God and the Compact

                If the social compact is defined as those values and ethical connections that bind us together as a society, apart from any legal or formalistic ties, then I think the majority of people might assume that religion would be the default starting point for those values.  I think there is good reason to resist that impulse.  I think that religion, and Christianity in particular, has made our democracy less inclusive and less tolerant.  There are those who would argue that those using religion to divide us aren’t true Christians, but try telling them that.  There are things in the basic structure of monotheism that are antithetical to a social compact that will sustain a democracy.

                I think that people should believe and worship whatever and wherever they choose, but the idea that it is our ‘Christian’ values that sustain us is more problematic.  In the first place, Christianity in America is a shrinking part of the demographic.  There have been fairly sharp shifts in the number of people who identify as Christian as compared to those who identify as ‘non.’  That shift is even more pronounced among millennials.  Even of the shrinking number of older, white folk who identify as Christian, only a fraction of those actively practice.  Throw in the 9-10 percent of people who identify with a religion other than Christianity, and we are almost at a plurality of people who are not Christian,  That plurality is only going to grow as older generations die off.  It would indeed be odd if not tyrannical to base the ethical and moral foundation of a democracy on something that a minority believe.

                An even more compelling reason to leave religion out of this is that monotheism in it’s Abrahamatic forms is inherently exclusive and not inclusive.  The values are supposed to be ‘universal,’ but access requires conversion and orthodoxy.  Every sect of every religion based on the covenant with Abraham believes that they are the chosen ones.  They believe their interpretation of the word is the correct interpretation, and they have spent large parts of the last two millenniums killing each other over the right to say that.  This ethical flaw is not an aberration of a few practitioners, it is the foundation of monotheistic values.  The “Christian” values that we lean on are already given as a reason to exclude other religions or discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual identity.  They won’t even sell the people they think are ‘sinners’ a damn wedding cake.

                This is no way to sustain a democracy.  We’ve added “under God” to the pledge and printed “in God we Trust” on every piece of currency we make, but that hasn’t made us a more democratic or more inclusive country.  In fact, things are trending in the opposite direction, as they often will in times of social change and upheaval.  If you put a monotheistic religion under pressure, it resorts to trying to ‘purify’ the culture.  The mayhem and bloodshed are never far behind.  A democratic compact has to have a foundation that cannot be reduced to sectarian claims.  We have to be more cosmopolitan than Christian.

                We find ourselves faced with certain collapse and extinction if we don’t find a way to rebuild a social compact that protects not just the diversity of our culture but the diversity of natural world.  The ethical foundation for a revived social compact is under our feet.  We live in it.  We have to learn to share and preserve it together.  Christians have been conquerors and marauders.  They thought they were ordained by providence to rule the land and all that it gave.  They all think, in one way or another, that they are chosen.  They are not the examples we should use to build a democratic future. 

Citizenship

                In one of the most controversial and antidemocratic Supreme Court decisions influenced by Scalia’s hypocritical notion of ‘constructivism,’ the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations had the same first amendment rights as individuals.  The decision opened the flood gates of ‘dark money’ that has crippled the democratic process, skewing elections toward a hand full of very rich donors, think the Koch brothers, who are able to hide their influence and meddling behind shell entities.  What our democracy faces now is predicated on the notion that rights do not necessarily imply citizenship That is, that corporations have the ‘rights’ of individuals without the responsibility of citizenship.

                Naomi Zack frames the issue by distinguishing between the social contract and the social compact.  The contract contains all the legal and constitutional elements of the democracy, while the compact is the ethical and moral commitment that citizens in the society have to each other.  Without the compact, the contract quickly erodes into clever lawyering and constitutional chicanery.  It is the commitment to the compact, the values and ethics that ground the relational foundation of a democracy that keep that democracy alive and vital.  The court failed to see that extending the rights of the contract to entities with no commitment to the compact was a recipe for undermining and unraveling the foundations of the democracy.

                Corporations shouldn’t have the rights of citizens if they are unwilling to also assume the responsibility of the compact, of acting in accordance the values of fairness and humane treatment we depend on in a democracy.  This rupture between the contract and the compact is the main reason that capitalism is destructive to democracy.  We expect corporations to be driven by the bottom line.  Trump has even bragged that paying little or no taxes is a sign of a smart businessman.  It may be, but it is not a quality of good citizenship.  Making money is fine if it can be done within the framework of the compact.  We tend to only hold corporations accountable to the law, but their larger civic responsibility is to the values that sustain the democracy.  Obviously, that isn’t happening.

                Every day we are confronted with another regulation being rolled back or another tax break targeted to the already obscenely rich, as if the only thing that makes us a democracy are the rights that individuals and corporations (even political parties) have is to (barely) follow the law.  That may be a legalistic and formal minimum for a democracy, but it will never produce a sustainable society.  No one, individual or corporate, should enjoy the rights of the contract without living within the commitments of the compact.  We have reified the idea of the law, thereby separating it from the social and relational contexts that create it.  Any society that conflates being legal with being moral is doomed.

                We need to stop apologizing for demanding that there be an ethical component to democratic citizenship.  Anyone who isn’t willing to uphold the compact is not a citizen, and certainly not a patriot.  You may have rights, but they are only legitimate in the context of the values and ethical standards that create and support them.  It doesn’t help that we have a president and majority leader who have contempt for both the contract and the compact.  To them, this is just a game they play to enrich themselves and those around them.  In that kind of culture, babies are torn out of their mother’s arms at the border, the ocean is filled with plastic and more and more life forms are fading into extinction.  This cannot last.

                It’s fine to be absorbed in policy and spend your time combing over the details of each candidate’s health care plan.  But the more important question is what values does that plan promote?  If we’re going to put profit above all else, then we will never have an equitable program.  The most salient part of those values we need reflects most directly on the environment.  Wealth that is driven by destruction really isn’t wealth at all.  Burning oil to make money isn’t any better than selling meth to school children.  It is our values and relationships that sustain our democracy, not the rights of corporations.

School

                At least once, and sometimes several times, a day I walk by the public elementary school in my neighborhood.  Like a lot of schools, it has that unmistakable architectural footprint somewhere between a factory and a prison, a lot of asphalt and chain link fencing.  Even when the kids aren’t there, it smells and feels like a school.  I wonder if we disappeared like the Mayans and our buildings were dug up a thousand years later what the archeologists, aliens to be sure, would make of such a place.  Every culture has practices and artifacts that are so normalized within the culture that no one really sees how odd they are.  School is one of ours.

                There are so many things about the institution of school that really don’t make much sense anymore, from both a pedagogical and organizational perspective.  The herding of children into buildings and segregating them by age groups sounds more sinister than we allow.  Breaking them off into small groups with one arbitrary adult leader for a year sounds even worse.  If we really valued what any of these children could become, wouldn’t we do more make this experience more like the world they existed in until they reached the magic age of five?  Wouldn’t we do more to match them up according to talents and interests that said more about them than their age does?   It’s easy to see that the purpose here is to homogenize the children, to make them into one interchangeable group of voters and workers.  School used to be a way off the farm and out of a stifling small town, now it’s just an assembly line for disenfranchised people.

                In the early part of the last century, institutions such as schools were a way of creating a common culture, of setting a standard of societal expectation and involvement that went beyond the geographic limitations of what was then a mostly agrarian nation.  Even in the middle of the century immediately following the war, school held its place as a means of cultural generation along with the emergence of mass media and consumer capitalism.   School was where we went to be immersed in a bigger world and get ourselves shaped up and ready for a new future, one that our parents were incapable of preparing for us on their own.  All of this happened in the context of a society that had a high sense of shared values and trust in its political institutions.  Even when those values were papered over the racist and sexist assumptions shared by most Americans, they were promoted in schools where we held our hands over our hearts and said the pledge.  We were all going to Disneyland.

                That world seems pretty far away now.  School couldn’t compete with the digital explosion of information, and it eventually got swept away in the consumer culture that created and destroyed fads and fashion faster than an archaic agrarian institution could possibly absorb.  The population of chronically underemployed women that had found a sheltered market in public schools (just as they had in the charity schools in England a century earlier) were suddenly freed to seek (almost) equal employment in a variety of better paying and higher status jobs.  Economic mobility in America eventually ground to a halt, and instead of being a mixing place for different classes of people, schools became a caste system that locked kids into the economic stratifications of their parents.  The central curriculum that was supposed to level social knowledge and mobility stagnated under this new economic and social order into the dried out and decaying testing desert it is today.

                Maybe in the first decades of the 20^th Century, school made sense.  It was certainly a laudable goal to treat us all equally and give us all the same chance to excel, but that isn’t what school does any more.  A radical democracy requires an educational approach that is far less formal, one more attuned to the technology and the politics of the moment.  Instead of sending our children to school, we need to start finding ways to bring school into our daily lives.  We’ve tried a mass cultural, top-down, formal approach to school, and it didn’t work.  We are more segregated and less able to communicate across the cultural barriers that divide us than we ever were.  Perhaps it is time to rethink this situation before the alien archeologists have to dig them and puzzle over just what the hell these people thought they were doing.    

Mediocre Elite

                One of the consequences of having an economic and educational system so skewed toward the wealthy is that the children of the top few percent of families economically never fail.  Instead, they are given a pass to the best schools and positions of influence and power regardless of how competent or intelligent they are.  They can fail upward their whole lives, while children in the lower income brackets stand less and less chance of being given a chance.  In a culture that is supposed to value merit and ability, this is critical problem.  It means that more of the top schools and top jobs are populated with people who’s only qualification is the wealth of their parents and not their ability.  The result is an elite class that is really full of pretty mediocre people.

                The textbook example of this is the flap over Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.  I don’t know enough about Hunter Biden to have any idea whether or not he is good at what he does or is qualified to do it.  I do know that Eric and Donald Trump Jr. talking about him taking advantage of his father’s position is more like an SNL skit than they realize.  Whether Hunter Biden has earned it or not, all of us reflexively assume that it is just another example of the rich getting richer while the rest of us scuffle just to stay afloat.  Our society is more and more segregated on the basis of wealth.  Even if we exclude the Ivies, the next tier of top universities in the country are filled with students who come from the top 5-10 percent of family household incomes.  They meet, marry and befriend people from the same economic class they come from.  Education has become a way of reinforcing social and economic stratification.

                It’s been clear for awhile that the economic system is rigged to concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of people.  The tax laws and monetary system function to help them consolidate and increase their wealth at the expense of everyone else.  The Trump tax cut went almost exclusively to the richest of the rich.  We have created an economic class who’s interests are no longer in synch with the general economic interests of the country.  The top 1% pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.  The economy being tilted in this direction is not news.  What is noteworthy is the role our educational system plays in making it even worse.

                We all were appalled, but not surprised, by the recent college admissions scandal that saw celebrities use their money and influence to get their kids into schools they probably didn’t belong in.  The farcical part of the story is that it happens every day.  ‘Legacy’ admissions dominate the upper tier of American colleges is a pyramid scheme every bit as brazen as the one the celebrity parents were caught trying to pull off.  As has been the case in capitalist countries for a long time, it’s only the people with new money who are called out, while the old wealth families get away with murder.  Money has always put a heavy thumb on the scale of who does and who does not get into a particular school.  What is new is how the instruments that were supposed to support the meritocracy, tests, have been rigged to help seal the deal.

                The testing regime in American schools is invalid.  Even without all the help economically advantaged parents can provide, the test replicate the existing economic structure.  Rich schools do better than poor schools.  You could imagine a system where the tests level the playing field and let the intelligence and creativity of children from the lower levels of society shine through.  That’s not what we’ve done.  We have invested billions of dollars in a testing industry that does little more than validate and reconfirm the social advantages of the wealthiest families.  Part of this has always been part of the Protestant Ethic, where rich people are, as Calvin put it, “saved to serve.”  Little did we know that they were mostly saved to serve themselves.  This bias means that often the ‘best’ students from the ‘best’ schools are mediocre at best.  If you think that is an exaggeration, remember that the Trump brothers graduated from Georgetown and Penn.  I guess they have a school for clowns.

               

               

The Over Managed School

                As schools across the country start doing the first parts of the NCLB mandated testing, I think we should stop for a moment and consider what it is we have normalized as part of public education.  In spite of all the blathering about improving schools and learning outcomes, all this testing does is add to the bureaucratic control of schools and enrich the textbook and testing companies that feed this insanity.  These tests are not about student learning or better education.  They reinforce the socioeconomic status the students bring with them to the school, and they are used to put a very early limit on how much most students can ever be expected to achieve.  They are part of what happens when a politically motivated managerial class takes over a school.  The ‘data’ collected just becomes part of an endlessly recycled and recalibrated set of numbers that administrators use to justify their salaries and positions in the hierarchy of the school.  It doesn’t make schools better and it doesn’t make students smarter.

                Since 1983 and the publication of A Nation At Risk, we have been wringing our hands over how bad our schools are.  Most of the blame has been placed on the teachers, who went from respected members of the community to fakers and frauds living on the public dole.  We all know the tune.  First, we produce some suspect data about how bad the students are, and then we find an appropriate villain to start in the revival.  Teachers are almost always the villains.  Even though we spend less on real education (after deducting the money spent of government mandates and administration) than before, we somehow always come to the same conclusions:  the schools are terrible and the teachers suck.  Bush’s NCLB program upped the volume and made this charade into a major Broadway production.  Now public schools are caught in the endless cycle of testing that leads nowhere.

                What happens during these testing cycles is that the teachers, still wearing the black hat, spend less time teaching and more time filling out reports so administrators can fill out still more reports to justify the pitiful amount of state aid coming their way.  Every second spent on this nonsense is time away from what the teachers are supposed to be doing: teaching children.  In ‘bad’ schools, the teachers can’t even choose the pace of sequence of the lessons because the managerial class has decided they know how to do it better.  More and more teachers leave the profession, and schools keep failing in the same places and for the same reasons as before.  If any of this worked, even a little bit, wouldn’t the problem be solved by now?

                Public education is supposed to be the life blood of a democracy.  It can’t serve that function if it is instead held hostage to political agendas that are more interested in preserving the economic fortunes of a few over the democratic interests of the majority.  Far from improving or saving schools, we have drained them of their relevance and importance.  While we have been playing this shell game with education, the disparity in wealth in the country has become more severe and the democratic institutions we rely on have eroded.  Mobility in America is lower than in any other industrialized nation, except maybe Britain.  School is not a social or economic engine of democracy, it is instead a place where students go to learn their place.

                It’s past time to call of this to a halt.  There is no validity to the testing regime we are currently practicing.  There is no value to vocationalizing education to the point of losing democratic values and political citizenship.  The next time, and their will be a next time, you hear that test scores are down and the budget requires that we lay off teachers, let’s do this instead.  Let’s stop giving money to the giant textbook and testing companies, lay off most of the central administrators and give the schools back to the teachers.  They’re the only ones who are in this fight for the right reasons.  They’re the only ones who can make a school a school.  If your kid is taking a computerized test this week, ignore it.  Look in their eyes and make sure they are still excited and still want to learn.  Don’t feed the monster.

The Molar Phase

                In their seminal work of postmodern pragmatics, A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss the way that cultures change.  One of their contentions is that change happens in unpredictable and ‘nomadic’ episodes that occur when social stratifications break down and make alternative realities and possibilities available.  The stratifications, or plateaus, can be things like institutions and traditions, but they also include the cultural sense of inevitability that things are normal or meant to allows be this way.  When that inevitability crumbles, they refer to those cultural events as becoming molar or in flow.  I think one way to look at American democracy is to say that we’ve entered a molar phase.  That is, many of the reliable and time-honored assumptions about our institutions and values are in flux.  They have been upended by political operatives who no longer believe in or follow those assumptions.

                We are now in a moment where none of the protocols or rules of democratic practice can be depended on to produce the intended result.  We have a president who refuses to follow or even acknowledge the written or implied those rules.  He is supported by a party who looks the other way and routinely defends the indefensible.  Some of his supporters, who should be jailed for sedition, are even trying to encourage the fringe militia movements to take up arms to fight impeachment.  Clearly, things are not normal.  When something becomes molar, the least likely outcome is that it will return to the state it was in before the disruption.  The plateau has been crumbling and weakening for awhile before it breaks loose and lets go.  Now that it has, we need to think not in terms of an unlikely return but in anticipation of new possibilities.  Now that we’re in a molar phase, a major reorganization and disruption is all but inevitable.

                Most of us, facing this kind of upheaval, tend to look for what used to be the norm and try to shore up the foundations of the failing institutions and practices.  I think that is exactly the wrong way to approach this.  We should embrace this moment and the opportunities it presents.  This is not a minor blip on the timeline of democracy, it is a five-sigma disruption that only comes along every 200 years or so.  No matter which way this disruption leads, it will be fundamentally different from where we were.  It may be that the forces that undercut the old normal will win out.  If they do, the direction they plan to move is pretty clear.  They intend to reduce the power of the electorate and continue consolidating wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people.  They will drain every ounce of fossil energy from the earth and choke on their own stupidity.  Their course is set.  They have one playbook, and we’ve seen what it is.

                Those of us hoping for another direction have a lot of possibilities but no clear vision has emerged.  There have been ideas, the Green New Deal is an example, that have gained some traction but are far from achieving a consensus.  The more important issue is what a coalition of people who oppose the destruction can agree on.  The other side is organized.  They will continue on this well defined and mindless trajectory until it kills us all.  To live in this molar phase and combat that outcome means that the things we normally argue about have to take a back seat to a more pressing concern.  What will unite us?  What can we imagine the future becoming?  A molar or nomadic moment demands imagination, and imagination demands courage.

                We are either going to settle for the worst and most dystopian elements of what we are now or forge a new vision.  It is past time to discard the corruption and environmental degradation of the fossil fuel industry.  But that means our ideas about wealth and energy have to be reshaped along with a shift to new energy sources.  Living in this molar phase is both scary and invigorating.  I think the first steps are less about the specifics of policy and more about the realization of where we are.  We are nomads in search of a new oasis.   

               

Fractal Democracy

                One of the interesting aspects of looking at complex systems using fractals is that the different levels of the system do not necessarily all have the same organizing principle.  Each level of the system is an iterative construction of some fractal structure, just not necessarily the same structure on every level of the system.  I think that is a good way to think about how a radical democracy could organize itself to be both systematic and diverse.  One of the failings of the formal democracy that was constructed in our country is that it tries to reproduce exactly the same structures at every level of the system.  Concepts such as laws, freedoms and rights are supposed to operate the same way everywhere, but they never do.  As a result, they become more and more vague and indefinable.  If we understood that some parts of the system would operate differently in different contexts, maybe we could start to conceptualize a democratic system that was both coherent and diverse.

                We know that in our current system we all have a right to equal representation, but we also know that lobbyists and money drive the system.  We all have a right to an equal education, but we also know that your parents’ wealth pretty much determines what kind of education a child actually receives.  In short, the Euclidian view of social life promoted in a formal democracy is never what it claims to be.  Trying to reach the potential of a diverse political, social and economic culture is constantly being frustrated by our insistence that every piece looks exactly like every other piece.  All kinds of privileges are baked into the system on the basis of race, gender, religion and sexual identification, but calling them out is always frustrated by the false concept of equality.  The way that affirmative action was labeled as an unfair advantage in a society of blatantly unfair advantages is a good example.  The only way a formal democracy can think of us is to think of us as all the same, even though we obviously are not.

                If democracy is going to morph into a viable expression of diverse but equal people it has to find another way to model what it is going to think of as consistency.  Our political and legal dialog has degenerated into a childish game of who got more cookies than the other.  It is particularly ineffective when we can see that the folks that started with the most cookies in the first place can use the game to extend their advantage.  Why do we construct political arguments around issues such as abortion as a zero-sum game?  Why does there have to be only one way of adjudicating an issue?  No one is running into anti-abortion communities and demanding that people have abortions, but it seems perfectly natural to us as part of our legalistic formalism to demand that other communities follow one set of laws.  All this does is to create obviously hypocritical arguments about life and rights that are as tedious as they are flawed.  A radical democracy has to allow for differences on those issues.

                Communities can have different organizing principles as long as two conditions are met.  The first is that the organizing structure of the community cannot threaten the structural organization of another community.  Issues surrounding climate or war or food have to be protected and adjudicated at the most comprehensive and powerful level of the democracy.  Other issues can be settled in smaller communities as long as people have the right to leave or join the community as they choose.  That means that there are some communities that will do things that you (and me) find objectionable, but as long as the people in the community aren’t coerced into compliance, as long as they have a chance to leave, we should accept that.

                The two forms of purity that threaten American democracy are Puritanism and identity.  Both are a result, although in opposite ways, of trying to make everyone the same.  The most onerous is Puritanism, which tries to impose a moral judgement on anything that violates the dominant value of the community.  Morality is often just an intergenerational reaction to change.  The supposed right of any one value system to dominate another, as long as some basic principles and free association are real alternatives, should be resisted.  If that were the case, the fierce battle over identity might be avoided.  In our culture identity is driven by the difference generating forces of capitalism and the uniform suppression of difference in our politics.  It is a schizophrenic charade.  If we could see ourselves as multiple, as having different organizing structures within ourselves, we could move toward a democracy that is both radical and fractal. 

Unstructured

                As schools in Michigan move past ‘count day’ and start to stabilize their budgets, another right of fall begins.  Schools in the state, indeed all over the country, are starting the first round of standardized testing.  That means children as young as 5 years old are sitting at a computer or tablet answering questions that will determine how the educational system labels and treats them.  Setting aside the fact that children this young don’t have a clear developmental status and the tests are biased by wealth, education of the parents, race and gender(and that’s a lot to set aside), the bigger problem is that the tests promote an idea of intelligence and learning that is antithetical to the lives these children are going to live.  They are not going to be sitting at computers spitting out predetermined answers.  They are going to confront some of the biggest and most fundamental changes in history.

                It’s one thing to structure an educational system this way in a stable culture with a low rate of change and a high rate of dependability and confidence in the information taught.  Perhaps, most of our history has demanded just such a system.  There were aspects of Egyptian tomb painting that remained the same for over three thousand years.  But this is ancient Egypt.  We live, and our children are being educated in, one of the most unstable and changeable periods imaginable.  There is little that these children will face that can merely be settled by established precedent or practice.  The environmental issues alone will force them to think in ways that we never had to contemplate.  Far from the structured environment of computer testing, our children and grandchildren face a completely unstructured future.

                Living in an unstructured time demands different intellectual and pattern recognition skills.  There is less value in stock answers and more emphasis on adaptability and creativity.  There is less value in individual intelligence or genius and more importance placed on collaborative and community- based thinking.  We are failing our responsibility to prepare them for any of this.  Even where the educational system has adopted ‘group work’ and collaboration, the final measuring stick always goes back to those tests of those computers, because that’s where the money is.  Unstructured thinking isn’t just a cool unit in the curriculum stuffed between reading and science, it is an entirely different approach to learning.  We tend to start with answers, and unstructured learning starts with patterns and problems.

                The fact is that we don’t know what they need to know.  We can help them, but we can’t direct them.  Instead of drilling the enthusiasm of learning out of them by taking away their curiosity and initiative, we should be developing a transgenerational network of interests and possibilities they can build on and we can contribute to with our experience.  Instead of a room full of silent children staring blankly at screens that score their responses instantaneously, imagine a school full of children and adults in play and conversation.  We know what their test scores are going to be before they even take the tests in many cases.  All we’re doing now is confirming and locking in the social and economic status they were born with.  They need discovery and not judgement.

                Dewey called this blending of ideas, ages, ethnicities and genders inquiry.  He thought it was the heart and soul of a democratic culture that was always striving to improve and be more inclusive.  Sometimes, the most important questions come only in the aftermath of failure and confusion.  We never let our children experience the positive outcomes of either of those.  In the world that is emerging, learning isn’t acting out someone else’s agenda (particularly if that agenda is driven by text- book and testing companies) but in setting your own.  We have trapped generations of teachers and students in a zero-sum game of predictability and statistical illusions.  We have drained the life out of schools and the love out of learning.  There is no need for every school to be the same or for every teacher to teach the same unit on the same day.  That isn’t accountability; it’s sterile and pedantic. 

                The problems of democracy are all unstructured problems.  We shouldn’t be surprised that as the American political system comes unraveled, so many people are confused and indifferent.  We’ve been teaching them to be that way from a very early age.

               

Rebuild

                The only way democracy survives after Trump is to rebuild it.  That’s true whether he is impeached, defeated in the next election or finishes out a second term.  The damage that he is personally responsible for is obvious, but it is also obvious that the foundations of American democracy were already rotting.  Trump’s presidency is so disastrous precisely because the form of democracy we practiced was created for a different reality in a different time.  We never imagined a president so dismissive of the laws and restraints of the office.  We never imagined a major political party that would be not only complicit but an active participant in the attacks on democracy.  We never imagined a system so corrupt that the richest of the rich, after stealing almost two trillion dollars in the great recession, would come back with a tax bill to steal a couple trillion more.  But here we are.

                We have been taught to revere the founders and the vision they crafted in the constitution, but every vision has an expiration date, and we’ve reached ours.  We have been amending and patching the flaws in our constitution, expanding the franchise and protections, for over two hundred years; it’s time for a teardown rehab.  Even the founders imagined and made provisions for new constitutional conventions, so they must have realized the compromise form of republic they were able to piece together would need major adjustments down the road.  Maybe as long as there was a consensus that we should take the original document and intent seriously and try to live to its standards, the prudent thing to do was not to make to many changes.  Maybe that made sense before Moscow Mitch and The Donald, but it doesn’t anymore.  We are trying to resurrect a two-party system when one of the two parties has decided to opt out of any responsibility or ethical commitment to the process.

                Our constitution was written for a class of agrarian oligarchs more interested in their own immediate economic future than the political fate of the masses.  It was written on the back of 17^th century notions of individualism and the social contract that simply don’t translate to a diverse and inclusive democracy.  The house we inherited may have looked like a Greek temple, but it doesn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, let alone an internet connection.  Institutions like the Electoral College are vestiges of the way the founding oligarchs saw the rest of us.  If you can Google yourself, we should be able to create a secure, instantaneous way of respecting the popular vote.  Being ‘democratic’ is more than a form of government; it’s a way of life.

                I have no illusions how messy and terrible this might be.  Like every major renovation there will be delays, unexpected problems and cost overruns, but the roof is leaking and the furnace is broken with winter only a month away.  This may not be the most opportune time to undertake this rebuild, but we don’t have a choice.  We thought democracy was a given, a birthright of being an American, but we have never really invested in the work and commitment that a democracy demands.  Less than half of the eligible voters even show up at the polls.  Government, whether it’s the Federal Government or the local Zoning Commission, is somebody else’s problem.  We flaunt our ‘rights,’ but we have no problem shirking the duties and responsibilities they are based on.  There is a lot that could go wrong, but the current situation is not sustainable.

                As the impeachment proceedings pick up steam and Trump does his best imitation of a feral pig trapped in a pit of quicksand, the temptation will be to see it as a ‘one off’ presidency.  I think that is a mistake.  This is the third impeachment proceeding in less than 50 years.  We went almost 200 years with only one caused by the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln.  This place is a mess.  Trump’s presidency is only possible in the first place in a broken system.  In no other era would he be seen as a credible candidate for the job.  As we work our way through whatever is going to happen next, we cannot be content to only do part of the job.  If we want to live in a democracy, we have to redesign one that fits our time and our challenges, just like those agrarian oligarchs did 240 some years ago.