There is no way to encapsulate all that is wrong in America, along with a comprehensive plan to fix it, in the confines of a single essay by a lone author. It requires a legion of thought leaders, each contributing a piece of the puzzle, in order to develop something workable and functional. This essay, therefore, is meant to spark discussion, not be a pretense to a solution. So, no. I didn’t think of everything. If you want to comment, comment on what I wrote, not what I left out.
I’m not morally opposed to violence as a form of protest against the forces of evil. Put one of ours in the hospital, we’ll put one of yours in the morgue, seems like a reasonable, logical approach from an historical perspective. Mutually assured destruction can be an effective tool when your opponent has no moral compass. I just don’t happen to believe that it’s an effective agent for long term change in a civil society. Violence provides those in power with an excuse to inflict even more pain on the populace in the name of law and order. Nonviolence is a strategy, in my opinion, not an ideology. I am a proponent, not because I think it’s morally superior, but because it’s been more effective historically. It simply works where violence rarely, if ever, does.
I don’t see much point in looking back in history for answers on how to move forward. I don’t think it matters if you go back 150, 250, or 500 years. It’s all a shit show. We don’t need to regress to some simpler time, we need to progress to keep pace with our environment. We have to ask ourselves, what do we want from our government, now that we’re contending with devastating climate change, in a global economy, that is colliding with a technological apocalypse? That’s what we need to decide on, not which party of wing nuts is most suitable to oppress us. What sort of government do we need to survive the 21st century, and how does that look different from what we have now?
Nonviolence is a strategy, not an ideology.
It’s hard for me to imagine a path forward given our current system, but I don’t agree with those who suggest we could just blow it up and start over—as if that wouldn’t require catastrophic disruption to the economy and the social order of civil society. It would destabilize the entire planet before it would ever get any better, and many of us would not survive. Additionally, who would get to decide what that future would look like?
You think a bunch of intellectuals and gentlemen farmers are going to once again think deep and hard about what sort of self governance we might like by studying the Greeks efforts at early democracy and the ancient republics of old? Or do you grasp that we would simply end up with billionaire warlords mustering private armies and setting up their own perverted rule of law. We won’t be meeting at the local library to debate big ideas with the neighbors. The powerful will rape and pillage the land and enslave the populace for their comfort.
Faster Horses And Better Government
Henry Ford once said that if he’d asked what his customers wanted, they would have asked for “faster horses.” I feel the same way about voters. If you asked your average voter what sort of government they would like, they’d likely tell you they wanted none at all. Then they would immediately demand that someone do something about the state of our failing infrastructure, lax national security, absence of healthcare, and public education, with no laws protecting life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. It would just be privately funded security for those who could afford it, and anarchy for everyone else. It would be the apocalypse from every bad movie you’ve ever seen.
I hear people all the time try to argue that we’re already living in a fascist state, as if this all couldn’t get exponentially worse. This is not the system I would design, and certainly not as good as it could be even as it stands, but also certainly not as bad as it could get if we do nothing. Let’s be clear about that. We are not Afghanistan, Russia, or North Korea. It’s not even close. The system isn’t entirely broken, not yet, but it does have quite a limp, the left eye and right ear are wonky, and one or more internal organs are beginning to fail. Still, we continue to stumble forward for the time being.
I truly don’t understand how people think we would be able to make massive, foundational changes to our system of government without massive bloodshed, and economic devastation. We can’t even get everyone to vote in their own best interests because oligarchs own the media and they’ve been gaslighting everyone for decades. In the same way that people delude themselves into believing that a third party would somehow magically cater to their own personal whims, who’s to say that if America came up with a new form of government, it wouldn’t be designed to cater, once again, to those who already control all the money and levers of power? What makes you think anyone would invite you to the new founding party?
The solution seems to be to stop accepting the corruption and greed as something we all just have to live with. We have to wake up to the truth of it, that we are more powerful than kings and despots, but only if we stand together, united as a people. We don’t need everyone to come along. There will always be those who believe their interests lie within a system of patronage and will resist calls for democracy and the equitable rule of law.
We need a strong majority to elect leaders who believe in the idea that government can be a force for good, that governments exist to support the people, not the politicians, and that intractable problems require radical solutions. Simply trying to revert back to a dysfunctional system that was already struggling before Trump broke it, is nothing but a recipe for failure. Once they’ve broken into the bank vault and stolen all the gold, there’s not much point in changing the lock. You have to rethink the purpose and design of the vault.
Once they’ve broken into the bank vault and stolen all the gold, there’s not much point in changing the lock.
With the exception of a few radicals who don’t seem to believe in anything rational, I don’t think most Americans have any sort of appetite for armed conflict against one another. We’re not going to give up our retirement savings, leave our homes, and live off the land, while everyone shoots each other. Short of that, we’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way, by electing a majority of a single party and rewriting the rules. The Republicans, such as they are, are already doing this, dismantling our institutions and destroying our institutional knowledge, right before our eyes. If the Democrats don’t fight back, fighting fire with fire, then the Republicans will be triumphant, and so will end the great American experiment in self-governance. Someone is going to win and they will make the rules. Currently, we’re losing to oligarchs and theocratic authoritarians.
If you look at the rogue regimes throughout history, successful opposition has usually taken on a strategy of isolating the corrupt regime from the world. Think about Apartheid in South Africa. It was a violent, oppressive system of government, but world pressure became too much for it to bear and when they relented to free and fair elections, they lost power. You can hardly argue it was bloodless revolution, because much blood was spilt, but it wasn’t open warfare. It also did little to change the economic calculus of generational wealth, where whites still hold all the money and much of the power, but it’s better than it was. There is at least hope.
Democratic Socialism
I’m not a socialist. Definitely not a communist, and certainly not an anarchist. Calling yourself an anarchist is defiantly stupid and moronically naive. Human beings are preternaturally craven and cruel and in serious need of restrictions over their natural inclinations. This every-man-for-themselves bullshit is childish and idiotic. Libertarians are even worse. They’re the domestic house-cats of the universe, who think they’re entirely independent, ignoring that someone is feeding and housing them while cleaning out their magical shit box.
I’m also not really a strident capitalist, at least not anymore. I’m not sure its realistic to believe in the purity of any political or economic policy. There is no one size fits all. You need a little free market capitalism, mixed with some ardent socialism, with heavy federal oversight over all of it, and then some serious guardrails to prohibit corruption. Humans are a messy business, and we’re always fighting with the dimmer angels of our nature.
I probably lean more socialist than your average American. I don’t see why anyone should ever profit from energy production, the internet, healthcare, water, prisons, or any aspect of government. I can’t even believe there’s an argument against this. The free market is not more efficient, it’s decidedly less so, because someone needs to make a profit and profits must grow. That is simply not sustainable. There is still plenty of room for capitalistic ventures in a fair and equitable system, but the rule should be that if it’s necessary for human survival, you don’t get to control it privately.
Despite my earlier proclamation that we don’t need to look backward in order to move forward, many of our greatest achievements in economic development were socialist in nature. The entire New Deal era built the middle class and was responsible for an unprecedented period of economic prosperity, and the rich and powerful have been trying to deconstruct it ever since. That seems to be the only purpose of the GOP, the culture war nonsense simply being a strategic ploy to engage social conservatives in order to achieve economic dominance. The more I read about Democratic Socialism, the more it seems like a reasonable approach to modern life. A little bit of everything.
The rule should be that if it’s necessary for human survival, you don’t get to control it privately.
We are already seeing the expansive growth of Democratic Socialism in America. The goal is to elect enough progressive thinkers that we are able to usurp control and take over the Party. There are solutions to be had within the framework of our Constitution. We can expand the House, as well as the Court. We can make the Electoral College irrelevant without repealing it. We can write laws with teeth to tackle corruption and remove the influence of money on our politics. We can institute universal healthcare, a job for everyone who wants one, a federally mandated minimum wage, and much better schools.
First, we need the average American to wake up to the horrors all around us. They won’t listen to us if we tell them, so we’re going to have to show them.
Tackling Racism
Racism has long been the cudgel the powerful use to divide and conquer the masses. Make people afraid of each other and they will be too busy fighting each other to realize they’re being taken to the cleaner by the people at the top. It’s the same with immigration. Make people fear the other and they will go along with whatever you propose in the name of safety, security, and national identity.
We don’t have to come together in a spirit of unity and sing Kumbaya, but we do need to recognize that the real fight is not with each other, but against those who would put their boots on our neck and watch us squirm. We might not all be in the same boat, but we are in the same storm, and we need everyone to see themselves in the other. We have a common enemy, who can be defeated, but only if we stand together.
Nonviolence As A Political Strategy
No one gives up power and money voluntarily, which means if you mean to relieve someone of it, you’re going to have to take it, and they’re going to resist, rather strenuously. Therefore, we’re going to have to fight them for it, and the fight will be existential; it will be to decide if billionaires and oligarchs have a right to exist. They will not go quietly, but if we are persistent, they will be unable to hold back the tide of humanity rising up against them. That said, you can’t expect to take them on with a full frontal attack. They’re too powerful. You need to use their weight against them.
Nonviolence is not about being nice, polite, or peaceful. It’s the strategy of provoking a more powerful force into using violence against you, thereby proving to the world that they’re not on the side of good people. The moral superiority is half the battle, but it’s not without pain and suffering. The difference is you are not exchanging blows, you are only receiving them, and this causes something in human nature to shift from fear to respect.
Peace is the enemy of the civil resistor.
Peaceful protest is the lie they tell you to keep you from disrupting the status quo. “Sure, you can protest, as is your right,” they tell us, “but don’t make a nuisance of yourself. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t disturb the peace. Don’t break anything.”
Peace is the enemy of the civil resistor. Peace and quiet is what the authoritarian wants; a subdued and compliant populace that will go along to get along. The opposite of peace is not violence, but disruption, chaos, uncertainty, and discomfort. That is our call to arms.
Protests Not Parades
We still tend to think of protests in terms of crowds taking over the public square or marching in the streets, and there are those who would argue that there is still value in this, but I’m unconvinced. One of the main purposes of the public protest was the visibility created by a cooperative media. Even a small group of disruptive protestors could reach millions by being covered by the news. This is no longer the case.
These are rallies or parades and they do nothing to disrupt the status quo. They are organized in conjunction with the authorities for a set time in a set place, and no one fears them. I think we have to consider other alternatives, and one of them is periodic and sustained economic blackouts that disrupt the economy. I’m sure there are other creative ways to disrupt the status quo so that elected leaders become more responsive to the voters, and it will take a grassroots movement to implement them.
I believe we can turn this sinking ship around, within the current framework of our Constitution, but to do so we need some major improvements. Ironically, not all of them are all that new. We just need to remember what it was like before we allowed greed and thirst for power to corrupt our systems.
Honor Among Thieves
Almost from the beginning, we relied on “the honor of gentlemen,” even as they tried to build a system to thwart our worst impulses. As bad as they believed humans to be, and many of them owned slaves, they seriously underestimated our capacity for cruelty and wonton corruption. Of course, it’s worth noting that even the most ardent among them didn’t expect the Constitution to last more than 20 years before someone rewrote it.
Social Democracy, or Democratic Socialism seems to me to offer the best that we can hope for as a society. It most closely resembles the most successful European societies, and is reminiscent of FDR’s New Deal era, when we were arguably at our qualified best, minus the rampant racism and misogyny. We don’t need to blow up our entire system of government in order to reign it in. We simply need better priorities and stronger safeguards against tyranny.
In the meantime, we have to put maximum pressure, not just on those who advocate for theocratic authoritarianism, but those who propose mediocrity in the form of centrist capitalism, easily the most cowardly and unprincipled stance imaginable. Nonviolent, noncooperation is the fulcrum to dismantling the oligarchy, as we have all the power to implode the economy and bankrupt the elite.
The real question is whether Americans still have the capacity for self-sacrifice in favor of the common good, and honestly whether enough of us believe we’ve even on the same side anymore. I think I speak for most people when I say that I haven’t felt represented in government for my entire life, even when I didn’t realize that’s what was going on.
The real question is whether Americans still have the capacity for self-sacrifice in favor of the common good.
This is where nonviolent protests come into play. You have to poke the bear so that it attacks the weak and defenseless so that those in the relatively safe spaces of America understand that the same could happen to them. The trick is to make the evil real to the masses, so that they move from suspicion to empathy, and finally to compassion.
Americans are naturally optimistic in nature, so it’s not hard to get people to look on the bright side, but we seem to be equally incapable of grasping just how bad things are without being hit over the head with a shovel.
What’s Next
It’s still entirely possible that Trump and his minions will actively try to subvert future elections, or outright refuse to leave, causing our entire system to collapse. If that’s the case, we have to move directly into open insurgency, with mass protests, general strikes, and the shutdown of civil society.
Until then, we can hope to vote our way out of this mess, elect better leaders who share our values, and stop relying on the generosity of the wealthy for what is rightfully ours. I read something today where some moderate douchebag was claiming that now was not the time to be primarying establishment Democrats, but focused on winning general elections. This is the problem with the Democratic Party establishment. They still believe their own hype. I think everyone from Obama to Biden to Clinton are part of that same problem.
If you want inspiration, look to people like Mamdani, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and other democratic socialists who have bigger dreams than a civil service job that they can exploit for personal profit.
We need to be prepared for a fight, for a fight is coming. You’d better start thinking about it because the opposition most certainly is. They have a plan. What do you have?