Now We Know (for Ron)

                When the Senate vote to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial went down to defeat, as we certainly knew it would, the thud that followed was the faith that a generation of mostly white liberal and educated people had in American democracy.  Not only was it not hard to find, it was hard to avoid the commentaries about the death of democracy.  It is true that the Republicans failed to honor their oath to the constitution and that Trump is the worst president in history, but the democracy was in tatters before that.  In fact, I’m guessing it came as no surprise to most Americans who have seen the ‘system’ fail them over and over again that the rich and powerful got off.  What was notable is that the last segment of people who believed in the myth of American democratic virtue are now left to figure out where they go from here.

                If you were a white liberal who was even fairly well educated, then you grew up not just saying but believing in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Even in the face of multiple examples that it wasn’t, we believed the system, if not exactly fair, was mostly just and in the process of improving.  We thought equality and goodness would triumph in the end, and someone or something would always arrive in the nick of time and save the edifice from ruin.  Well, I guess we know that’s just not true anymore.  Part of the problem was the passive faith we had in laws and institutions that allowed us to live individual lives away from the constant pursuit and protection of justice.  A bigger part of the problem is that the America we lived in was never real.  This has always been a country where the end justifies the means, where money and power always meant more than justice and equality.  Watching my friends watch the trial was like being in the movie theater as a kid watching Peter Pan.  We all kept trying to bring Tinkerbell back to life – just one more witness or one more fact would surely save us.

                America is built on a lie.  It was colonial and genocidal before 1619, and the legacy of the slave trade is still an original sin on our collective consciousness.  It took suffragettes decades to get the right to vote.  Even we got it right by ending slavery, it was followed by Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Klan.  The Voting Rights Act didn’t end voter suppression and intimidation, which is increasing again.  Even the hard-fought rites of unions have been eroded and characterized as ‘counter-productive.’  Tell the miners at Blair Mountain or Matewan that the system worked.  Tell the survivors of the Tulsa race massacre that justice mattered.   Whether it was Shays’ Rebellion or the tent city of WWI veterans seeking the promised benefits being routed by the Army, there has been little in the way of justice or fairness in our history.

                If we want to live in a democracy, the first step is realizing that we can’t just restore it.  We have to build it over again, and we have to build it with an honest and inclusive history of who we are and where we’ve been.  We have to finally face down and defeat the hateful impulse of purification and division.  We have to have an honest history and be more humble about what we stand for.  Most importantly, we have to engage.  Democracy is not a passive political endeavor.  There is no candidate or party platform that will change anything unless and until we change our attitude toward political action.  Trump and McConnell are the culmination and inevitable conclusion of a system that, Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric notwithstanding, that was always rigged.

                If you felt let down and betrayed on that Friday, start the road back by taking a sobering account of what we had become.  Nothing ended that day that hadn’t been on the ropes for a long, long time. 
We are the only ones who can change this, and the first step is to stop romanticizing what America was.  There was never going to be a magical witness in the Senate.  There is no Atticus Finch waiting in the wings to offer a high-minded but essentially useless defense of our principles.  Tinkerbell is dead.

Mindfulness and Chaos

                As the Senate Republicans gather in cloak rooms deciding how, exactly, to end constitutional democracy, the temptation is to plunge into the hour by hour, minute by minute insanity.  It’s addictive.  Who has the votes?  Who might testify?  What might they say?  It’s understandable to drawn to the spectacle, but that’s not where the action is.  Whatever they decide and however they decide to do it, doesn’t really matter anymore.  The gig is up.  We all know how this movie ends, and it’s time to focus on what’s next.  This system is broken.  It is no longer democratic, even in the limited terms it was supposed to be.  As we pick our way through the rubble for something to build on, it’s important to take a longer, more mindful view of what just happened.  We have to step away from the constant noise and confusion that is Trump and reassess what we have to do next.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the constant barrage of venial distractions that prevent us from focusing on something bigger.

                This is a historic moment.  It can get much worse from here or this can be the point where real democracy, a more radical democracy, emerges.  What is no longer possible is a continuation of the myth that the formal structures of democracy still work.  As you read this, Moscow Mitch is choking the last breath out of that corpse.  Trump is guilty, even the Republicans are admitting that now, but he will not be removed.  The only way to get rid of him is to beat him.  But we are not one candidate or one election away from rebuilding democracy.  The best we can do is stop the bleeding and cauterize the wound.  We are a long, long way from fixing the system.  Losing in November means years in the dark as a formidable but mostly powerless resistance.  I prefer the first scenario, so it’s time to stop watching the trial and start thinking about how to win.

                As Iowa looms next week, there is a chaos there that needs to be avoided, too.  The worst mistake we can make is to assume that any of these candidates has some magic wand that will fix what’s wrong.  Charisma is less important than the ability to create a vision that is inclusive.  The problems are complex, and solution is not simple.  We should stop forcing these candidates into arcane arguments about policy that will never become legislation.  We need a coherent party and not factions of self-righteous purists arguing over details.  We need principles more than we need policy, and we need values that span the differences between people who want the same general outcomes.  Our politics has been consumed by an aggressive and poisonous sense of conflict and chaos.  What are the broad principles that unite us?  We can argue over details later, after we have united.  As it looks now, we’re more likely to descend into factional infighting.

                Usually we think of mindfulness as an individual quality, something that grounds a person.  But I think there has always been a social sense of mindfulness, too.  The concern with the goodness of the Emperor is the same concern as the goodness of the people.  For us, I think goodness is the expression of an aspirational direction.  How do we promote the good?  How do we get better?  We have little patience for the journey anymore.  We want quick and decisive answers that solve everything.  We’re not going to get them.  Being mindful is to be willing to take the journey slowly, with both principle and intent.  We are in the midst of a fundamental change, one that will either create a new era or end in disaster.  This is no time to panic, but it is also no time to be complacent.  It is a time to be mindful and fully present.

                Mitch and the boys are caught in a Faustian bargain.  They can’t win, but they can destroy everything.  They will not turn back the clock on a broken patriarchal system.  They can’t escape the reality of climate change or growing disparity of wealth.  Their time is almost over.  We need to be calm but resolute in the face of this challenge.  There are more of us, and we’re the only ones with a future, but we have to claim it.  We should step away from the fray for a moment, gather ourselves, and focus on what we want to be.  It’s been a long time since we’ve asked ourselves that question.

               

Aftermath

                Now that the Republican Party has proven just how venial and bankrupt it is during the sham impeachment trial, I think we should start making an early list of what to do next.  For now, the list doesn’t need to be exhaustive as much as it needs to be prioritized – what do we have to do first.  The most important problem we face is how to make voting a meaningful and democratic activity again, one that creates a government which is representative of the people and is more immune to the kind of minority power grab now underway, at both the federal and state level.  What Republicans have made clear is that they cannot be trusted to participate in a fair and democratic society, but the current voting system makes it almost impossible to relegate them to irrelevance they so richly deserve.

                There are two main problems with the way we hold elections, and they reinforce one another.  The first is that we’re locked into a two-party system.  The second is that we have structured our elections so that territory is more important than people.  These may seem unconnected, but the modern Republican Party has fused them into a minority stranglehold over what used to be a functioning, if elitist and oligarchical, democracy.  Addressing only one of these issues will not fix the rot at the heart of our electoral futility. 

                The two-party system has ossified into something it never used to be.  Each party used to have a continuum of voters that somewhat overlapped with each other.  In other words, ‘moderates’ could be found in both parties that had more in common with each other than they did with the more extreme members of their own party.  That simply doesn’t exist anymore.  There may still be a few moderate Democrats, but there is no corresponding moderate wing of the Republican Party for them to work with.  Increasingly, the two-party system has come to represent two different nations who have little in common with each other.  The Republican response to the House Managers in the Impeachment Trial is basically that Democrats are bad people who lie and hate America.  To talk of bipartisanship in our government is like retelling some Homeric epic of a bygone era.  It doesn’t, can’t and won’t happen.

                Political representation depends on people feeling that their vote matters.  In a two-party system it gets harder and harder to see how that is true.  Most people who vote want change, but that change never comes to their lives.  The people that voted for Obama and then voted for Trump were frustrated more than they were political or ideological.  When AOC said that in most countries she and Biden wouldn’t be in the same party, she was telling the truth.  In most advanced democracies a multi-party system allows people to leverage their vote to create a consensus around how to govern.  Our parties are increasingly a test of loyalty that squeezes out the legitimate concerns of minority viewpoints.

                The problem we have in moving to a multi-party system is that so much of how we structure elections is based on where people live.  I live in a Congressional district that elects on representative.  This zero-sum arrangement makes the two-party system impossible to defeat.  If each state has so many representatives based on their population, shouldn’t that whole population pick their representatives instead of having them divided up by gerrymandered districts.  If Michigan has 10 representatives, then let the population vote for a range of parties to pick those representatives.  If the Green party gets 20% of the vote, that party picks two representatives, and they then have the leverage to form a block of representatives to move legislation through the congress instead of being locked in a voting minority of a larger democratic party apparatus.  It is time to give the power back to small groups of people and take it out of the hands of corrupt party operatives. 

                From there we could move to deciding the presidency and the senate in the same manner.  We will not get relief from the shameful spectacle that Trump and his allies are manufacturing without changing the way we elect our politicians.  Like so many things in this formalistic democracy, the two-party system has outlived its democratic function.  My hope is that this would lead to a more regional governmental sensitivity, making us like the EU on steroids.  We should have the same laws and freedoms, but we don’t need to be exactly the same all the time.  Remember this when you watch – actually I can’t recommend that you watch – the absurdist drama in the Senate. 

                 

Democracy and Capitalism – Part 3

                Capitalism is not only a threat to the way we conceptualize and act toward the biosphere and information, it is also a threat to our social and community organization.  Capitalism is built around the idea of competition – around winners and losers.  As Maturana frequently warns in his writings, competition is destructive to the cooperative nature of human society and interaction.  The excess is easy to see.  We’ve created unfathomable wealth, but only at the cost of crushing poverty for many.  We have advanced technology for some and created dead zones for the poor.  Our health care is either spectacular or unavailable.  The competitive focus of capitalism creates inequality and alienation instead of a cooperative and fair social order, in short a democratic social order.  It is becoming increasingly clear that democracy is impossible with the radical distribution of wealth we have now.  If you add in a political party and a president that believes that an electoral victory justifies treating the other side as at best irrelevant and at worst malignant, the picture is even darker.

                We have been raised to believe that competition is not only a good thing but the only way to achieve value and excellence.  That is simply not true.  If competition is constrained by a social nexus of collaboration and shared values, it can at least be mostly benign.  But we are a long way from competition that has any sense of fairness or honor to it.  There is almost no social mobility left in this country, and the idea that decisions are merit based went up in flames as we watch parents buy access for their children.  Even the idea that the ‘best and brightest’ exist is just a social convention developed by those self-proclaimed elites to justify their status.  The fact is that competition is only helpful as part of a larger collaboration.  I’m not looking for a fake utopia of participation trophy kids, but rarely is there on answer or one idea that is so good that it wouldn’t be improved by collaboration.  In fact, I don’t think there are any great ideas that aren’t a product of collaboration in the first place.

                Capitalism is inherently exclusive.  Democracy is inherently inclusive.  If we want to rebuild our democracy we have to curb our addiction to competition.  We can’t build a democracy around the idea that there is one winner and everyone else sucks.  That doesn’t mean that we all have the same intelligence, the same physical abilities or attributes, or that we’re all as good at everything as everybody else.  The problem with capitalism is that it makes those differences the basis for exclusion.  A democratic society should want to bring out the best and most unique talents of its members, but not by making some of them obscenely powerful and rich while the others barely have a life.  We are, as Maturana says, a species that is collaborative in our biology.  Our necessary reliance and language and social order to survive is testament to that fact.

                In our formalistic and oligarchic democracy we have always believed that capitalism was essential to democratic life.  We are now at a point where it should be obvious that it isn’t.  If we are going to have a future democracy, it has to be a more fundamental and radical form of democracy.  We can’t just patch up the institutions and practices that got us here and expect a different outcome.  We can’t just offer a collectivist rearrangement of our economic system in the form of socialism and expect the inequality to go away.  The problems of capitalism are hard wired into our system and are responsible for our decline.  They are there in Locke’s writing about ‘providence,’ and they are still with us today. 

                Democracy has always been hard.  Radical democracy is going to be even harder.  Our democratic experiment failed for a lot of reasons.  It’s easy to identify the most egregious and corrupt players and blame them for everything.  It’s true that Trump is an existential threat to democratic government, but it’s also true that a real or healthy democracy never would have produced a Trump in the first place.  If we are to build our way to a future democracy, we have to look at the fundamental mistakes made the last time we tried.  Capitalism is at the top of the list.

               

Democracy and Capitalism – Part 2

                Not only does Capitalism decontextualize and deracinate the material world, as discussed in part 1, the same thought process and the technology it created has done the same thing to information.  The disaggregation on information and the rise of data using computers has destroyed any contextual or ethical relationship between what we know and the values of the social world.  No culture has ever made more information available to more people, but very little of it can be trusted or verified.  Democracy depends on bringing forth a shared world, one that is situated not just in data but value.  When the information is separated from any context or value, it becomes not only useless but corrosive to the building of a democracy.  Once again, the impact of Capitalism goes beyond the limited impact of the economy, striking at the heart of the way we see and interact with the world.

                To make information as ubiquitous and instantaneous as we have, we had to break it into ‘bits.’  That is, instead of encountering and processing information in a context saturated in value and meaning, information was extracted from the conditions and circumstances that created it and literally smashed into binary bits of code.  That code travels virtually, with no social or biological references to situate, restrict or modify the way we intake and process it.  Increasingly, ‘information’ is produced by bots and other programs without any concern for its accuracy or validity.  The impact of this played an important role in the 2016 election, and it has been a telling characteristic of Trump’s presidency.  Once information has been broken free of context and meaning, it’s relatively easy to lie about everything.  You can ‘fact check’ what is said, but the blizzard of factoids and the lack of any sort of authority makes it impossible to counter the lies.  With enough ‘likes’ from enough ‘friends,’ the ‘truth’ can be whatever you want it to be.

                Even the way we deal with information in our educational system has been dramatically impacted by these changes.  More and more, we rely on a testing regimen that mimics the same ‘bitted’ form of learning information, abandoning the analysis and synthesis of the information or even using it to construct or critique and idea.  When students read, they read for matching content to test questions and not for a complex and integrated understanding of the material.  If you can get the multiple-choice question right, it doesn’t really matter if you understand what it means.  Just as in the rest of society, school has succumbed to the quantity information and lost any meaningful way to understand the quality of that information. 

                To be fair, the ‘gatekeeping’ function of education has always been problematic.  It promoted a limited view of the world tailored to the interests and advantages of the elites who paid for and ran them.  The contexts that were provided often left equally valid perspectives out and created an educational system that was stilted and unfair.  I’m not bemoaning its demise, but without some means of contextualizing and situating information within a value system, democracy is impossible.  We’ve adopted a ‘fast twitch’ thought process that consumes information the same way we use and discard plastic, with the same consequences to the environment they come from.  Maybe schools should stop worrying about how much information they dispense and start working toward a more deliberative, creative and collaborative model of critique and communication.

                Just as I don’t think the physical world can survive the consequences of turning the biosphere into a profit margin, I don’t think a democratic politics is possible in a world where information is treated as code instead of value.  Our current political situation should be ample warning of what happens when deliberate misinformation and populism intersect.  Thinking about the world is more than Googling an answer, it is engaging with the people we share the world with in a way that is sustainable and mutual.  The technological manipulation of information is not inevitable.  It is a direct consequence of the impact of capitalism and the destruction and deracination of the life world.

Democracy and Capitalism – Part 1

                One of the tensions between where we find ourselves and a more essential and radical phase of democracy is its relationship to capitalism.  Capitalism has become the uncontested economic descriptor of our age.  Nothing really even opposes it any-more.  We are, we’ve been told, ‘at the end of history’ as it relates to the evolution of competing forms of economic and social organization.  While there are many phases and types of capitalism, they all share one founding epiphany, the elimination of the cosmos and the deracination of experience.  This is the dominate theme of Peter Sloterdijk’s book, In the World Interior to Capital.  While there are many layers of his critique that are too complicated to reproduce here, the central insight is the way that the invention of latitude and longitude paved the way for Portuguese navigators to reduce the world to a set of coordinates instead of a specific and sacred place.  The age of navigation and exploration destroyed any connection to place and value that wasn’t easily reduced to capital. 

                It took awhile for the older cosmological forms of order and meaning to dissipate, but we find ourselves at the point in this transition where even the sustainable future of the biosphere is being overrun by the intense lack of value other than money that capitalism feeds on.  There is no viable argument for continuing to destroy the environment, and civilization, in search of the last petro-dollar, but we appear to ready to do it anyway.  Sloterdijk’s critique makes it clear that any other value system or form of meaning that opposes the raw value of capital must be defeated.  Our relationship to the world becomes existentially transactional.  I think it’s important to see this as the essence of capitalism.  This isn’t just an argument about what kind of energy or distribution system our economy will be based on, it is the realization that capitalism is incapable of leaving any extractable value on the table.  The reality at the heart of capitalism is that it is driven to destroy any connection other than money.

                The issue is no longer how labor is rewarded or organized, because eventually capitalism consumes and destroys the concept of labor.  Eventually, capitalism devolves into the consumption of money by money.  It no longer is connected to anything but its own internal dynamic and cannot be regulated or modified by any other locus of meaning.  It consumes the cosmos and renders all the connections and values within it moot.   We have tended to treat capitalism as an economic practice that is compatible with and controlled by politics.  Increasingly it is clear that politics is being controlled by capitalism in its most raw and base forms.  Capitalism is incompatible with politics once it begins the reduction of the political to the economic.

                Radical democracy cannot be content to reform or redirect capitalism.  If we are going to be democratic, we have to find a way to build a cosmological defense against capitalism.  That is, money cannot be the reason we do what we do.  This is not merely a question of moving to socialism or some other more collectivist form of capitalism that temporarily diverts the ultimate goals of capitalism.  We’ve tried that, back when we were still part of ‘history.’  It is impossible to overstate the threat of capitalism to the planet.  We talk about alternative energy and sustainable growth, but none of that is compatible with capitalism and none of it will survive the brutal transactional force of capital.  The only way to defeat capitalism is by creating a cosmology of value beyond money.  There are lots of potential pitfalls in that idea.  Cosmologies carry their own dangers, just follow the trajectory of any organized religion. 

                The challenge of radical democracy is to create a cosmological connection to the earth and to one another that can remain open and avoid orthodoxy and tests of purity.  There are lots of possible and even plausible narratives about why democracy has failed, but they should include the corrosive effects of capitalism and its destructive and inhumane ideas of wealth and progress.  Radical democracy is not more of the same with better group dynamics and smarter leaders.  Radical democracy must challenge the Eurocentric narrative of capitalism and wealth if it is going to have a chance.

Building a World

                Democracy is an evolutionary and aspirational project.  Democracies are continually faced with the need to redefine and redirect themselves as the conditions of their existence change.  One of the structural failures of our democracy has been our inability to create and sustain an educational project that fulfills this need.  We have settled on an educational system that promotes class stagnation and political inaction.  The potential is there to do more, but the debate over our schools is mired in the tired and failed language of individual performance and testing.  We have adopted the attitude that reading an isolated text on your own and answering questions about it is enough.  An educational system that is capable of sustaining and invigorating a democratic society has to have as its main goal the building of democratic practices that allow democracy to adapt and flourish.  We’re doing exactly the opposite.

                I’ve written before that, following an earlier critique of our nation, that education has become ‘extractive,’ working to funnel public money and energy into the hands of the rich.  Another way of putting it might be to use the image Ramon Feenstra uses and say that education has been kidnapped, it no longer produces democratic outcomes and is strangled by a managerial class of politicians, business leaders and bureaucrats that all want schools to support their goals.  Dewey thought that education and inquiry were at the heart of an evolving democracy.  We have moved over time to an educational system that promotes a sedentary instead of a dynamic image of the world.  We’ve constructed schools to teach kids the way it is instead of engaging them in the possibility of what could be.  We stifle instead of grow their creative energy, and then wonder why they seem so unenthused to be there.  Education is not a factor in economic and social mobility (not that there’s much of that going on anyway), and it creates the undemocratic and unnatural feeling that learning is something done for someone else’s interests.

                Maturana says that we ‘bring forth a world,’ it isn’t just sitting there as an objective reality.  In the process of bringing forth a world, we have to conserve and tend to the transgenerational links that allow us to evolve while preserving our social and structural couplings to a world that sustains us and is in turn sustained by us.  Hannah Arendt wrote that the ultimate goal of education was preserve and celebrate a common world of our potential.  You can’t develop a standardized test for that.  You can’t farm that out to a state committee on outcomes.  It has to be woven into the daily fabric of interactions that reinforce the importance of the democratic values we want to work toward.  Every word and every action is both important and impossible to undo.

                The transgenerational trust is broken.  We are not passing a sustainable, let alone a better or more promising world.  We’ve treated our time here like we were in a temporary rental that was going to be someone else’s problem soon, so why fix it.  There is no process or institution in our world that could do more to address this than education, but only if we stop the madness.  The imagination that it takes to dream a new world and bring it into being is there, but it’s buried under a curriculum designed to fail instead of promote that dream.  Kids will learn to read and do math – maybe they’ll even learn it better if it’s their idea.  Education is a conversation that unites us to ever changing and evolving people and circumstance.  It can’t be so scripted that it shuts out insight, experiments and joy.

                Instead of sending our children off to ‘learn’ what the world is all about, we should be sending them off to build and play.  If we knew the answers we wouldn’t be where we are now.  They certainly need help and guidance, and we need our faith rekindled by their faith.  Democracy requires participation in the most active and creative sense possible.  It’s more than a tweet or an Instagram or a blog post.  In order to build and grow a democratic world, schools need to redefine their goals and change their practices.  Schools need to be part of what brings us together and not an instrument for segregation and marginalization.