Energy and Information

                As we watch the House Republicans systematically dismantle what we used to call our democratic institutions, I think it’s time to start thinking about the deep structural changes that have to occur before we can rebuild a more robust and radical democracy.  There are lots of things that will have to change and be rearranged, but the two I think are most basic to building a new society are energy and information.  As building blocks of our daily lives, these two systems not only control the way our lives play out, they control the way we think about the options that are available to us.  Changes in these two systems will change almost everything else we do.

                The change in energy has been coming for a while now.  Climate change and greenhouse gasses are part of our daily lexicon.  I don’t think, however, that we’ve been as radical as we need to be about this shift in energy or what that shift will mean to other aspects of our lives.  When people talk about a proposal such as the Green New Deal, the tendency is to say it’s too extreme or too radical.  That might have been true twenty years ago, but it’s not true today.  We had a chance to be moderate and gradual, but we passed it up for a chance to build a few more coal powered power plants and a few thousand more gas guzzling SUVs.  The environmental part of the equation is widely debated, but it’s the structural changes that come with a shift to renewable energy that might have the most profound impact on how we structure our lives.

                Our energy is centralized and monetarized, meaning that the power of energy is controlled by a few companies and those companies are more interested in profit than the environment or flexibility.  When renewables make up a majority of our energy (and there’s a transition phase where they won’t and will need to supplemented by things like nuclear energy) the way we think about energy will change.  Instead of large conglomerates controlling supply and running pipelines and wires everywhere, a new energy system can spawn a whole new independence.  There are already people who ‘live off the grid,’ but in this system there would be no ‘grid’ to be part of.  The dominate and coercive effect on our economy that energy companies have will be eliminated.  We can share energy and be more responsible for the choices we make about it.  If we produce our own energy, I think we will become more of how it impacts our lives, and maybe we can stop burning California to the ground.  Being self-dependent will also give communities more control over development and land use.

                I think most people would be confused by the idea of an information infrastructure, but we have one.  There is a monopoly of a few gargantuan companies, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), Apple and Microsoft, that control the information industry.  The proof that they’re monopolies is in the way they buy up every promising new alternative to their dominance.  We are at their mercy as much as the people in California are at the mercy of rolling blackouts.  Just as our experience with energy has conditioned us to act in certain ways, so, too, has the information business.  The control that they exert over what we know and how we know it is a direct threat to democracy, which depends on good information and a highly manipulated algorithm of ‘likes,’ to function.  We’ve been running a 25 year experiment about unfettered information in a capitalistic system, and the results are pretty clear.  Either we change the information infrastructure or we lose our grip on sanity and reality.

                Both energy and information challenge us to behave differently.  How much energy should we use?  Are all the things we use energy to do and make really worth it?  Are we really better off with no regulation of information?  Are we really smarter and more well informed because of it?  There aren’t any easy answers to any of this, but it’s time to start the conversation.  Among the reasons our democracy failed was the corruption of the economy and politics by petrodollars and the contamination of the ‘public sphere’ by information companies.  It’s too late to stop what they have done, but if we want a different future we have to change the way they impact our world.

Whatta Ya Know ?

                As we stumble on through the public impeachment hearings, a central problem in our democracy becomes more and more evident: there is no way to create a consensus around what is and is not true.  I’m not talking about the kind of Truth that comes with flaming bushes and stone tablets, just the ordinary grounds for agreeing how we sort out what we think is important.  A democracy cannot function without some mechanism for defining political reality.  I am also not proposing that we return to any of the male dominated truth machines of the church and state that propped up political reality since the Enlightenment.  But we have to find some way that we can talk to each other without retreating to separate universes and lobbing bricks at the other side.  How did this get to be so hard?

                Science was supposed to solve this problem.  Rational and scientific thought was supposed to be free of the ideological contamination that infected the religious definitions of reality it replaced.  It should be pretty simple.  We have visual evidence from space that the earth is round (ok, elliptical if you must), but more people than ever believe the earth is flat.  Exhaustive studies on the effects of vaccines have concluded that they do not produce autism, but the anti-vaxer movement still grows.  Over 99% of climate scientists believe that climate change is real, but people still deny it exists.  How could there be such a disconnect between science and popular belief?  Democracy is impossible if people just deny what they don’t want to believe.  It depends on a robust conflict of ideas that can be worked out through dialog and compromise to create a political truth.  That truth may, and probably will, be found to be wrong or insufficient down the road, but that’s part of the plan.  When Dewey tried to define democracy as inquiry, that constant interrogation of truth is exactly what he had in mind.  We can’t engage in inquiry because we can’t agree how to agree on what is real.

                The expectation, ever since Bacon, was that science wouldn’t fall into the same sectarian disagreements that sent Christians out to kill other Christians over petty doctrinal issues.  To be fair, the chemists and physicists aren’t cutting each other’s throats, but a large part of the population has simply tuned out.  As science advanced, it became more specialized and credentialed.  Early proponents of the ‘New Science’ didn’t have to go through peer review to get tenure or research positions.  That specialization helped the sciences, making their work more focused and more productive.  Unfortunately, it also cut out most of the people.  The way we teach science doesn’t really help the problem, concentrating on rote memorization instead of experimentation and direct experience.  But the bigger problem is that for a lot of people who don’t really understand what science is or how it works it isn’t any more valid than Uncle Ted’s version of how the world works.  Scientists don’t think they should have to have a narrative interface, but without one their work is just being ignored by people who don’t get it.

                The temptation is just to say that those people are dumb, and they might be, but they vote.  They elected a president who tweets out half-baked conspiracy theories daily.  Science will not survive as a stand-alone enterprise if the political will to fund it and follow it isn’t there.  People want to believe they understand the world; that it makes sense.  If they can’t make sense of science, they’ll find another story to tell about how the world works.  I think that’s the easiest way to understand why our political system is in trouble.  Elites thought they could control the narrative by talking only to other elites.  In a democracy, that’s not enough.  The point is that in a democracy science needs more than labs and equipment; it needs a story, one that is both inclusive and captivating.  I think that story exists, but scientists don’t seem to want to tell it.  We have to change the way we educate people about how we make knowledge.  We have to stop acting like a random selection of facts or information means anything at all.  We also have to stop assuming that we only need to speak to the people who are as refined and educated as we are.  Democracy as inquiry needs more than a plan for STEM programs; it needs a narrative about those programs that makes them accessible and understandable to all of us.

               

               

               

Good Faith

                When most people think about being able to read, they think about the mechanical aspects of identifying words, sounds and letters.  It is true that readers have to learn to master semiotic systems that underly the written language, but reading is far from a mechanical exercise.  At its core, reading is a social activity that involves the reader in an ongoing and preestablished conversation, one that always takes the reader outside of herself even if her original encounter is personal.  One way of looking at a text is to see it as a complete and non-negotiable artifact.  In this view, the text has a meaning and it is the job of the reader to faithfully find that meaning.  The problem is that even the simplest texts have multiple possible meanings, and the reader finds the meaning they are most willing to find.  This is the basic insight of Reader Response Criticism.  Some versions give more power to the text, and some give more power to the reader, but they all see reading as an interaction or negotiation between the text and the reader.

                There are two more things that have to happen for a reading to take place.  First the reader has to make a commitment to the text (text here can be almost anything).  In order to read, the reader has to want to read.  If they don’t, no amount of mechanical proficiency will produce a valid reading.  One of the reasons that reading test scores are always dubious is because the students taking the test don’t want to read the test.  They are smart enough to know the test means more to the adults than it does to them, so they mail it in.  The second thing that has to happen is that the reader, even when deciding to engage, has to make a good faith effort.  That is, they have to be willing to try to play within the framework of the text and be willing to engage other readings from other readers.  When other teachers used to say, “yeah, but what if they say Hamlet is about dogs from Venus,” my response was they weren’t making a real effort.  The teacherly impulse is to tell them what it means, but telling them what it means is not a reading, it’s a command.

                Committing to a reading is demanding.  A reader has to set aside whatever they’re doing to enter another realm of languaging.  If the person has learned that they are going to be pressured for a ‘right’ answer, the commitment is even less likely.  Language regimes can be brutal things.  You can be corrected, ridiculed or even punished for not getting it right.  A real commitment begins by surrendering your time and focus to a social encounter.  It means you are going to try and read something that is not of your creation and might put you at odds with other people.  Just like listening to a friend is more than just hearing the words, a commitment to reading involves more than just decoding a text.  In fact, sometimes we retract our commitment after getting into the text and finding out we’re just not interested in continuing.

                The issue of making a good faith effort is even more important.  We’ve all had to read things we didn’t want to read.  We committed to finishing but not really trying to make our own meanings and compare it to the meanings others made.  Good faith means we are going to take this seriously and try to work through what troubles us or what we disagree about.  It means you care and will show some respect for the people and the process.  Without good faith, reading is reduced to a game that allows anyone to say anything.  

                I think what applies to reading applies to living in a democracy.  We have to make a choice to make a commitment to dialog of our culture.  That commitment means we are going to try and stick it out and give it our best shot.  It means we have to sometimes suspend our judgement and give the process a chance to work itself out.  It means we have to stay engaged.  When we don’t the democracy weakens and becomes stagnant. Making a good faith effort means that we will not just participate in the dialog but respect the people and processes that are part of it.  That means not reducing everything to personal attacks or throwing out the most outrageous and factually untrue things we can to gum up the works.  Right now, we have on political party who is no longer reading in good faith.  They don’t value the rules, and they don’t care if they ruin or destroy the game.  They think Hamlet is about dogs from Venus.

Narratives of Possibility

                There was a time when we shared a cultural narrative of possibility about what we could become, individually and collectively.  Those narratives promised opportunity and equality to anyone who was willing to buy in and roll up their sleeves.  They were always a big part fairy tale, because both opportunity and equality have never been available to everyone.  But now even the thought of opportunity and equality gets lost in the dystopian narratives of our future.  Go to a ‘sci-fi’ movie and watch the trailers that precede it.  You will be treated to endless iterations of the same scenario – the good days are gone, technology is evil and the planet is dying.  Even though most of these movies have a hero that fights for the good, any hope of revival is a long way on the other side of some bad stuff.  We have to find a way to tell or retell our story in a way that makes the future possible.

                One of the worst things about the Trump presidency is that it sucks all of the oxygen out of the culture.  When you have a poorly behaved toddler in charge of the political machine, all it creates is an endless cycle of crisis.  Even if we fix the immediate political problems, we are dead in the water without a meaningful sense of where we go next.  We should be thinking about how things are about to change.  They are going to change whether we like it or not.  The crisis with the climate, the coming change in energy production, the economic changes that will come from those changes should all be at the front of our cultural play list.  Instead, we’re caught in a 24 hour news cycle of Trump’s new tirade.  We have the power to change the way we live if we can focus on those issues instead of spending way too much time with trump.  Are we going to use AI to finally free us from menial labor, or are we going to create a new class of killer robots who hunt us down if we ever stop working?

                Our cultural narrative is being held hostage by the shift in demographics that threatens to take power away from those who have, almost exclusively, held it.  Part of this generational, with Boomers holding on to their jobs and their money because they see no place for themselves in the future.  Part of it is racial, as the demographics of country inevitably create a country without a majority of any one race.  White folks can see they are losing their privilege, even those rural whites who support Trump and had little of it to begin with, and can’t deal with that future.  Part of it is gender based, as women ever so slowly move into positions of power, and men are left to figure out how all the things they have heard about being a ‘man’ are supposed to align with that.  All of it is economic, as an incredibly small number of people control the wealth the culture generates. Where do go to tell a new story?  What soapbox, what street corner, what reading group or media platform will host this event?

                There are narratives being told.  Facebook, and every other large platform, tells one every day.  They make it feel like our story, but it’s really their version of what they want us to ‘like.’  There are narratives of loss and fear that are driving us closer to violence and decline being pushed by Russian, Chinese and North Korean bots.  There are still narratives for elites that promote the idea that if your tastes are erudite sophisticated enough you can avoid the scrum.  Cultural narratives that are robust enough to create a new imagined order aren’t going to be that precious.  There are mass media versions of the story in the Marvel Universe and beyond that are long on action and special effects but are tired stories about individual heroes saving the world at their core.  I don’t think any of these are going to take us to a new narrative.

                The bad news is that things are falling apart.  The good news is that things are falling apart.  This is the moment where we can imagine what was unimaginable before.  Before, there was too much of the past in the way, but now a lot of that has been reduced to rubble.  What we were telling ourselves will not help us move to a new world.  Turn off the news.  Concentrate on where we are and what you can contribute to it.  It may be that the odds are long, but that is no reason not to imagine.  The critique of the failures of Modernity and the Enlightenment are complete.  Their failures cannot point the way to a new era. 

The Transgenerational Problem

                I was part of the first ‘generation gap’ back in the 60’s.  We were a generation that was sure it was destined to save the world and overturn the stodgy cultural values and practices that were still entrenched after the war.  We fought for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and against the war, at least some of us did.  The generation that ushered in the Free Speech Movement and the antiwar movement was always just a fraction of that generation.  “Boomers” were never demographically what they were made out to be in the media.  The majority of us didn’t go to college, didn’t protest the war, believe in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll and weren’t particularly liberal.  But those of us who were got all the attention and all the credit for the change that was created.  We’ve apparently morphed from a generation who didn’t “trust anyone over 30,” to one that doesn’t think anyone under 70 should be president.

                We’ve gone from filial piety and elder respect to “Ok Boomer.”  As a society, we’ve balkanized the age differences between us and retreated into the comfortable stereotypes of Boomers, Slackers, Xers and Millennials.  Each generation has faced an accelerated and unique rate of change.  There is little that translates from generation to generation as a positive and enduring cultural anchor.  When the rate of cultural and technological change accelerates, the social connections between generations becomes weaker.  There is less and less that the new generation can relate to or depend on in forming their own necessary adaptations to the environment around them.  When the corrosive effect of market capitalism intent on branding and exploiting every possible difference is added to the mix, it is little wonder that we have the cultural and political rifts we see between generations.  Any healthy democracy has to find a way to facilitate a transgenerational exchange based on goals and values that may manifest themselves differently to each generation but are still recognizable to all generations.

                That problem used to be solved by social institutions that promoted political and educational programs that were designed to increase prosperity and inclusion.  That isn’t happening anymore.  Economic and social mobility is almost at a standstill in this country.  Education has been under a 40 year assault from conservative and right-wing political movements that has hollowed out and degraded what was once a source of pride and equality.  Political institutions have crumbled under the constant debasement of basic democratic principles resulting in the highest level of partisan division and outright cynicism in our history.  In short, we’ve lost the narrative that used to unite us.  To be fair that narrative was often a fiction, they almost always are, that needed to be exposed and debunked.  The problem is not the old narrative of white male privilege and its antipathy to women, people of color, LGBTQ people or immigrants has unraveled, the problem is that we haven’t found a way to replace it.

                The short-term outlook isn’t that rosy.  Trump is going to be impeached and the Republicans are going to respond with an all-out assault of lies and distractions, further weakening our political institutions. The 2020 election will be infested with an unprecedented number of foreign and domestic bots spreading conspiracies and misinformation, and the environment will continue to edge toward the cliff.  There will not be a kumbaya moment any time soon.  One thing that is possible is for Boomers to wake up and read the date on their drivers licenses.  Even with the unparalleled breakthroughs in medical science, no one over 70 should run for president.  The issue is not their health, the issue is the relevance of their frame of reference.  As Boomers, we have had our run, and the results aren’t pretty.  Some of us thought there was a path forward to a better and more equal society that was grounded in respect for each other and the environment, but we were wrong.  It is time to let our children drive.  If we don’t respect what they know and what they can do, we have no one but ourselves to blame.  On the other hand, it is time for the generations that follow us to learn from our example.  Good intentions and hubris are a recipe for tragedy and little else.  Democracies evolve.  They are nurtured and handed across generations.  We fumbled the hand off.    

It’s Not About You

                This is the point in the school year that the first round of parent/teacher conferences are just about wrapping up.  Parents all over the country are trudging into classrooms to hear how their child is progressing.  Most of the conversation will center around test scores and other evaluations that tell whether or not the student is on the right ‘level,’  A lot of nervous smiles and tense exchanges over those numbers will leave both the parents and teachers wondering what it’s all for.  The individual focus in education is a misguided activity.  It promotes a faulty idea of what intelligence is, and it normalizes a forced hierarchy of achievement.  The ‘data’ passed back and forth in the conferences says nothing about how intelligent or creative a child is, all it does is promote an undemocratic and inaccurate picture of what learning is and why we do it.

                Intelligence is not an individual property.  A person can only be considered ‘intelligent’ within a specific cultural context.  Being good in one context is no guarantee that you will be good in another.  Besides, the issue is not how a random individual is doing, but how the group or society is doing.  There are lots of really ‘smart’ people in America, but we still elected Donald Trump.  Over 98% of climate scientists agree that global warming is man-made, but we still live in an economy driven by petro-dollars.  A democratic society is not the invention of a few elite intellects.  It is the relationships and values of a collective.  Nothing in our current educational system promotes collective intelligence.  Instead, we pit students against each other in rankings, which are often based on statistically insignificant differences created while performing unrealistic and unimportant activities.  Life is not a test, and doing well on a test does not prepare you for life. 

                We are fixated on individual genius, but it is collective intelligence that creates and sustains the world.  There is nothing that one smart person can do about creating a just social order or an ecologically sustainable future.  It’s not that smart people aren’t valuable; they are, but only if the cultural context supports and responds to them.  Humans are diverse because their diversity adds to the possible solutions and adaptations available.  Whenever only one idea or one type of thought is allowed, the adaptability and sustainability of the group declines.  It’s good to have tall people for some things, but squeezing into small places requires a different physique.  We have chased the folly of individual greatness or brilliance to the point of diminishing returns.  We need an educational project that turns toward a collective sense of responsibility and participation.

                The politics of the moment couldn’t make this any clearer.  When almost half of the country is willing to support a narcissistic liar, it doesn’t matter what the rest of us think.  We have no common standpoint to work from.  There is nothing that we can point to even start building a shared vision or description of events.  Some of these people probably had high test scores and good grades.  What good did it do them, or us?  An educational system that fails to create a common basis for engagement is a failure, no matter what the ‘data’ say.  As long as we perpetuate the myth that only the elite from the elite institutions need a good education, we will fail as a democracy.  Setting aside the ridiculous notion that only really smart people get into ‘good’ schools, there is no elite institution capable of producing a democratic and civil intelligence.  In fact, they are almost guaranteed to produce the opposite.

                It’s too bad that all those parent/teacher conferences aren’t community events.  It’s too bad that parents go in alone to hear about just their child instead of seeing them in a collaborative setting.  Instead of some reified test scores, maybe the teacher should show off something they all did together.  Sure, some kids will have done more than others, but that doesn’t matter as long as they all contributed what they could.  If we can’t do it together, we can’t do it at all.  It’s not about you.   

Contracts

                Since the Enlightenment, at least, we have looked at societies as being based on a social contract.  The idea is that the sovereign rights of the individual are voluntarily limited by the social agreements, such as laws and institutions, and that those limitations are based on an enlightened self-interest.  The soaring rhetoric of the opening of the Declaration of Independence is probably the most well known and repeated expression of that idea.  Given that grounding, it is completely understandable that we have a democracy based on the adjudication of individual rights.  Scratch the surface of any American’s understanding of democracy, and they are bound to start talking about their rights.  In English law, rights are mostly related to money and property, so our democracy has also created an unequal and unsustainable economy of individuals making money at the expense of the political franchise.

                Now that the presidency of Trump has made the limitations of that approach obvious, it might be time to go back and rethink our obsession with a social contract.  On the one hand, the contract is supposed to protect us from tyranny, but what is the crushing poverty caused by individuals bending the rules to create obscene wealth at the expense of others if it’s not tyranny.  Of course, we don’t want a King, but a capitalist feudalism doesn’t really seem like such a cheery alternative.  Contracts for the oligarchy that founded our nation were only ever meant to apply to a limited class of individuals.  That is still true.  The market produces wealth, but only for those who can afford to play in and manipulate the system.  Most of us are just spectators.  The legal system protects our rights, but only if you can afford representation that is better than the other side.  The worst part of contracts can be seen in Trump.  He never signed one he intended to honor, and his oath of office was just another convenient lie.

                Social contracts cannot create nor protect a democracy.  A democracy has to have at its core a commitment to something greater than individual sovereignty.  Maturana says that we ‘bring forth’ a world, and democracy is a specific example of that.  Creating a democracy is a move to realize that it is what we are collectively and not individually that defines our existence.  We have been sold the story that it is strong individuals that make a society great.  That’s a lie.  What makes a democracy great is collective achievements of its people.  That means that democracy is the environment and relationships of its people, not in the archives in Washington D.C.  The constitution is still there, but the commitment to a social destiny is not.  We were never meant to be a diverse nation.  The compact of the founders only covered a small group of people.  Once their shared hatred of King George delivered a surprise victory, even that initial solidarity started to unravel.  They found out their interests were not so mutual and that their willingness to sign on to a new nation was compromised.  The narrative we spin out in public school American history is edited to leave out the conflicts and the exclusions, so now that we are faced with the end of that compact, we have no living example of how to proceed.

                If there is to be a next act in the American democracy, it won’t be created around contracts and individual rights.  If there is to be a next act, it will be based on a narrative grand enough to unite us and loose enough to let us be the diverse and complex society we’ve become.  Instead of the institutions of democracy, we should concentrate on the environment of democracy, the felt experience of seeing something beyond ourselves and our immediate interests.  As far as I can tell, there is a whole political party in America that thinks democracy is the right to make money, regardless of what or who is hurt in the process.  Their model of the contract is the same as Trump’s.  They cannot see and do not help create a living and relational environment of democratic value.  To them, their success is all that matters.  That approach has hit the wall.  The life world is in peril.  We are setting our children up to fight over the last scraps of food in an environmental diaspora.  We are wasting the time we have producing garbage instead of building a future.  The limited vision of the Enlightenment created such a strong sense of self that we are now incapable of understanding how illusory the self is.  Nothing we have thought or told ourselves about how we got here will help us get to a real democracy.

What Now?

                Last week the House of Representatives voted along party lines to formalize the next phase of the impeachment proceedings against Trump.  The number that should concern all of us is that there were no Republicans that voted for the inquiry.  That means that not a single member of the Republican Party thought bribery and extortion of a foreign government was even worth investigating.  When they had control of the House, they initiated 13 different proceeding on Benghazi, which was an unfortunate but not an unconstitutional event.  Now they seem to buy the line from the White House that Trump is not only immune to prosecution but to even being investigated.  It isn’t really surprising that the vote turned out the way it did, but that doesn’t make it any less concerning.  What it means is that the system of government that we were all taught to revere is dead.

                We have now reached the point where one of the two major parties in our country is willing to abdicate their responsibility for constitutional oversight to a craven liar.  They no longer make any pretense of believing in the most rudimentary functions of a democracy.  They were already a minority party ruling as the majority, but now it’s obvious that they intend to tear down whatever barriers were left to their rule.  They have corrupted the Justice Department, stacked the courts with the most egregiously unqualified slate of judges ever, and filled key government offices with incompetent sycophants at every turn.  They have breached our alliances around the world and undone decades of minimal improvement in the environment.  They separated and locked up over 5,500 children at the border in a move that had to make sadistic xenophobes around the globe envious.  The damage to our government and our image is only getting worse.

                The other major party is acting as if an election can stop or reverse this damage.  I don’t see how.  The next election will be marked by cyberattacks that will make the Russian interference in 2016 look like an outdated game of pong.  Voter systems will be hacked, and mistrust for the results will rampant on both sides.  The Democratic candidate, whoever it is, will win the popular vote, probably by more than the three million votes Hillary won by.  It won’t matter.  Trump and the Republicans will claim the results are invalid, and he will refuse to leave office.  The Supreme Court will support that, unless Roberts has a crisis of conscience at the last minute.  Democracy in America is no longer an electoral matter.  In fact, America is no longer a democracy.

                If Republicans play by the ‘rules,’ they lose.  They have no intention of losing.  This result was inevitable.  The protocols of our democracy were always papered over a litany of divisions that go all the way back to the earliest colonists.  For almost 250 years we perpetuated the narrative that we would rise above those divisions, but in the end we never really could.  We have spun a story about inclusion and expansion of the franchise, but in reality our story has always been about exclusion.  We were never able to confront and fix our problems because we could never really face them.  We put more faith in an unequal and unfair economic system than we did in political honesty.  This has been brewing for a long time, but the vote on the House floor makes it clearer than ever than American democracy is close to the end.

                I think it’s time to pick through the wreckage for whatever can be salvaged and move on.  The right-wing supporters of Trump like to talk about a civil war if he is removed.  They should be more worried about one if he’s not.  Democracy isn’t based on institutions; it’s based on the relationships and shared narratives of the people.  We will not move forward on policy alone.  The only way forward is a new story about who we are and how we’re connected.  Fixing the government doesn’t start in Washington; it starts in the neighborhood.  A diverse democracy demands a level on involvement and ethical behavior Americans have been unwilling and unable to give.  If we want to continue as a democracy, we’re going to have to face that responsibility.

Coleman Young

                My parents moved from central Wisconsin to Flint, Michigan in 1953.  They moved to be part of the economic boom that was going on all over what they now call Automation Alley.  The city at the heart of all this was, of course, Detroit.  In the 50’s it was one of the richest and fastest growing cities in the country.  The political and economic power of the region was wielded by auto executives and the millionaires that the Big Three and the supporting industries created.  They were mostly white guys in suits that invested in the civic development of the region.  In Flint, the Mott Foundation funded educational and cultural programs that made the city important.  The factories were booming, the unions were expanding, and future was so bright you had to wear shades.

                Underneath this prosperity, were the fault lines that would turn this region into the dystopia that it is today.  When I was in school, Flint had four Class A high schools and a network of parochial schools.  Today, there isn’t a single class A school in the city.  The landmark buildings of the Detroit architect, Albert Kahn, that symbolized the wealth and power of Detroit are often in ruins today.  There are books of photographs of decaying buildings that make the city look like a ghost town, like it was the site of some horrible war.  All these cities saw folks, mostly, but not entirely, white folks move to the suburbs and the surrounding small towns that stretch from the Tri-Cities to the downriver communities in Detroit. 

                What happened in Michigan is complicated.  It always is.  There is enough blame to go around about how something that looked so prosperous and solid could fall apart so fast.  The usual suspects have all been rounded up and interrogated, globalization, the unions, the lack of innovation have all been cited as being part of the demise.  But as I sit here watching what is left of American democracy being cynically destroyed by Republican sycophants defending an indefensible president, the element that I think played the biggest role is race.  It might have been difficult for Detroit to survive and flourish with all the economic and cultural upheaval of the 50’s and 70’s, but even that slim chance left town when the racial turmoil of the period caused the compact that connected the city to the surrounding area broke down in the 1970’s.  I don’t mean to imply that race wasn’t an issue before then or that everything was fine until the civil rights movement came along.  Far from it.  Race always divided the city and the shop, even in the best of days.  What I want to suggest, however, is that a fundamental change in the way people thought of Detroit happened when Coleman Young became mayor in 1974.

                When he became the first African American mayor of what was still a major American city, something changed.  The white people who had been leaving Detroit anyway, now left completely.  It was as if having a Black mayor meant they could abandon the city emotionally and culturally.  If Coleman was the mayor, then they were going to take their ball and go home.  Instead of trying to find a new coalition to share the city, they left it to die on its own.  Young wasn’t without some blame.  In the twenty years of his stewardship there was enough corruption and bombast to make what was an already difficult proposition impossible.  But every large city has corruption, and every large city has problems.  When they survive, it’s because all the people in the city want to make it work.  That didn’t happen in Detroit, or Flint, or Pontiac, or Saginaw. 

                I say this because this is the impulse I see today in Republicans.  The mere existence of an African American president was enough for them to abandon the country.  They no longer want any part of America.  They want their own, unsullied version of America that they don’t have to share with “them.”  There have always been racists that are load and vulgar about it, but in both of these instances the racism is deeper.  If white people can’t have control, then they don’t want anything to do with it.  It’s the only way that I can make sense of people supporting the most incompetent, corrupt and stupid president in our history.  I think most of the people who left the city would deny this, but what other reason is there?  So when I watch the news and see how bad things have gotten, I think of Coleman and the city they let die.