No Equivalency

In the aftermath of January 6, most Americans have condemned the violence perpetrated by the insurrectionists in our nation’s capital. Some 57% even blame Trump. But many white Americans seem to feel uneasy about taking a stand against seditious violence by white extremists without also throwing in the violence we saw last year in the events surrounding Black Lives Matter protests and during Trump’s 2017 inauguration. So these conflicted whites must add that they oppose all violence to achieve political ends.

Now, there was violence during the Trump inaugural, in the aftermath of police killings of unarmed Blacks and during the events prompted by Trump’s waving a bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church on June 1, 2020. Some of the worst was committed by white anti-fascists. The violence during the mostly peaceful protests of police behavior – especially burning down a Minneapolis police station – served no useful purpose and hurt communities that still deserve security. (Two of the four indicted in August for the Minneapolis incident are white.) But the rage expressed by the Black Lives Matter protests must be understood as the pent up reaction to white violence directed at Blacks going back to the days of lynching and often perpetrated or condoned by public officials and police. One can say violence out of even righteous rage is wrong. But it is not in the same category as what happened last week.

There is no equivalency – moral or legal – between any recent past incidents of protest violence and that carried out at the request of the President of the United States against the US Congress. Just saying this should make it clear. After railing against “criminals” including members of Congress, other Republicans, the press and social media that block his dog-whistle tweets – and threatening the Vice President to “do the right thing” – the President of the United States sent white thugs, extremists and fanatics to intimidate the US Congress through what Rudy Giuliani had just called a “trial by combat.”  And the white crowd that invaded the Capital targeted the very government that provides them, more than others, their race privilege and economic support.  

Yes, political violence in a democracy is always wrong. But there is no way that what happened on January 6 is anything less than treason and the attempted overthrow of the US Constitution. That is in a class by itself and needs to be understood as such without the white caveats.

Time to Be Progressive

It's possible to understand both of our two major political parties as having led America into a crisis. The Republican Party – in control of the US federal government and many states and in the hands of ideological and religious extremists – has been captured by an immoral egotist with no capacity for governing. In pursuit of elite interests and “conservative values,” Republicans have launched an assault on everything good in how our government has come to serve the common welfare since the days of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.

Democrats have not been on the playing field. They threw away the 2016 election by passing the presidential nomination through a politically correct form of primogeniture. The candidate threw it away through own goals and writing off voters in certain groups and states. Lacking any coherent vision to address the economic and social effects of globalization, the Democratic Party instead played to niche politics and appears to have little to offer beyond waiting for Trump to crash and the Republicans to burn.

Joe Biden does have a heart and could oversee cleaning up the mess the Republicans leave behind. But there must be a cohesive progressive agenda to go beyond that. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understood that presenting voters with one could begin the process of putting the country on the right path again. A progressive agenda must begin with embracing the progressive income tax. Government needs money to serve the common good. Our tax system must be made more fair and taxes sufficient to meet our needs. (The Republicans have sought to subordinate this to cutting spending and a regressive taxing system favoring the owners of capital.) It need not be confiscatory but should treat the fruits of labor and capital equally with progressively higher tax rates on individual and corporate income no matter where it comes from and with very limited exemptions.

With adequate funding, the federal government can attend to the chief challenges facing American society in the 21st Century: healthcare, jobs, inequality and education.

Healthcare should be treated as a basic right as it is in other advanced Western societies. It need not be done through a government entity but perhaps with needs-based expansion of Medicare, a non-profit public option and/or payments to purchase insurance on open markets.

In the 21st Century, technology and globalization have conspired to reduce the need for human labor. There simply may not be enough good paying jobs for everyone. A reduction in the work week from 40 to 32 hours plus an increase in the minimum wage may help in opening job opportunities to a greater number. Federal funding to pay for some of the increase in the minimum wage could help reduce the burden on small businesses. Insofar as training will help prepare workers for new roles, government needs to fund that as well.

Inequality undercuts democratic community through making life for many nasty, brutish and short. The federal government should ensure some minimum income for those unable to work and those for whom jobs do not pay enough to rise decently above poverty.

Federal funds should support quality, free public education by focusing on providing modern facilities and adequately paid teachers and staff for all local public school systems. Federal oversight of local schools should be kept to the minimum required to ensure equal access.

Some elements of a progressive agenda need not require additional funding:

Money’s role in politics needs to be removed through campaign financing reform. A national commission on redistricting should oversee the drawing of congressional districts. Each vote should count equally.

A pathway to citizenship should be created for those now in the US “illegally.” A cross border agreement should be made with Mexico (and possibly with the Central American countries) so seasonal workers may go back and forth legally.

The role of contractors and lobbyists in the budgeting process – especially as concerns the military – should be subject to tight limitations.

The Democratic Party needs to begin talking to this agenda in the next three months and not only focusing on Trump’s disqualifications. Waiting for the Republicans to march lemming-like over their cliff might still not be enough and would nevertheless leave the country without a clear direction forward. Biden appears to be getting this.

The 2016 Election

It's over and that is good.  The choice was not the best and either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders might have done better than Hillary.  She carried self-inflicted wounds and the weight of being the first serious woman candidate in a country where lots of white men are still challenged by that.  (Now watch for Elizabeth.)

However, it is also clear that yesterday the global reaction against globalization – which has benefited the rich more than the bottom – came to the US with the election of Trump as President.  Not just white men felt left behind by what seems an elite project to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest.  But if the Republican conservative fundamentalists fill Trump's Administration and have their way, our country and the world will continue coming apart and there will be many losers.  Watch for encouragement of foreign extremists (and Putin) as well as chaos in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan if the US hand is removed or rejected.  Watch for Republicans ruining the economy again with more trickle-down.  Watch for those people feeling empowered now to do nasty things to others not like them (including some who may get cabinet jobs.)  Things all around could get dangerous.  But being an optimist, one can hope that Trump will surprise in some good ways.  Perhaps centrist Congressional Republicans, Democrats in the Senate and the former Democrat version of Trump (he was one a few years back) will save us from the excesses of the campaign Trump.  Trump's victory comments were at least more presidential.  

Boy, do we ever need Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Our Three-headed Beast - Divided US Leadership

The New Yorker of March 19 has an interesting piece - The Unpersuaded by Ezra Klein - that looks at whether Presidential speeches make any difference.  He finds that they do, in a negative way.  When President's talk about things they support or want to do, they engender partisan resistance to that very thing among the opposition.  What helps a President achieve his agenda is a strong enough economy to help him win re-election and his party to gain enough seats to gain/maintain control of Congress.  This may always have been true but seems more so over the last few decades.

Drawing from political scientist Juan Linz, Klein writes that our form of presidential democracy is not common.  And for good reason.  "A broad tendency toward instability and partisan conflict is woven into the fabric of a political system in which a democratically elected executive can come from one party and a democratically elected legislature from another.  Both sides end up having control over some levers of power, a claim to be carrying out the will of the public, and incentives that point in opposite directions."  Parties no longer moderate this tendency in our American system because they have been transformed from "big tents" to groups operating as "disciplined, consistent units."  With party rigidity, the President becomes a polarizing figure rather than a persuader.

In other words, we have a system in which the parliamentary leaders - Speaker and Senate majority leader - and the executive can form a three-headed beast instead of a coherent government.  Time for change?  Time for a constitutional convention?

America is waiting for a message of some sort or another

Americans of all political persuasions apparently are disappointed with our dysfunctional government. We want most of what government does for us – even in health care – but it seems that the system is broken. It feels like our leaders, parties and the way our government works just may not be up to the challenges we face in this 21st Century. Yes, Washington seems sunk in partisan bickering and knee-jerk attacks on whoever tries to do anything. But the very mechanism – designed in the 18th Century and last updated 100 years ago – seems woefully incapable of helping us make and implement the decisions we need to survive and prosper in the bewilderingly complex world we now find ourselves in. The Senate has become an arena for power politics fueled by all the influence that money can buy. The federal government – and most of the states – are spending more money than we have. Fortunately, the Chinese have little choice but to hold our dollars for us. But the debt we have run up measures a collective addiction greater than the most pernicious drugs. The Presidency is enmeshed in a bureaucracy of vested interests – within the government and within the ruling party. We seem to have entered the age of permanent war in which only the professionals fight and die. The whole system has become the tail on the dog of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about.

We need to update how we do business, bring the constitution into this millennium. Whether by constitutional convention or through amendments, we need to seize back the initiative. The Founding Fathers were great men for their time, we need great men and women now for our time. Change in America is usually incremental. Our political system's great strength is our reliance on stable and solid rules of the game. But we need change; we all recognize this. Some may fear it. Certainly some may worry about opening the Pandora's Box as widely as a constitutional convention might. But we really cannot go on this way much longer and still maintain our leadership in the world and offer our children and grandchildren a return to the American dream that we boomers have let slip from our grasp. We need the sort of grand national conversation that a convention would bring on. Being democrats, sharing a belief of government of the people, by the people and for the people, we should have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Perhaps our national dialogue can be channeled through serious consideration by the Congress and then through state ratification of amendments we might agree on? Or maybe the Tea Party has accurately measured the times and we need something from outside the existing structures. Article Five of the US Constitution provides the various alternatives.

What might we need to change? Perhaps a parliamentary system might be best. Parliamentary government is more agile, allowing majorities to rule yet quickly recallable. But we Americans do like our change in small steps. So a couple of more modest suggestions:

To improve the efficiency and representativeness of our national legislature.

- Increase the term of office for Representatives from two to four years so they can spend more time focusing on legislating rather than running. Stagger the terms so that every two years, half the House is up for election.

- Increase the representative and deliberative nature of the Senate. Change the distribution of the Senate seats so that no state can have more Senators than it has Representatives. Distribute the extra seats to states according to population with no state having more than three. This would mean that states would have 1-3 senators roughly distributed every ten years according to the latest census. All senate terms would be concurrent and for five years timed to be open the year following the census.

To improve the efficiency and representativeness of the administration of government.

- Increase the presidential term to six years while retaining the limit of two terms.

- Mandate constitutionally that the federal government operate on a two-year budget.

To build into government and law some regular process of review that includes popular consideration.

- Mandate that all Acts of Congress be reauthorized every 25 years either by a 3/5's vote in each house or failing such action, by national referendum.

- This would apply as well to all departments and agencies of the federal government not explicitly named in the Constitution.

Change is the order of life. We Americans have lived in a political system resistant to change. That is mostly good. But the time has come to dig up the roots, prune the tree and replant in soil we can grow on. Let's talk....