Is America Too Dumb for Democracy?

A piece in Salon ask the question that is the caption of this post.  The Founding Fathers believed that citizens of America had an obligation to educate and keep themselves well informed both on politics and the larger world because doing so was part of making democracy work.  Fast forward to the present day and civics classes where students learned the structure of America's three branches of government work are no longer taught.  Likewise, geography has fallen by the wayside and the difficulty of high school books compared to those of 1900 has plummeted. Leisure reading has declined and on television one sees more and more mindless reality shows and "contests" with serious documentaries relegated to obscure cable channels. Frighteningly, significant portions of the U.S. citizenry cannot locate important foreign countries on a map - 6% cannot locate the USA on a map. Pointing out these disturbing realities of America may brand me an "effete liberal" among Trump's base - or at least a liberal since they would not know what effete means - but the ignorance of America's population together with its refusal to learn from other nations due to delusions of "American exceptionalism: are becoming a threat to democracy itself.  Here are highlights from the Salon piece:

Independence Day presents a good opportunity to consider that many Americans act as if their young country is independent from the rest of the world. The former popularity of the mindless slogan, “My country right or wrong,” offers a perfect summary of America’s suicidal self-absorption. When the fireworks no longer illuminate the sky, the barbecue is down to bones, and the hangovers begin to commence, a genuine act of patriotism would insist on the widespread realization that small-minded chauvinism is not virtuous. One need to look no further than the early stages of the presidential campaign to survey the damage of a country’s inability to look beyond its own borders.

The provincialism of American culture renders its politics both farcical and dangerous. While it is encouraging to see previously “extreme” and “radical” ideas, such as socialized medicine, paid family leave and debt-free higher education, become mainstream in the Democratic Party, it is also amusing to imagine a French or Canadian observer watching American politicians debate a national health care program as if it were a novel concept.

[T]he United States is the “only country in the developed world” that does not achieve universal health care coverage through public funding. Sanders, and his fellow candidates for the Democratic nomination, have strenuous labor to complete considering that most Americans know and care little about the world beyond its borders. . . . a U.S. strategic task force of Education Abroad concluded that America’s ignorance of the outside world was so great as to constitute a threat to national security. A recent National Geographic survey indicates that merely 37 percent of recent college graduates can identify Iraq on a map, most failed to identify North Korea, only one in four could identify Iran or Israel, and among Americans ages 18 to 24, 6 percent could not even point to the United States. If you are among the 6 percent, and you are reading this, that’s where you live. The American perspective on history is as sophisticated as one would expect in a country where Donald Trump can even run for president without eliciting of universal laughter and disgust. Three-fourths of the public is unaware why the U.S. fought a cold war with the Soviet Union, and 41 percent are unfamiliar with the term “Auschwitz.”

America’s perverted priorities of giving tax breaks to the wealthy while its public schools decline into states of disrepair, along with a shallow and superficial news media operating under the demands of corporate ownership, are largely to blame for America’s failures, but the general public is not exactly resistant.

Historian Richard Hofstadter analyzed “anti-intellectualism” in American life in his seminal 1963 Pulitzer-winning book. Decades of  compounding fatuity have created a culture where leisure reading, according to several reports, is at an all time low.
It seems unlikely that those Americans who do crack open a book are studying comparative politics or international relations. For the full picture of how pitiful American culture has become, consider that for many recent years the bestselling “historian” in the country was Bill O’Reilly.

To bemoan the spectacular incuriosity of Americans is not an exercise in snobbery, but a red alarm warning of an impending crisis. The consequences of American ignorance are not academic. A Washington Post survey, two years after American forces invaded Iraq, revealed that 70 percent of respondents believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

American provincialism also functions as insulation of the brain, preventing the average citizen from seeing and hearing the warning signs that history offers into the transformation of democracy into despotic rule. Fascism is not an overnight development, and when your country is earnestly debating whether its treatment of immigrant and refugee children qualifies for the term “concentration camp,” you have already taken a few large steps down that deadly road.

The qualities of Donald Trump, and the zealotry of his worshipful supporters, resemble the images of nearly every authoritarian movement in European, Asian and Latin American history. If America’s political culture possessed some semblance of literacy, its voters would collaborate to consign Trump to the political garbage disposal. When it came to providing basic services for its own people, it would not allow intellectual titans like Chuck Todd to ask Democrats, “How are you going to pay for it?” — as if countries with far less wealth have not already managed to do so.

A friend of mine whose father recently died told me that her brother, who lives in London, took one month off with full pay to travel to Texas, make some final memories with his dad, and attend the funeral service. Britain, contrary to popular belief, is not a mythical, far-off universe from a fantasy novel.

If one wants to drift off entirely into dreamland, envision an America where its federal government invites consultants from countries with better performing health care systems, affordable universities and more effective poverty relief policies to assist in the expansion of the social welfare state.

Instead of seeking outside advice, we will continue to display the symptoms of national solipsism, bumbling along as if there is no reality outside what we can see right in front of us.

The United States of America is one year older today. Only time will tell if it is also wiser.

Ignorance is not bliss nor is it to be celebrated - it is a crisis that threatens our democracy.

Nov. 6th: Last Exit Off the Road to Autocracy

It is election day and today's election results will determine many things.  First, as note in the previous post, whether or not America regains its moral compass and rejects Trumpism and the racist and discriminatory agenda of the Republican Party that is striving to restore the worse abuses of the Gilded Age.  Secondly, today may may well determine whether true democracy continues in America. If Republicans prevail today, expect voter disenfranchisement efforts to sky rocket - tactics employed in Georgia will go nationwide in GOP controlled states - and the social safety net will be shredded to pay for tax cuts for the most wealthy and privileged.  I'm not being overly dramatic in this latter issue.  One need only look at what has happened in other purported democracies where one party rule is now in place.  Even the early Roman emperors  maintained the trappings of the old Roman Republic  even though democracy had in fact died.  A column in the New York Times looks at this other key element of America that is at stack today.  Here are highlights:

Whatever happens in the midterms, the aftermath will be ugly. But the elections are nonetheless a fork in the road. If we take one path, it will offer at least a chance for political redemption, for recovering America’s democratic values. If we take the other, we’ll be on the road to autocracy, with no obvious way to get off.

It’s a near-certainty that Democrats will receive more votes than Republicans, with polling suggesting a margin in votes cast for the House of Representatives of seven or more percentage points — which would make it the biggest landslide of modern times. However, gerrymandering and other factors have severely tilted the playing field, so that even this might not be enough to bring control of the chamber.

And even if Democrats do climb that tilted slope, anyone expecting Republicans to accept the result with good grace hasn’t been paying attention. Remember, Donald Trump claimed — falsely, of course — that millions of immigrants voted illegally in an election he won. Imagine what he’ll say if he loses, and what his supporters will do in response. And if and when a Democratic House tries to exercise its powers, you can be sure it will be met with defiance, never mind what the Constitution says.

But ugly as the scene will be if Democrats win, it will be far worse if they lose. In fact, it’s not hyperbole to say that if the G.O.P. holds the line on Tuesday, it may be the last even halfway fair elections we’ll ever have.

Look at what’s happening in Georgia, where Brian Kemp — the Republican secretary of state, who oversees elections — is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams. In any other democracy, letting a man supervise his own election would be inconceivable. But that’s how it is in Georgia, and Kemp is abusing his power to the max.

A political party with any kind of commitment to democracy and fair play would treat Kemp as a pariah. Instead, he has the full support of the national G.O.P.

And Georgia is far from unique. There have been similar if less spectacular attempts to rig the vote in Kansas and North Dakota, where would-be absentee voters were told that they had to use the right color ink — and were given conflicting information about what color was acceptable.

The lesson we learn from all these abuses of power is that today’s Republicans are just like their fellow white nationalists in Hungary and Poland, who have maintained a democratic facade but have in reality established one-party authoritarian regimes. Everything we’ve seen says that Republicans will do anything they can to take and hold power, and Tuesday’s elections may be the last chance to stop them from locking in permanent rule.

Oh, and in case you’re tempted to bothsides this: No, both sides don’t do it. Voting restrictions are almost entirely a Republican thing. As always, Democrats aren’t saints, but they appear to believe in democracy, while their opponents don’t.

Democrats haven’t made the clear and present danger to democracy a central theme of their campaigns; they’ve been running mainly on health care instead. And it’s hard to fault their judgment. After all, health care is indeed on the line in these elections: Millions of Americans, especially but not only those with pre-existing conditions, will lose coverage if Republicans hold the House, because they’ll finally repeal the Affordable Care Act and will soon go after Medicare and Medicaid.

[W]ith the crucial moment here, everyone should bear in mind what’s at stake. It’s not just tax cuts or health coverage, and anyone who votes based simply on those issues is missing the bigger story. For the survival of American democracy is on the ballot.

If you are registered to vote, be sure to do so and vote a straight Democrat ticket - even if you have to hold your nose to do so.  It really is that critical.

Boycott the Republican Party

At the risk of boring long time readers, I used to be a Republican at a time when the Party was in the equivalence of a galaxy far, far away and bore no resemblance to the hideous phenomenon that it is today.  I held city committee seat for eight (8) years, was a precinct captain and worked on many a campaign.  But then something happened.  The Christofascists became ascendant in the Party and the Party's agenda became more and more homophobic and racists (in my experience, most Christofascists are racists as are the so-called lily white "family values" organizations). I left the Party and decided that the only way to "save" the Party was to work against it and see it suffer as many electoral defeats as possible.  Hopefully, at some point some sane people would rise up and work to expel the  Christofascists and racists from the Party.  To date, that has not happened and the result has been that the Party has descended deeper and deeper into hate and insanity, the election of Donald Trump being the ultimate consequence of the degeneration of the Party and the exodus of morally decent people from the GOP.  Now, other are coming to the same conclusion that I reached many years ago: the Republican Party needs to be boycotted and defeated whenever and wherever possible.  A piece in The Atlantic by two moderate conservatives makes the case as to why such a boycott is necessary.  Here are article excerpts:

A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no.

Count us in, Mr. Beasley. . . . . This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).

We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans.

For us, this represents a counsel of desperation. So allow us to step back and explain what drove us to what we call oppositional partisanship.

So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.

Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered . . . . A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.

The second unforgivable sin is Trump’s encouragement of a foreign adversary’s interference in U.S. electoral processes. Leave aside the question of whether Trump’s cooperation with the Russians violated the law. He at least tacitly collaborated with a foreign-intelligence operation against his country—sometimes in full public view.  . . . . the broader response to Trump’s behavior has been tolerant and, often, enabling.

The reason is that Trump and his forces have taken command of the party. Anti-Trump Republicans can muster only rearguard actions, which we doubt can hold the line against a multiyear, multifront assault from Trump and his allies.

[W]e should not count on the past year to provide the template for the next three. Under the pressure of persistent attacks, many of them seemingly minor, democratic institutions can erode gradually until they suddenly fail. That the structures hold up for a while does not mean they will hold up indefinitely—and if they do, they may not hold up well.

Even now, erosion is visible. Republican partisans and policy makers routinely accept insults to constitutional norms that, under Barack Obama, they would have condemned as outrageous. When Trump tweeted about taking “NBC and the Networks” off the air (“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked”), congressional Republicans were quick to repudiate … left-wing media bias. In a poll by the Cato Institute, almost two-thirds of Republican respondents agreed with the president that journalists are “an enemy of the American people.” How much damage can Trump do in the next three years? We don’t know, but we see no grounds to be complacent.

It’s Trump’s party now; or, perhaps more to the point, it’s Trumpism’s party, because a portion of the base seems eager to out-Trump Trump. In last year’s special election to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Republican primary voters defied the president himself by nominating a candidate who was openly contemptuous of the rule of law—and many stuck with him when he was credibly alleged to have been a child molester. After initially balking, the Republican Party threw its institutional support behind him too. In Virginia, pressure from the base drove a previously sensible Republican gubernatorial candidate into the fever swamps. Faced with the choice between soul-killing accommodation and futile resistance, many Republican politicians who renounce Trumpism are fleeing the party or exiting politics altogether.

So we arrive at a syllogism:

(1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.

(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

(3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

If the syllogism holds, then the most-important tasks in U.S. politics right now are to change the Republicans’ trajectory and to deprive them of power in the meantime. . . . The goal is to make the Republican Party answerable at every level, exacting a political price so stinging as to force the party back into the democratic fold.

The off-year elections in November showed that this is possible. Democrats flooded polling places, desperate to “resist.” Independents added their voice. Even some Republicans abandoned their party. One Virginia Republican, explaining why he had just voted for Democrats in every race, told The Washington Post, “I’ve been with the Republicans my whole life, but what the party has been doing is appalling.” . . . A few more spankings like that will give anti-Trump Republicans a fighting chance to regain influence within their party.

We understand, too, the many imperfections of the Democratic Party. Its left is extreme, its center is confused, and it has its share of bad apples. But the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order. That is why we are rising above our independent predilections and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. It’s why we hope many smart people will do the same.