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.

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.