the Founding Fathers and others consider to be necessary to maintain a democracy. A democracy can't exists for long if the ethos is everybody for themselves. If people only consider their own selfish interests and not the well being of the polity, the necessary substrate of democracy is missing. The preamble to the American Constitution, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, ...", includes the words "to promote the general welfare." It's not just about a radical interpretation of "freedom" which encourages people to ignore the general welfare or to ignore the welfare of the planet earth. This solipsistic interpretation of freedom which encourages people to only consider their own selfish interests and to ignore the general welfare is conducive to the demise of democracy.
