Moving in the right direction will not fix American foundational flaws

The good news is that we now have a good, honest president and that we are moving in the right direction. The bad news is that Biden is being blocked by Republican recalcitrance and that he, like all presidents, is limited by antidemocratic rules that were deliberately baked into the framework of the nation almost two-hundred and fifty years ago by the elites who founded it.

“The United States is back.” That is the mantra that President Joe Biden has been repeating to allies and adversaries as he makes his way in Western Europe. Joe Biden, in his short tenure as president, has been a breath of fresh air. The Europeans, who had to endure four years of an ogre, are breathing a sigh of relief.

The Russians, Vladimir Putin first and foremost, are another matter. Putin and Trump had their own private Cosa Nostra. Putin helped Trump win the 2016 election by hacking to steal the Democrats’ information and to spread disinformation on social media. Trump repaid Putin by letting him get away with murder, literally and figuratively. That bargain is null and void under Biden, and their meeting figures to be more of an ice hockey game than a tea party—rough but rule-bound.

I don’t blame Joe Biden for trying to put the best face on things. You need to be positive to get things done. Cassandras don’t lead championship sports teams or countries that win wars or succeed in shutting down a pandemic. Biden has been tough on Covid-19. We have suffered 600,000 dead and countless wounded from the pandemic, but the rate of death and disease has been notably reduced on his watch. I shudder to think how many more we would have lost by now if Trump were still in power. Everything he did could have come out of a playbook titled “How to enable a virus to run wild.”

Biden’s domestic priorities lean in the right direction. He wants to bring the physical and social infrastructure of the United States into this century. The Republicans oppose everything he has proposed, they even opposed the American Rescue Plan that averted misery for millions and revived a flatlining economy. Then GOP members of Congress who voted against it went home and took credit for helping people through that very plan. Trump is not the only Republican whose nose keeps growing.

What Biden hasn’t recognized, or perhaps can’t afford to acknowledge, is how far back we, the United States, are, relative to our peers in the world. We live under a constitution crafted by a handful of white men of English extraction, all of them property owners, many of them enslavers, who given who they were and what they owned had a mortal fear of democracy. Accordingly, they built into the foundation myriad checks, obstacles, and labyrinths to prevent democracy from coming into being.

We are still living with many of those impediments today. Almost two and a half centuries later, one must say the founders succeeded for the most part in stifling democracy. Since then, democracy has made advances, but partial ones and at a glacial pace. To the celebrated glory of the Founders, we should subtract the deficit of democracy, the surplus of racism, and the vexing anachronisms they saddled us with. As the country has grown and diversified, as technology and science have developed, these foundational features, sometimes working in combination, have come to haunt us.

The Senate, which plays a crucial role in deciding who sits on the Supreme Court, is grotesquely unrepresentative, conferring enormous power to the most insignificant states populated mainly by whites abounding in entitlement but too often lacking in education. The Supreme Court, that for the last four decades of Republican power in the Senate has been building, has distorted and deified the Second Amendment into a carte blanche for gun ownership, a “right” which exists in no other country. The result of our democratic deficit is a plethora of gun deaths as unique as the Second Amendment.

Compared to other decent, democratic countries, we have the costliest, least accessible, and unequal health care system, one that yields mediocre results by world standards, a fact that the pandemic brought into stark relief. While recently leaked IRS documents revealed those at the very top pay virtually no taxes, we have money only for the most miserly of safety nets, torn by holes through which you could fly one of those awfully expensive planes that we always can find the money to buy.

The other big elephant in the room is the Electoral College, undemocratic by design, and increasingly the Republicans’ one trump card in winning the White House. George W. Bush won his first race via the Electoral College while losing to Al Gore by hundreds of thousands in the popular vote, which set Bush for reelection despite the lies about, and the debacle in, Iraq. That time Bush did win the popular vote. Go figure the American electorate.  In 2016, Trump won the White House via the Electoral College while losing by a couple of million in the popular vote. In 2020, he lost all of it notwithstanding the big GOP lie to the contrary.

The fury that ensued among the Trump fanatics, whose racial and socioeconomic profile resembles that of the founders—white male property owners— more than it does the rest of 2021 America, reflects a dawning realization that even the loaded deck of the Electoral College won’t save them. If you can’t win even with your best card, what do you do?

Revolt against reality. Sink into the dismal swamp of denial and delusion. Create new obstacles in the way of democracy by tricking the electoral process and hand-picking the electoral officials and the ballot counters. Conjure up miracles and mirages, like the supposed restoration of Trump to the White House this August.

Right now, the Electoral College looks like the only way to the presidency for Republicans. And one thing is certain: the larger the role the Electoral College plays in the route to the White House, the less room for democracy.

For the sake of democracy and their own interests, Democrats should make abolishing the Electoral College a plank in the very long-term agenda that they should begin crafting now. That, along with free universal health care, a guaranteed minimum income, paid family leave, free childcare, the abolition of the death penalty and mass incarceration, educating and gradually disarming the police and the population, also should be in there.

Many will see all that as a hopelessly Utopian agenda none of us will live to see. I think of it more as a horizon which we can look and walk toward but never quite reach.