Democracy, Education and Indoctrination

There are many challenges to a democracy, but education has to be one of the most important. Everything begins with education, specifically as it relates to enculturation and indoctrination. Here is an article from The Guardian that touches upon one aspect of this, although it isn’t as thorough as I’d prefer:

 The dark side of home schooling: creating soldiers for the culture war
The Christian home school subculture isn’t a children-first movement. Some former students are bravely speaking out
By Katherine Stewart

The point of the article is in the conclusion:

“The fundamentalist home schooling world also advocates an extraordinarily authoritarian view of the parental role. Corporal punishment is frequently encouraged. The effects are, again, often quite devastating. “People who experienced authoritarian parents tend to turn into adults with poor boundaries,” writes one pseudonymous HA blogger. “It’s an extremely unsatisfying and unsustainable way to live.”

“In America, we often take for granted that parents have an absolute right to decide how their children will be educated, but this leads us to overlook the fact that children have rights, too, and that we as a modern society are obligated to make sure that they get an education. Families should be allowed to pursue sensible homeschooling options, but current arrangements have allowed some families to replace education with fundamentalist indoctrination.

“As the appearance of HA reminds us, the damage done by this kind of false education falls not just on our society as a whole, but on the children who are pumped through the ideology machine. They are the traumatized veterans of our culture wars. We should listen to their stories, and support them as they find their way forward.”

This is put into context with a comment to the article and another comment responding to it:

StVitusGerulaitis  08 May 2013 12:16pm

the consequences of putting ideology over children include anxiety, depression, distrust of authority, and issues around sexuality.

“This is bad, but it’s not really necessary for a condemnation of the religious home schooling movement. After all, mainstream education can produce these effects too. It is enough that children are being lied to and deliberately manipulated for the purpose of engineering society.

“Should attendance at state approved schools be mandatory? It may be the only way to prevent this kind of brainwashing.

“Incidentally, why is the piece illustrated with a picture of a house in Cleveland?”

Paulson84  08 May 2013 3:21pm

“@LorddMUCK –

“Yeah, it’s those damn lefties in Kansas that are trying to get creationism pushed into science classes at public schools. And those lefties in Texas that are trying to rewrite the historical record to suggest the Founding Fathers didn’t envision a secular society. Oh, wait, it’s actually right wing lunatics trying to re-shape the educational curriculum in this country. That’s right.”

The problem isn’t homeschooling or any particular activity, rather particular tendencies that can undermine society in an infinite areas and in infinite ways. The same people who want to use homeschooling for indoctrination also want to use public schools for indoctrination. These are dangerous people. They are dangerous to democracy when they gain power and influence.

The danger with fundamentalism is complex. I don’t want to blame conservatives, but conservatives have become complicit with this problem by aligning themselves with fundamentalists and hence aligning themselves with right-wing authoritarians and social dominance types. This wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice made by movement conservatives and Republican elites. They made this Devil’s Bargain because it gained them immense power.

The bigger issue is that now we all have to deal with this problem. Indoctrination is a dangerous road to go down. It only takes a small group of well indoctrinated children to grow up to create a movement that could destroy democracy and take over the country. Before the masses can be indoctrinated, first a small vanguard must be indoctrinated. Indoctrination can never be taken lightly. It was a small movement in the beginning that took over Italy, Germany, Russia and China. Is our democracy strong enough to resist a totalitarian takeover? I doubt it.

I’m fine with homeschooling, but we better think twice before we let children be brainwashed. It doesn’t matter who is doing the brainwashing and for what purpose. It doesn’t matter if it is right-wing or left-wing, although we shouldn’t ignore the fact that this danger is at the moment coming from right-wing fundamentalists. We should consider carefully why this is the case.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1903914

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12152-012-9155-7

http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2012/03/arvan-follow-up-study-on-conservatism-and-dark-triad-personality-traits.html

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/3/prweb9255652.htm

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.1893/abstract

Localized Democracy and Public Good

To give balance to recent blog posts, I’ll share my thoughts that arose with a discussion I had with my dad.

He is definitely a conservative in most ways, fiscally and socially. However, he is intelligent and well informed which has caused him to adjust his views over time. I often use him as a way of testing the direction of political winds, specifically which way mainstream conservatism is blowing.

I can lean strongly left at times and my father can lean strongly right. This often leads to disagreements, but maybe just as often leads to certain kinds of agreements. As conservatism and liberalism meets in the middle, the right-wing and left-wing meets in the political desert.

It’s my dad’s fiscal conservatism that saves him from the ideological blindness of partisan politics. He is an economically practical man who has worked in and taught business management. It has been his business to consider new information. My leftism has maybe served a similar role. It’s basically within the general realm of libertarianism that my father and I can find common ground, although neither of us is an ideologically committed libertarian.

The discussion we were having was fairly typical, not unlike any number of other discussions we’ve had. I guess it stood out to me because I sensed my dad was struggling with new info and so reassessing a bit. There is a newsletter he reads and the financial advisor who writes it doesn’t seem particularly conservative. He was reading this newsletter and the info was food for thought.

For example, my dad is slowly coming around to taking environmentalism more seriously. He was reading about how we as a society can’t continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere. This might seem obvious to those on the left, but this is the type of info my dad has spent a lifetime avoiding and the conservative media has helped him avoid it.

Environmentalism isn’t the main issue my dad brought up, rather economics as it relates to politics. Environmentalism only connected because my dad was considering the commentary that oil will no longer play the role as a cheap energy source. This is problematic as our entire society has been literally fueled by cheap energy and it could be a while before we develop a new cheap energy.

The economics and politics angle, I think, related to developing new energy sources. My dad was telling me about how this financial advisor was saying debt itself wasn’t the problem, but whether deficit spending was being used toward pragmatic investments or not. This goes against my dad’s fiscal conservatism.

Both my dad and I agree that bailing out banks was a bad idea. I was telling my dad about Iceland and he wasn’t familiar with that example.  I also mentioned Sweden that is doing well, even with a massive welfare state relative to GDP. I used this as a jumping off point for explaining my personal theory (or rather set of theories), and my dad agreed.

My dad is wary of what he calls ‘populism’, but I pointed out that the policies in Iceland and Sweden seem to have been popularly supported in those countries. My speculation is that these countries represent optimal conditions for societal and economic health.

I see several essential factors. First and foremost, democracy seems key which doesn’t imply any single form of democracy, moreso just the general principles of democracy in society overall (not just politics, but also in social institutions, community organizing and economic systems). I suspect that democracy only functions well under certain conditions.

There are obvious differences between the US and countries such as Iceland and Sweden. The US is massive in terms of both population and geographical territory. This might be the most important part as I have yet to see it proven that genuine democracy can function at all on the largescale. With this massiveness, there also comes massive diversity that disallows easy organizing and governing. In the US, every special interest group seems out for their own private good. There isn’t a single shared culture to create a sense of social solidarity and common good.

For these reasons, you can only find some well functioning democracy on the local level of American politics. And even on the local level, well functioning democracy in the US is more rare as local communities have been undermined and in many cases decimated. The federal government helped to end much oppression and corruption on the local level, yet often just shifted the problems to the federal level. The closest the US has ever come to something akin to the Northern European social democracies is, to use one of my favorite examples, the early 20th century municipal socialism of Milwaukee.

To my mind, democracy and local governance go hand in hand. However, that local governance has to be supported by a shared local culture. The problem of  many post-colonial countries is that their boundaries were created according to political demands and compromises. This has meant that a single country might contain multiple tribal cultures while any single tribal culture might be divided between multiple countries. Unsurprisingly, these are conflict-ridden societies.

The US seems to be in an impossible situation. I see no likely way of getting democracy to function in the US, definitely not on the federal level and probably not even on the state level. There are just two many special interests and too many lobby groups, not to mention that most of the founding elites never wanted democracy.

My sense of democracy is somewhat open-ended. Democracy maybe isn’t a single ideological system in the way capitalism is. Democracy applies to all aspects of society and can allow for many possible ideological systems. My ideal well functioning democracy could manifest quite diversely depending on the local culture. It could be more capitalist or more socialist or even more religious.

This does seem to be a more libertarian interpretation of democracy. This could be minarchist democracy, but I don’t know that it wouldn’t also allow larger political alliances that might resemble the government of a larger country or union.

The problem with actual functioning capitalism is that it is completely opposed to my vision of democracy. If capitalism is supposed to be a free market, I don’t know what kind of freedom this is or whose freedom it is. It certainly isn’t a democratic economy.

My dad could agree with much of what I said, but he struggles with the notion of a democratic economy for his fear of ‘populism’. Nonetheless, the fact that a mainstream conservative like my dad could agree with my general argument is impressive. There is already a lot of agreement in American society, but the anti-democratic system gets in the way.

I wonder when global society and local communities will get shook up enough to begin implementing something entirely new, beyond a few exceptions found in isolation.

Roger Williams and American Democracy

I finished listening to the audio-book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul. The more I study history the more I discover all that I wasn’t taught in my public education. I didn’t know anything about Roger Williams or Rhode Island prior to this book.

The first American radical that awoke me to the American radical tradition was Paine. It blew my mind that ideas so far to the left could be found at the founding of the country. Paine makes Democrats today look like conservatives.

Since then, I’ve discovered such radical thought (and action) goes even further back into colonial history.

The Quakers and William Penn’s experiment was the second radical influence I learned about. We think of Quakers being tame these days, but back then they were the worst troublemakers around. They would protest using almost any means available to them, including stripping naked and parading through towns while preaching about fallen man and fallen society. Puritans hated them to no end. Quakers were turned away, imprisoned, fined, maimed, and killed. And Quakers kept coming back for more.

What I discovered in this recent book is that Roger Williams is the only colonial founder who didn’t mistreat Quakers. Williams came to America as a Puritan and despised Quakers, but there was a difference. He was mentored by Sir Edward Coke, the famous common law lawyer. Also, he was heavily influenced by Francis Bacon, the famous scientist and arch-rival of Coke. These were the type of influences that would inspire the Levellers and others involved in the English Civil War. Williams came to America before revolution erupted, but he brought the societal conflicts with him.

Williams believed everyone should have equal freedom: Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Baptists, Quakers, atheists, etc. He abolished chattel slavery for all races, witchcraft trials, most capital punishment, and imprisonment for debt. He defended free speech. For example, instead of punishing Quakers, he invited them to a public debate. Most importantly, he valued fair treatment under the law and legal procedure, values he learned from Coke’s defense of common law.

Basically, Williams was articulating Lockean political philosophy when John Locke was still in diapers. Even Locke never defended Lockean rights as strongly as did Williams. Locke didn’t think Catholics and atheists deserved equal freedom. Locke was involved in writing the constitution of the Carolina Colony which included slavery, something Williams wouldn’t have ever done under any circumstances and no matter the personal benefits. In writing about land rights, Locke defended the rights of colonists to take Native American Land whereas Williams defended against the theft of land from Native Americans.

Despite being a Puritan, most other Puritans didn’t like Williams any more than they liked the Quakers. He was a strong critic of the theocratic tendencies of the Puritan colonies, just as he was against mixing of religion and politics back in England.

Williams, however, took the ideal of freedom further than anyone before.

One example had to do with Native Americans. Williams initially wanted to convert the natives to Christianity, but he changed his mind once he came to know Native Americans and their culture. He concluded it would be hypocritical for him to try to force his religion onto others, even with the best of intentions. He saw how the Native Americans were mistreated and he became a strong defender of native land rights. He maintained peaceful relationships between natives and settlers for many decades and remained neutral during King Philip’s War.

Even when the Native American’s attacked Providence and burned many houses down, including William’s, he still couldn’t bring himself to blame them for their acts of desperation. During that incident, he went out to the warriors and convinced them that the Rhode Island colonists weren’t their enemy and they were left alone after that. All in all, Native Americans treated Williams better than many of his fellow colonists. When he was banished from Massachusetts, the Wampanoag tribe took him in for the winter. He never forgot the kindness of his Native American friends and allies.

The only colonial leader before him that treated the natives as fairly was Samuel de Champlain. A really good book, Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer, is written about Champlain’s experiment in French Canada. Champlain, like Williams, would live with and study Native American culture. Champlain went even further in that he sought to create a shared culture where the French settlers and Native Americans would exchange children to be raised in each other’s communities, and he encouraged the French to learn the Native American languages. Later on, William Penn attempted to have similar good relations with the natives, although it was becoming increasingly difficult with the growing population of colonists, especially the Scots-Irish immigrants.

Both Williams and Champlain had personally experienced the violent oppression that could be caused by the combining of religion and politics, and so both wished to create havens in the New World. Williams was the first to use the phrase, “wall of separation”. He didn’t think government should even promote religious values. Government should do basic governing and that was it. He thought you shouldn’t attempt to force people to do or not do something simply because that is what your religion teaches. Each person should do their own thing as far as possible and leave others alone.

He took separation of church and state very seriously, took it to its furthest end in fact. He thought religion should be a purely individual matter. After briefly becoming Baptist, he never became affiliated with another church for the rest of his life. He came to the conclusion that no church had the right to claim to represent Jesus Christ’s teachings or to rule in place of God. He disagreed with Quakers that religion was solely based on a personal relationship to God, but he did believe that Jesus’ teachings via Scripture trumped any worldly organization including churches.

We often think of the American Revolution as the product of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers without a doubt contributed much. However, the basic elements of a new society were long before then being planted in the colonies. The charter for Providence Colony even referred to it as a democracy: “The form of government established is democratical”. Besides Paine, most of the later American founders were wary of democracy. Nonetheless, Roger Williams’ experiment was the most direct precedent for the American Revolution, and indeed Rhode Island declared independence two months before any other colony.

There have been many social experiments in American history, during and after the colonial era. What makes Roger William’s social experiment stand out is that it was so successful. If it had failed, American society might have turned out differently.

Democracy, Legitimacy, & Consent of the Governed

Here I continue my personal exploration of American conservatism. The topic of this post, the 2012 election, is what all of my recent posts have been building up to. The impetus to my thinking was experiencing the campaign season in stereo with the news media in one ear and my parents in the other. Frustration is the result.

—

As others have already explained: If America could survive 8 years of Bush without becoming a corporatist plutocracy and outright fascist police state, then America can survive 8 years of Obama without becoming communist. Besides, considering the GOP used to be far to the left of Obama: If as Bircher-inspired Tea Partiers claim Obama is a secret commie and as the Birchers claimed Eisenhower was a secret commie, why did the US government including both parties spend so many decades fighting the commies until the greatest communist nation finally collapsed?

Conservatives think they’ve somehow lost America. I don’t know that they ever had it, but certainly the it they thought they had was never what they thought it was. There is a disconnect that is perplexing. And when perplexed by some issue of conservatism, I consider how such things play out in the thinking and lives of my parents. I do indeed observe this disconnect in them and, although I’m sure it existed in the past, I don’t remember it always being so blatant. What happened?

My family moved to South Carolina and my parents ended up spending a couple of decades there. While there, many things changed, besides just their being surrounded by a more right-wing version of conservatives than is typically found in the Midwest where our family lived prior to that.

The right-wing backlash was going mainstream and becoming empowered during the 1990′s. Like most conservatives, my parents were swept up in the changing atmosphere. But one thing kept my parents going too far right while I was still living down there and in the years immediately following my departure.

For my entire childhood and well into my adulthood, my parents consistently attended very liberal churches, mostly the Unity Church. They, however, began to feel a growing chasm between their own beliefs and the worldview of Unity Church, a growing chasm that wasn’t caused by any changes within the Unity Church. The inner right-winger was awakening within my parents. So, they left the Unity Church and began looking for more conservative churches, finally settling on one that they remained with for their last decade in South Carolina.

This was also the time when my brothers and I were back in the Midwest. And this was the time when Fox News was launched (1996). This left my parents to have no source of liberalism to balance out an increasing influence of right-wing rhetoric. No liberal children, no liberal church, no liberal Midwestern community, no liberal local media.

On top of that, my parents were increasingly associating with a more upper class set of friends, having left behind their poor years when my dad had gone back to school. Furthermore, along with my dad’s business management friends, their new church didn’t seem to have the socioeconomic diversity found in the Unity Church. To clarify why this matters, I should explain that in the Deep South upper class tends to mean very conservative.

This gets at a point that few Americans and fewer conservatives understand. The South isn’t as conservative or as Republican as it seems. The South was a part of the Populist alliance that pushed for many liberal reforms. More importantly, most of the eligible voters in the South lean Democratic. Republicans have maintained power in the South by disenfranchising minorities and the poor, one method being voting laws such as how some Southern states disallow early voting, restrict who can use an absentee ballot, and close polling stations early. Such voter disenfranchisement in certain states causes the majority of eligible voters to not even vote.

There is a stronger class divide in the Deep South which, of course, goes hand in hand with a race divide. Private schools and gated communities (also, majority white conservative suburbs) separate the haves from the have nots. Plus, even churches are divided along the same class and race lines. If like my parents one is an upper class white conservative in the Deep South, it is easy to become disconnected from not only most people in the country but also most people in one’s own community. A similar dynamic plays out in the majority white conservative regions in the rural South.

This is how so many conservatives became so deluded about this being their country. They’ve been surrounded by people who are like them such that they didn’t realize how isolated they had become. The last two presidential elections were a slap to the face for conservatives. They could no longer be oblivious to the larger social changes that were happening all around them. It wasn’t just a change in minorities. The youth, increasingly multicultural and multiracial, were changing as well. Even in some Southern states (including South Carolina), Obama won the youth white vote which is the future adult white vote.

As a leftist, I don’t have the privilege to suffer the type of delusions conservatives indulge in. Even though I know from history that US politics has always been liberal in a general sense (as in having no tradition of traditional conservatism), I also know that the US never has been dominated by left-wingers. I’ve never even lived in a state that would be the radically left-wing equivalent of Deep South states. I don’t romanticize the past and so I don’t have the sense of doom as is more common among those on the right.

My parents think that democracy has become corrupt simply because minorities are growing in numbers, thus diluting the superior white culture that made American great… or something like that. Conservatives used to blame it on the dilution of Christian values; they can’t do that anymore since minorities are more religious than whites. Maybe I’m not being fair in pointing their racialist-tinged worldview, but that is how it looks to an outside observer.

Once again, as a leftist, I know there never has been a golden age of democracy in the US. I’ve been saying for more than a decade that US democracy is problematic at best, often saying this to my parents. But my dad always dismissed my criticisms and argued it was perfectly fine. This was easy for him to say when Republicans had power with gaining Congress in the 1990s and regaining the presidency in the 2000s, less easy now. Only when minorities, women and the youth voted Obama into the presidency twice did my dad all of a sudden think democracy was corrupt.

I find this response disingenuous, certainly considering how morally righteous my parents have expressed themselves.

In 2000, the Republican government in Florida targeted minorities with a voter purge and then when a recount was attempted the Republican majority Supreme Court stopped it. The entire democratic system was thrown to the side by Republicans as if it meant nothing. This is the type of anti-democratic event we’re used to hearing about from third world countries with recent histories of political oppression. And if this had happened in a third world country, there would have been intervention by international organizations.

But this didn’t bother my parents at all. My dad still to this day denies that a full Florida recount was never attempted and that the Supreme Court stopped even the partial recount, even though these are rationally indisputable facts. In typical conservative fashion, he simply denies inconvenient information.

If the entirety of democracy being unconstitutionally undermined doesn’t bother my parents, then what finally convinced them that democracy had failed? It wasn’t just that demographics with traditionally low voting rates now voted in high numbers. They certainly don’t blame themselves for the GOP trying to suppress the vote, thus unintentionally causing greater voter engagement and turnout. No, they blame the Democratic Party.

I should explain my parents’ experience. Since they are retired, they decided to work as poll workers for this past presidential election. That was probably a mistake, considering that they are now living in this city that is dominated by uber-liberal Democrats. That just made Obama’s victory feel even more traumatic.

Two specific things about that poll work experience really hit a nerve.

First, my mom was bothered by how special needs people were not only allowed to vote but brought in by their helpers to vote. They were in a precinct that apparently included the place that houses special needs people with various issues: autism, low IQ, etc. It’s not that ton of these people came in, but the fact that they would be brought in at all made my mom outraged, maybe more upset than I’ve ever seen her in my entire life. I got the feeling that my mom thought this was a covert evil plan to get all the mentally challenged people to help steal the election for Obama.

Second, my dad was bothered by the official representatives of the Democratic Party. There were the typical poll watchers of both parties who are volunteers, but the Obama campaign also had two sharply dressed and knowledgeable professionals who stood there the entire time. They kept track of the names of who had voted and continually checked those names against the list of potential Democratic voters in that precinct. They would then call volunteers who would try to persuade these people to vote. My dad thought this was the “Chicago Machine” in action.

I sort of understand my parents’ general criticisms, but when they get to specifics they sound like conspiracy theorists. They feel that we need election reform. I agree as probably do most Americans, left and right. But too many eligible voters voting isn’t the problem that is undermining democracy and that needs reforming.

There is a big difference between voter reform and voter suppression, a difference that my parents don’t understand. They believe that if people can’t get themselves to the polling station without any help or encouragement, without any absentee ballots or early voting, then they shouldn’t vote (or be allowed to vote?). As the rhetoric goes, voting is a privilege, not a right… well, the constitution happens to disagree with conservatives on this issue.

Besides, conservatives are ignoring the history of voter suppression with roots in racism and classism which in turn has deeper roots in slavery and plutocracy. Ignoring this past isn’t just being historically clueless. It verges on being morally depraved. This is a very dark history, and a history that specifically has privileged people like my parents… how convenient.

So many conservatives don’t seem to understand democracy (or are they playing dumb?). Consent of the governed necessitates that the public (or at least a very large majority) is convinced of the legitimacy of the government. When people are disenfranchised from the political system, it brings into doubt this legitimacy. The act of voting, based on the right and ability to vote, is the most basic expression of the consent of the governed. When the majority doesn’t even vote, epecially because of voter suppression, the cornerstone of democracy is shown to be crumbling. The fight for voter rights and against voter suppression was a fight for democracy, and this fight was hard won.

After the country was founded, only a few percentage of Americans were both eligible to vote and eligible for election to public office. It took almost two centuries for nearly all Americans to get the right to vote. In fact, my parents were already adults when the Voting Rights Act was passed. The history of previous voter suppression is not just within living memory but specifically within the living memory of my parents’ generation. Even so, growing up, my parents were probably oblivious of it.

When I told my mom that she experienced privileges that others didn’t have, she denied this by literally screaming over and over, “I worked hard!” So fucking what!?! Most people work hard, including the poor and minorities, including liberals and civil rights activists, including all the Americans throughout history who’ve experienced voter suppression and other forms of political oppression.

I take democracy very seriously. It’s not that my parents simply dismiss democracy out of hand. Part of it is that, sadly like many other Americans, they lack a fundamental grasp of what democracy is about. Another part is even more basic. They don’t understand democracy because they don’t prioritize it as a value. If my parents were to be honest, they’d have to admit that they put their ideology, their belief system before democracy. What this means is that religion (social conservatism) and capitalism/’meritocracy’ (fiscal conservatism) will always come first, even if that means underming or sacrificing elements of democracy in the process.

My parents are closer to some of the founding fathers. Most of the founding fathers didn’t want democracy, maybe because they didn’t even know what it was. But the problem that the founding fathers faced was that most early Americans did want democracy. Right-wing conservatives now face a similar problem as they find themselves in the minority.

There is very interesting data about American democracy in terms of voting.

This past election inspired high rates of voter turnout which is a heartening thing to see for us lovers of democracy. Actually, voter turnout has been rising for about a decade now, although it hasn’t risen back up to the 1960s level when more than 60% voted.

After the 1960s, the voter turnout continuously dropped until hitting a low point in the 1990s. It was in 1994 that Republicans gained majority in Congress which hadn’t been seen in 4 decades, even with the popular influence they had earlier with Reagan. A sad thing happened in 1996, two years into this Republican majority in Congress, interestingly the same year that Fox News was launched. It was the precise moment when the voter turnout dropped below 50%, voter turnout having barely hovered above 50% during the 1980s. The right-wing had become so loud as to dominate the media narrative. Instead of being energized, voters apparently became demoralized.

In 2000, however, voter turnout became an irrelevant issue since votes literally didn’t count or rather weren’t counted. For a democracy based on consent of the governed, the rise of the right-wing between 1994 and 2000 was a precarious time. Like Obama or not, there is some reassurance in having a president that won the popular vote twice (a rare event) during a time of increasing voter turnout.

For those on the right, this provokes paranoid conspiracy theories. For me as a leftist, this gives me a glimmer of hope.

American Democracy?

I had someone ask me why they should care about politics. It was just a few days ago. They were responding to my posting a bunch of political stuff on facebook. They didn’t see how politics helped one live one’s life.

I gave a rational response. Everything is political. One should care about politics because one cares about anything at all. Whether or not one is involved in politics, politics is involved in every aspect of one’s life. The personal is political. But rationality doesn’t by itself offer anything compelling, much less inspiring.

I’m not a person who is obsessively involved with politics. I often don’t even feel sure that voting matters. I see how democracy functions to a limited extent on the local level, depending on the local politics, but it is for damn sure hard to tell if democracy is functioning even slightly on the national level. If it is, it’s barely hanging by a thread.

This has become increasingly apparent as I’ve grown older.

The first election I cared about was in 2000. And what happened? It was stolen. There was never a full recount done and the supreme court chose our president. American democracy became the joke of the world. If this scenario had happened in a third world country, it would’ve been an international scandal necessitating outside intervention. Gore did nothing in response, no demand for a full recount, no righteous defense of democracy, nothing. The 2006 election also was problematic.

More recently, there was disinformation campaign that destroyed ACORN. That was an organization that helped average and below average Americans, especially in terms of voting. Republicans attacked them and Democrats caved. It was one of the most morally depraved acts in recent years. Now, Republicans have stepped up their campaign against democracy by pushing voter suppression.

Citizens United was maybe the tipping point toward a new era of corporatism. Polls show that the average American is far to the left of the Democrats and yet the majority position is rarely heard in the mainstream media or from either of the two main parties. Even a strong majority of voters can’t compete against the corrupting power of big money.

I’m not sure which is worse: Republicans attacking democracy or Democrats refusing to defend it. I’ve come to the conclusion that, for the moment, voting against the attacks on democracy is strategically more important. If democracy is finally and completely corrupted and disempowerd in national politics, then any other attempts at defense are meaningless.

The last thing I want to see is Republicans being rewarded with votes for attacking democracy. It’s sad that this attack has happened at all. It’s even more sad that the mainstream media and the Democratic Party has given it so little attention. There is no more important issue in a democratic system than ensuring democracy functions. The only unforgivable sin in a democracy is to undermine democracy itself.

I don’t care about either candidate in this election or either main party in general. All I care about is saving what remnants of democracy that have managed to survive. However, if Romney wins this election, I’m going to give up on American democracy. I’ll join some critical leftwingers in their assessment that the entire political system has become dysfunctional beyond saving.

There apparently is a very large number of Americans who either don’t understand democracy or don’t care about democracy… or else maybe it is just cynicism and apathy. Democracy can’t defeat a highly organized and well funded campaign of propaganda and disenfranchisement. I’d like to believe that democracy has a fighting chance, but it is hard to keep the faith.

So, what is the point? When rationality fails me, my cynical response is to say, “Wake me up when the revolution begins.”

Democracy & Literacy

Here is a particularly insightful passage from an insightful book. It’s about the sad relationship between illiteracy and a dysfunctional democracy.

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
by Joe Bageant
Chapter 8, American Hologram: The Apocalypse will be Televized
pp. 249-251

“[ . . . ] of the 89 million to 94 million American adults—nearly half of the U.S. adult population—who are functionally illiterate. According to the National Institute for Literacy, they “lack a sufficient foundation of basic [literacy] skills to function successfully in our society.” Of these, 17 percent to 20 percent can read just a little. That means that they cannot fill out job applications, understand food labels, or read simple stories to their children. Another 25 percent can read, but not well enough to follow five consecutive paragraphs of text or dense documents such as sales contracts.

[ . . . ]

“Of course there is more to literacy than reading words. In our culture it helps to be able to contextualize an infomercial, not to mention Tom DeLay’s crimes. Almost none of the Royal Lunch crowd, however, even knows who Tom Delay is. They do not watch the national news unless the United States attacks somebody or there is a flood in New Orleans. Even if they took the trouble to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, none of them would see it as anything other than a story about animals.

“In our culture there is also the need to interpret legions of symbols and acronyms (IBM, CBS, GM, FBI, CIA, OBM, MCI, FEMA, HUD…) that turn up every day in advertising, product packaging, corporate brochures, government pamphlets, and news stories. Functional illiterates, however, cannot separate industry from government, or the news from an advertisement or an infomercial. Hence the inability of Carolyn (the old flame I bumped into in the Food Lion parking lot) to tell a nonprofit charity from a quick-buck manufacturer of magnetic yellow ribbons. From inside the American hologram an eagle is an eagle and a yellow ribbon is a yellow ribbon. Uneducated and trapped within the hologram, people like Carolyn and Bobby will never be capable of participating in a free society, much less making the kinds of choices that preserve and protect one, unless the importance of full literacy can somehow be made clear to them.”

Conservative Anti-Democratic Elitism

In my last post, I wrote:

“I was only slightly shocked to learn that a mere 8% of Americans were considered legal persons when the Constitution was ratified. This means that 92% of the population had very limited rights of any sort, from voting to having one’s own bank account. Women, for example, were basically seen as property, owned by fathers and later husbands with only widowhood giving them some power and freedom.

“The founding fathers wanted a society determined by class, race and gender. They wanted to create an independently wealthy class of “disinterested aristocrats” (i.e., rich white males). Talking to many conservatives, I realize that this vision of a ruling elite still has strong support.”

 The last sentence was inspired by an actual conversation I recently had with a conservative, although I’ve had similar conversations in the past with other conservatives. This particular conservative thought the founding fathers had a point in not allowing the common rabble, the ignorant lower classes to vote and such things.

He was being completely honest and genuine. This not atypical conservative fears mobocracy more than he fears plutocracy or oligarchy. The reason he fears it more is that he assumes that, if there was a ruling elite, he’d be allowed to be a member. It’s the common desire to have as much power over others while disallowing others to have power over you. It is obviously self-serving and that is the entire point.

This kind of person doesn’t realize that once power becomes undemocratic then who gets it and who doesn’t can become quite arbitrary. His certainty that he’d be part of the ruling elite is rather naive.

I think this is made clear in the words of Benjamin Franklin, at least in interpreting those words according to the present context of democracy: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary danger, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Just exchange “Essential Liberty” for “Universal Liberty” and exchange “Temporary danger” for “mobocracy”… and you get the same basic idea: Those willing to sacrifice the freedom of others, intentionally or unintentionally, end up sacrificing their own freedom.

 This conservative explained his reasoning which is what really got me thinking. I pointed out that 8% legal personhood when defined by such narrow terms (whether race, gender or class) is concentration of power. He argued that such benevolent paternalism wasn’t concentration of power if it was done on the local level such as Jefferson envisioned, ignoring for a moment that alternative benevolent paternalism of Hamiltonian federalism.

I was utterly shocked by this profound lack of insight. When a local police force or private thugs beat, kill or imprison labor protesters on behalf of a local business, why would that not be concentrated power just because it was local? When a dictator or oligarchy takes over a smally country, why would that not be concentrated power just because it is on the smallscale? When a cult leader controls the lives of his followers, why would that not be concentrated power just because it only involves a small group of people?

Without inclusive democracy and popular soveriegnty, how does one prevent benevolent paternalism from becoming concentrated power? What makes American conservative ideals of benevolent paternalism different from all those other ideals of benevolent paternalism that have a long history of justifying oppression?

What is scary is that this profound lack of insight is at the very heart of the conservative vision of America. Conservatives are very serious about their fears of democracy. That is why I fear conservatism.

American Paternalism, Honor and Manhood

I’ve been reading a number of books recently, mostly about early America and related subjects, including such topics as Quaker pacifism, Southern honor, and concepts of family. Here are some of my thoughts and observations.

First, I was only slightly shocked to learn that a mere 8% of Americans were considered legal persons when the Constitution was ratified. This means that 92% of the population had very limited rights of any sort, from voting to having one’s own bank account. Women, for example, were basically seen as property, owned by fathers and later husbands with only widowhood giving them some power and freedom.

The founding fathers wanted a society determined by class, race and gender. They wanted to create an independently wealthy class of “disinterested aristocrats” (i.e., rich white males). Talking to many conservatives, I realize that this vision of a ruling elite still has strong support.

There were two problems with this vision.

First, few of the founding fathers were independently wealthy and so a disinterested aristocracy wasn’t possible. Only someone like Franklin was wealthy enough to work as a politician for free. The rest had to work jobs on the side such as lawyers or plantation owners.

Second, the 92% of the population didn’t want to be ruled by a benevolent ruling class. Also, with Jefferson’s dismantling much of Hamilton’s centralized government, grassroots populist democracy flourished. The American people didn’t need anyone else to solve their problems, especially not about their own local self-governance. In the first half of the 19th century, government as a formal institution was almost invisible.

The founding fathers had been disappointed by their failed lofty ideals of a gentile brotherhood. Their vision was one of honor as defined by Englightenment thinking. It was about noble self-sacrifice by well-educated wise leaders (a modernized version of Plato’s philosopher kings). All of this was grounded in ancient ideas of a republic. Some of the founding fathers were more radical, but most of them didn’t want democracy as we now appreciate, heck most of them probably didn’t even understand such a concept. Rule by “The People” for them meant rule by the 8%.

Jefferson, somewhat unintentionally, made way for an entirely different vision of America. What America became in the 19th century was a country of shopkeepers and religious reformers. There was no nobility, no valor, no honor in being a shopkeeper. Anyone could be a shopkeeper. Even a lowly housewife or black person could produce something to be sold. And religious reform was an emasculating force often led by women.

Along with this, a middle class began to arise, although in some ways it was more of a perception than a reality in the 19th century. After the American Revolution had ended, there actually was more economic inequality than before. But the difference was that Americans now saw themselves as free, even if many of their freedoms had been curtailed by an overreaching and sometimes violently oppressive plutocracy (the Whiskey Rebellion comes to mind).

This also relates to Jefferson. He wanted a society based on agricultural landowners who worked their own land. This was the beginning of the American Dream of everyone owning their own home. The government artificially created a middle class by giving public land away for free or else very cheaply and by providing such things as public education. This made the American population more self-reliant and so less needing of paternalistic rulers.

Another unforseen result was the religious revivalism and the politicized religioisity that it fomented. This frightened many of the founding fathers who saw religion in more elite and intellectual terms. Adam Smith despised Evangelicalism and began to longingly speak of British aristocracy. Jefferson ended up being profoundly wrong in his prediction that Unitarianism would become the dominant religion within a few generations of America’s foundation.

What the Evangelicals and other religious reformers offered was something new. They didn’t want paternalistic benevolence such as money being given to the poor. They wanted to solve the problem of poverty itself. They tried to discover the roots of poverty and they sought to reform society. This was what would later result in the movements of Populism and Progressivism. Grassroots democracy was becoming a force to be reckoned with, especially with the new breed of populist politician (e.g., Andrew Jackson). This was only exacerbated by the influx of European immigrants during the 19th century, many of whom were escaping oppressive ruling classes and some of whom were radical revolutionaries.

The earlier ideals of honor and manhood were becoming lost. The Revolutionary generation was growing old and the public recollection of the Revolutionary era were becoming hazy. The founding fathers often felt forgotten and disrespected.

America was founded on the eve of early industrialization. Even farming was being transformed through new technology. In this marketplace society, there was no place for elitist Enlightenment thinking. Most Americans knew nothing about Enlightenment thinking and had no desire to know. Americans were becoming a people of producers and consumers.

Grand conflicts were no longer so apparent to the average American. People didn’t feel directly threatened by the French, British or even Indians. The frontier had moved so much further Westward, far away from the bustling cities of commerce.

The problem was: How were Americans to maintain a larger sense of meaning and purpose as a nation? How were boys to be made into men and how were men to prove their manhood? This problem seemed clear to the founding generation who reminisced about the ennobling effect of war. Many saw the War of 1812 as an opportunity to develop character in the American people. This feeling became strong in places like Kentucky where masculine identity had been built on romanticized notions of the early Indian fighters. However, the War of 1812 was a failure and besides it never captured the imagination of most Americans.

This sense of a problem remained. And it led to divisions in how America should be defined.

Andrew Jackson was a Scots-Irish Southerner who, along with being the first president not being born an aristocrat, embodied the Southern vision of militant honor. He combined that with an overtly racist and anti-intellectual sensibility that was particularly popular among Southern white farmers. The North was more industrialized and had a different vision of honor that was influenced by Puritan and Quaker values, but it was the South rather than the North that dominated politics at that time. It was only with the mass immigration to the North that allowed a change of political fortunes during the Civil War.

An odd thing happened, though. The Civil War was traumatizing for both sides. There was little honor in victory, but Americans began to romanticize the honor of Southern loss and so began to romanticize Southern notions of gentlemanly honor. This, of course, led to much conflict around class and race.

Going into the 20th century, Americans were still struggling with what honor and manhood meant. There was a mass exodus from farming communities. A new generation grew up in the cities, the largest generation of child labor and the first generation of modern consumers of all the products being built in the factories in which they worked. They were a generation without authority figures. They became known as the Lost Generation. They fought in WWI, a war worst than the Civil War. They travelled the world and became cosmopolitan in the way no group of Americans had been since the founding fathers.

This was the beginning of the Progressive era which was strongly promoted by religious reformers such as Evangelicals. This was when the National Parks were created and when the streams were stocked with European game fish, the idea being that such things as hunting and fishing could make men out of this urbanized generation of boys.

It’s interesting how these themes formed and how they continue to this day.

Romney’s Class War

I’ve been saying for a while that this election is Obama’s to lose, but I have to admit recently that Romney is doing his best to lose. I’m not even speaking as an Obama supporter.

The media is particularly getting excited about Romney’s comment that 47% of Americans are freeloaders with a victim mentality and that these people will inevitably vote for Obama because they are looking for handouts from government. Two things stand out to me. First, Romney is admitting there is a class war and that he is fighting on the side of the rich. Second, this recording simply proves what many rich Republicans say in private when around other rich Republicans.

Even though I’m not an Obama supporter, I have decided to vote for Obama. My decision came before this recent event. What brought me out of voter apathy was the endless attacks by Republicans to suppress the votes of the poor and disadvantaged. This became most clear recently with the changes to state voting laws, although it had already become clear with the morally depraved attack on and destruction of ACORN, one of the few organizations that helped lower class Americans.

It forms a truly dark picture of cynicism. This class war that isn’t just about economics, isn’t just about unemployment and stagnating wages, isn’t just about ensuring tax cuts for the rich, isn’t just about outsourcing American jobs, isn’t just about redistributing America’s wealth to the already wealthy, isn’t just about eliminating the remains of the safety net. More fundamentally, the voter suppression tactics demonstrate Republicans are trying to disempower and disenfranchise all Americans who aren’t apart of the upper classes. Republicans are flirting with plutocracy and the Republican elite seem to have already fully embraced their role as plutocrats.

I find this disturbing. I know the Democratic Party has its own problems. I realize Democrats haven’t always been the best defenders of democracy. But at least Democrats aren’t actively attacking average Americans who are just trying to get by.

That is why as an Independent I’m voting for Obama. I’m not voting for the lesser of two evils. My vote isn’t about party politics. I’m voting for Obama in order to vote against those who attack democracy. I’m rather fond of democracy and I don’t want to see it any further harmed. Democracy and plutocracy are incompatible. Every generation must choose democracy again and so every generation faces the possibility of losing democracy.

 

Unlike Romney, I don’t see all of this as a simple class war. There are rich people for democracy and lower class people against democracy. The American Dream of an egalitarian society isn’t about attacking the rich and giving to the poor. It’s about making a better life possible for everyone.

Republican Liberalism

I was looking at two scholarly books about the history of American ideologies. Both books are fairly recent (2007 & 2008) and both bring up a similar viewpoint about the relationship of republicanism to liberalism. I’ve never come across this view before and so it made me wonder what caused two different authors to write about it at around the same time.

—-

The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America
by Michael J Thompson
pp. 2-3, location 208

“My basic argument is that liberal and republican themes were wedded in the American mind at the nation’s founding. Both viewpoints saw an intimate relation between power and property, if not coevality with each other. Liberalism was a doctrine of individual labor and, by extension, property, and it sought to give independence to individuals, smashing feudal relations of dependency that were predominate before the American Revolution. Republican themes emphasized the need for the institutions of the state to ensure that inequalities in property—and by extension, power—were kept in check. Within the context of an emerging commercial society bent on popular government, the theme of economic inequality was therefore central. Both liberalism and republicanism—two doctrines that have traditionally been seen as oppositional in previous literature on American political history—were actually seen as two sides of the same coin. Both sought to confront inequality of property and political power, and each saw that this was a central concern in eradicating the vestiges of feudalism that were at the heart of the birth of the American republic and modernity more generally. But the real essence of the story is that these two impulses begin to differentiate over the course of American history as the economic context develops. The evolution of capitalism begins to chart a course for liberalism at the expense of republican themes. By the end of the twentieth century, liberalism becomes co-opted by capitalism, and republican themes of the past fade into the background. The result is an overall acceptance or at least toleration of economic inequality and the gross differentials in political and social power it engenders in contemporary American politics and culture. I contend that this has led to a reorientation of democratic life in America and that as long as economic inequality and politics are held separate, a more vibrant democratic culture and consciousness will not be possible.

“Indeed, the success of neoconservative and neoliberal thought over the last thirty-five years has had the effect of redrawing the boundaries of American liberalism. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the loss in mainstream American political discourse of one of the most crucial veins of American political thought, which ran, until quite recently, like a roiling river at the heart of American life. This vein is the politics of economic inequality”

—-

Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns
by Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson

location 1685-1700

 

“Working with these orientations, proclivities, and tools, these thinkers and actors powerfully transformed republicanism into political liberalism but did so distinctively. Their pathways to a common outcome were not identical. The formation and crystallization of political liberalism was not the result of a single line of development. Nor can its origins be identified with a seminal thinker, or even with one lineage or sheer acts of substitution.

 

“[ . . . ] republican failure to identify and secure a stable and enduring political center in the space between radical Jacobinism and reactionary monarchism. This disappointment prompted her liberal inventions. It was her dissatisfaction with French republicanism’s violence, fanaticism, and dictatorship, as well as her fears that republicans could not end the Revolution, that impelled her to explore such new political formulations. Republican traumas, in short, motivated Stael’s liberalism.

 

“[ . . . ] These various paths converged. At their terminus, constitutional liberalism existed; republicanism no longer was a freestanding alternative, but it did not disappear. Republican values, sensibilities, and orientations have survived as deposits that fused with, and became integral to, liberal politics. In light of this history, some of the most familiar, and often pejorative, dichotomies in today’s political thought, including the right and the good, interest and virtue, individual and community, make little sense. These oppositions are new fabrications that do not accurately capture the rich historical and conceptual relations between the two traditions. They contradict the most prominent aspects of liberal beginnings.

 

“Further, both republican nostalgia and liberal purity are revealed to be false alternatives. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it became apparent that the republican model was radically deficient. So it is worse than ironic that some leading thinkers today counsel a resurrection of what even leading republicans two centuries ago transformed and superseded, and for good reasons. It is respectively discomfiting that a good many liberal advocates have distanced themselves from the lessons taught by key founders. By contrast with often abstract and philosophical exercises, the thick and sturdy liberalism fashioned within and against republicanism was open and syncretic, not closed and exclusive.”