The U.S. model is in crisis: Let’s not waste a good crisis

Clear thinking, sharp thinking about the critical situation this country is in today, requires questioning the language, stepping outside the predominant paradigm through which we see reality and organize information. Before the reader concludes this is the introduction to an obsolete postmodernist treatise, bear with me and let me explain the idea by example and situate it in our time and place.

Paradigms are the lenses through which we see the world. The sun revolves around the earth. Matter is a thing; energy is something altogether different.

These are two paradigms—conceptual boxes—which were deeply ground into humanity’s view of reality seemingly forever. Sometimes there is clear film in a new pair of lenses in glasses. Often, we don’t even notice it until we do. For thousands of years, it was very hard to think outside the enclosing boxes of geo-centrism and the energy versus matter chasm. It took the Renaissance, the Copernican scientific revolution, and Galileo’s astronomical observations confirming Copernicus’s new heliocentric theory (because of which the Catholic Church almost had Galileo’s head) to overthrow the old comforting assumption that our planet was the center of the universe.

It took more centuries and Einstein’s genius to break through to our current understanding that matter and energy are fundamentally linked, the same stuff ultimately, convertible by the famous formula, energy equals matter times the velocity of light (186,000 miles a second) squared, or expressed as an equation, E = mc².

Where am I going with this? ‘America is a democracy,’ along with ‘free market capitalism is the best economic system,’ are central pillars of our ruling political paradigm. Unlike the ‘earth is the center of the universe’ paradigm, these two are easy to disconfirm intellectually but almost no one even attempts to. They can’t take the film out of the lens.

If America were a democracy, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would have won their presidential elections instead of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. In an actual democracy, the winner is the one who gets the most votes. That is not what happens here.

Moreover, laissez-faire capitalism is not the best system, at least not for most people. People who live in rich, welfare state capitalist societies live better than people in this country who live in a dog-eat-dog, each man for himself and God, against all sort of capitalism.

What does it mean to live better? More free time—leave, shorter hours, long vacations—to live rather than merely toil. An economic floor through which you are not likely to fall to the bottom unlike what happens to people here who fall through our tattered safety net as easily as a porpoise jumping through a hoop. Health care which is a medical service accessible to all and not an economic transaction available only to those who can pay. Longer lives, healthier lives. And so it goes, [on and on] as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

We don’t have a democracy in peril because, by Constitutional design, we never have had a democracy at all. What we need to do first is to turn back the threat of the wave of terroristic fascism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism unleashed by the new ultra-right Republican Party. Then the democrats and the Democrats among us can try to build a real democracy upon those too few democratic elements already existing and abolishing the many antidemocratic features of so-called American democracy like the Electoral College and the rules for electing the Senate, better suited to represent cows than people and the norms like the filibuster that make the institution not just undemocratic but ultra-anti democratic.

Stepping far out of the box into heresy, the sacrosanct federalist system itself is part and parcel of the undemocratic juggernaut. Federalism is gerrymandering on a grand, enduring scale. Playing games with electoral maps to render minority votes meaningless and excluding minority candidates and liberals from attaining power as is happening now is similar but on a smaller scale.

The fact that the political pundits are all saying the Republicans have the upper hand in future elections is proof that the United States is not democratic. Republicans have won the national popular vote in only two elections since the days of Ronald Reagan.

That is also proof of the insanity or the truculence of a healthy proportion of voters. After the long track record of disastrous Republican rule, built on injustice and inequality, the fact that so many people are ready to return the culprits to power speaks volumes about those people and the country. Many people are readier to live in an unfair society than they are in one of racial, ethnic, and economic equity where the superheroes by dint of white Anglo ancestry would have to jump over the same bar as everybody else.

We don’t have a democracy. But we do have a Republic if we can keep it. The first task is not to protect a non-existent democracy but to see clearly and to beat back fascism, open fascism like the Proud Boys and the vastly more dangerous in-the-closet Republican fascism.

If we manage to beat fascism back, we can begin to build a democracy for the first time. And we don’t just need an every-four-years sort of democracy. We need a pervasive, 24-7 democracy, everywhere, in the economy and the workplace as well as at the ballot box and in the state legislatures and the Congress.

Crises sometimes engender deep, rapid change. Let’s hope this is one of those times. We need it.