Saving Our Nation's Democracy from Enemies of the People: An Exercise in "Red-Teaming"

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice 

have each of them several different meanings which cannot be 

reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy,

 not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to 

make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally 

felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: 

consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, 

and fear that they might have to stop using that word 

if it were tied down to any one meaning. 

Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.  —

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

“Well, Doctor [Franklin], what have we got—

a Republic or a Monarchy?”
  “A Republic, if you can keep it.” — 

Exchange with Benjamin Franklin leaving  the

Constitutional Convention of 1787, as reported

There is one and only one official democratically elected by the American Nation: the U.S. President. And that President represents, embodies, and implements the spirit and will of our Nation. The purest democracy, therefore, consists in ensuring the People's will is fulfilled, allowing the majority — the true Nation bathed in the blood of patriots and rooted in native soil — to rule.
The Deep State of bloated bureaucracies and corrupted institutions must not be permitted to thwart the will of the People, the demos in "democracy." These enemies of the People are to be circumvented or pushed aside, and if the Congress or a political party or lying media consistently attack the People embodied in the President, these enemies are to be neutralized.
"Lock them up!" and let them be happy they are no longer taken out and guillotined or shot as a matter of Revolutionary Justice or Racial purification.
Perfect democracy is direct and spiritual: the Rule of the People — the real Nation, purged and purified — not that of law or moribund assemblies. 

And that, brothers and sisters, is why I for one repeat the line of 1950s conservative curmudgeons that the US is not a democracy but a republic, and not a nation in the sense that, say, Japan is a nation: pretty much one people with one religious tradition (in two main strains in Japan), one history, one Emperor, one language — which at least so far the US is not. This is why I recommend to the Blue Team stressing our Republic, the rule of law, and a tradition that includes an ideal of majority decision, not majority rule (where you ignore and/or screw minorities), within a "mixed constitution" that includes Federalism and divided governments with a law-making legislative branch, an executive, and a judiciary (in that order).

Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer — One Nation (or People), One Empire, One Leader — is Nazi German stuff; Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality is Czarist Russian (now making a comeback). "We are the wretched refuse" as Bill Murray's character says in STRIPES, the mongrels of the Earth; and a good part of our good traditions is rule of law, and the institutions of the Republic.

If we can keep it. 

The U.S.A.: A Secular Federal Republic (Not a Nation)

The classics scholar William Arrowsmith said that the major ancient Greek tragedies dealt with the meaning of key terms politically-involved Athenians "contested," argued over.

We in the U.S. also have profound disagreements over basic terms. Case in point: America as a "Christian nation" (or a "White Christian nation") vs. the U.S. as a "secular Federal Republic" and not in a meaningful sense a nation at all.

We have no established church (synagog, mosque, or whatever), and Amendment One in our Bill of Rights forbids "an establishment of religion"; and, in a significant omission, "God" isn't mentioned in our Constitution. As a matter of official state policy, we're a secular establishment (which has been quite good for the various religions in American society: they're stronger than in most places with established religion).

And we're not a nation: one "ethnos" — people — with one origin and culture, and a history beginning "back in the mists of time" or even in an origin myth, all united by "blood and soil."

We're a hodgepodge; if you want a fancy image, a mosaic, the one I prefer, that thoroughly American dish, chop suey: one thing, sort of, but in complex ways. Collin Woodard counts "Eleven Regional Cultures of North America," and there are good historical reasons for that kind of regional analysis. For one thing, we're not only still kind of fighting the U.S. Civil War, but also the English struggles of the 17th century that separated out Puritans from less radical Christians.

Plus other ways that we're sliced and diced and divide ourselves up, which on balance is a good thing — *IF*

Our diversity is a good thing if, but only if, most Americans can see ourselves as «One Republic (if we can keep it)», with citizens unified by some agreement on basic terms, plus consciousness of what it's important for us to argue about and dedication to rules of civil contention and competition

Pledging Allegiance (Flag Debates Again)

As long as we're re-cycling arguments on patriotism, treason, the National Anthem, and such, here's me briefly on The Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag from April of 2004. Hey, if we're going to keep recycling arguments on symbols, I think I should get to recycle my short contributions. Anyway,  I take very seriously my oath "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States (and will repeat that below) but have some qualms about the patriotic exercise of pledging allegiance to a flag.


* First off, allegiance is pledged to the flag, with "to the Republic" almost an afterthought: following an "and" and never mentioned as a variant title for the exercise (we don't talk about "Pledging Allegiance to the Republic").
* The Republic in The Pledge is defined as "one nation," as opposed to a confederation of states undoubtedly, but also as a conflation of nation and republic. The U.S. isn't a nation in the same sense that Japan is a nation, or in the sense of "nations" in the joke in the song from HMS Pinafore: "But, in spite of all temptations / To belong to other nations / He remains an Englishman."
In everyday usage "nation" is still often expanded to "Christian nation," and at one time that was "White, Christian nation" (and Catholics, in such usages, weren't Christians, and Jews weren't White). And the nominally-Christian racists had and have a point: traditional nations were supposed to be united by "blood" and faith or "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden). I am a citizen of and have sworn my loyalty to the American Republic established by the U.S. Constitution; I don't belong to some hypothetical American nation.

* As the U.S. prison population continues to rise, with many inmates incarcerated for minor drug crimes — and many of them young African-American males — the line on "liberty and justice for all" becomes increasingly problematic.  In the War on Drugs and the War on Crime, Americans may prefer security for themselves over liberty for other Americans, often justly, but often not.
* Between "liberty for all" on U.S. territory and a sense of security for "natural born" U.S. citizens, most Americans would probably go for security.

If we want a patriotic exercise, maybe reciting this: "I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Federal Republic established thereby, and will strive to achieve domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for us today and for future generations."

It's Not Just the Nazi-ish Salute ...

      It's not Just the Nazi-ish, fascistic salute that should bother people about Donald Trump's asking for a pledge of allegiance; it's more important that Trump came close to requesting an oath of allegiance to himself, Donald Trump.

“Let’s do a pledge. Who likes me in this room?” Trump asked the crowd at a rally in Orlando, Florida, which was frequently interrupted by protesters. “I’ve never done this before. Can I have a pledge? A swearing? Raise your right hand.” The Republican presidential front-runner then proceeded to get the audience to repeat after him. “I do solemnly swear that I, no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there are hurricanes or whatever, will vote on or before the 12^th for Donald J. Trump for president.”

This is "the cult of personality" in politics, and it does not turn out well. Taken further, it's not just asking for a promise to vote for a person one "likes" but an oath of loyalty to the individual. One famous one went "I swear eternal allegiance to Adolf Hitler and to those designated by him unbroken obedience." More significant were the oaths sworn by the Wehrmacht, German civil servants, and the SS, "swearing loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler rather than the nation or the constitution."

     In the United States we pledge allegiance to the flag in a relatively recent and not particularly binding ritual of civic loyalty. When we "solemnly swear" or affirm in the United States it is to support and defend our Constitution. Donald Trump is casually, almost flippantly messing around with that tradition. Combined with Trump supporters' supporting the man and not his policies, that is a very bad sign.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend ... (3 Nov. 2012)

"Preserve, Protect, and Defend" America, Not Necessarily Americans  

   
               A fair number of Americans, including American Presidents, assert that the first duty of the President of the United States is to protect the American people, to protect Americans.

                  And then a smaller group of us pedantic sorts, especially small-r republicans, assert that no, the key duties of the President are to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, and, as s/he swears or affirms — no American may be required to swear an oath — to "preserve, protect[,] and defend the Constitution of the United States."

                  Now does "Constitution" here mean every clause, phrase, and mark of punctuation in the document? The Constitution in its original form — e.g., with the assumption that slavery legally exists and that new slaves could be imported until 1808? Of course not. "Constitution" in the oath means the written document, as amended, plus something like "Constitution" in the British sense of the term.

                  I'd put it that the primary duty of the President is to defend the Republic, the American Republic as constituted in its essentials by the document, The Constitution of the United States. Let's put it, the primary duty of the President is to protect not Americans, but America.

                  This idea is in useful tension with the commonplace truth from Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan to John Stuart Mill in On Liberty to our own Declaration of Independence that the primary duty of any government is to protect its people.

                  Most Americans are either loud about their patriotism or keep their mouths shut; relatively few Americans get arrested any given year — so most Americans, most respectable, voting Americans, would be safer in a police state. Insofar as we have avoided a police state, we put at risk a fair number of decent, innocent Americans.

                  If the tree of liberty is fertilized from time to time with the blood of patriots, it is also fertilized with the blood of men, women, and children who die, or are wounded or maimed, because we make the State prove people guilty and grant bail and allow free speech to those who will insult God and the Prophet Mohammed. Well, and so forth through the Bill of Rights and traditional ideals of liberty.

                  At various times, however, and the years following 11 September 2001 have made up one of those times, there has been consistent over-emphasis on the part of US Presidents and the Congress and other leaders to protect Americans and consistent reluctance to tell the American people to toughen up and be willing to take casualties — civilian casualties — to preserve traditional rights.

                  There has been a failure to explain that even furthering US interests can have its costs, and a balancing favor to continue whether perceived interests are US interests and just what we mean be the interests of America.

                  We cannot have US ambassadors walled up in fortress embassies; we cannot have US Special Forces holed up in secure areas: to do their jobs they must get out among the people, including among people who want to kill them and sometimes succeed.

                  Ambassador Chris Stevens died doing his job, as did two of the CIA security officers who died responding to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in Libya, along with at least one other American.
                  To protect America, in some cases even to just achieve US policy goals, some Americans have to risk death or horrible injury, and sometimes they suffer.

                  The first duty of the President is to protect America and further its interests, and to do so s/he may have to get some Americans killed. Each President need to explain this nasty fact to each generation of the American public, and each generation has to debate where to strike a balance.

                  On 22 April 1971, speaking for Vietnam Veterans Against the War — against what we Americans call the Vietnam War — John Kerry asked rhetorically, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Or, arguably, worse than a mistake: we continue to debate the morality of the Vietnam War. What isn't debatable is that the President and government of the United States can err, horribly, and order Americans to kill and die in conflicts that are not necessary to preserve America, wars that hurt America.
                  This idea, too, needs to enter the debate.

                  A bumper sticker is not a philosophy, Charlie Brown, and one-liners on "the first duty of the President" aren't serious consideration of difficult issues.

                  We Americans need to toughen up and be willing to take risks necessary to preserve our freedoms (and our dignity). For example, making US airports less secure but freer puts lives at risk. So be it, I say: I sometimes take planes, and I'm for loosening up security. Let's debate that.

                  We Americans need to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and much of the rest of the world and shift money from "kinetic" military operations into the civilian economy. Such pulling back will save military lives and may put at risk civilians. So be that as well — and let us debate that also. 

Civil Libertarians Putting Americans in Harm's Way (7 June 2013)

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground;

Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down.

— Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Yo, Civil Liberties Pushers complaining about surveillance! (Cheek swabbing for DNA gets into other issues.)

            Are you saying that you would endanger innocent Americans, increasing the risks of death, dismemberment, rape, or maiming to American men, women, and even our children just to defend your right to privacy?!

            'Cause I will say something like that, except I would put it as defense of, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," to quote the US Bill of Rights, Amendment 4.

             To repeat the cliché: Freedom isn't free, indeed, and part of the cost of freedom is avoidable deaths of innocent people. Look, most Americans — that "great, silent majority" — would be safer from terrorism and crime in a police state. Anything less than a police state is a net increase in risk for most Americans. Let's all grant that.

            Let's grant also that John Kerry was right in his gaffe — definition: a politician's letting slip what he thinks and/or the truth — "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance," a deadly threat for the victims, but this side of a loose nuke not a threat to the Republic. Also, with nukes complicating the equation, not a major risk factor in American lives.

             If you're into the Constitution and Liberty and all that, you need to be willing to tolerate some increased dangers, and there has to be "a clear and present danger" before you even start to talk about giving up liberties. Then you have to do risk-assessment.

            You're worried about unlikely but catastrophic risks, and you should be? Well, there's Earth getting hit again by a substantial comet or asteroid, and there's full-scale thermonuclear war. Either could wipe out the human species, and a number of others, or at least blast human civilization back to a pre-industrial era. We can do a better job tracking extraterrestrial threats and we can reduce the number of nuclear warheads worldwide to a level below what risks Nuclear Winter. And we can do both without any reduction in liberty and, if nuclear build-down is done carefully, with an increase in security.

            Climate change is more complicated, but the risk can be reduced with only minimal loss of liberties and none of those of the basic sort. People will lose some of the "right to be left alone" as pollution controls become more rigorous and invasive, but there is no right to pollute. (I have a right to piss in the stream, as we used to say, only if the stream can clean up after me before it gets to humans and other critters that want to drink the water or take a swim.)

           If we really want to reduce the risks for Americans we can work on getting more people decent, affordable medical attention, reduce our production of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and improve our ability to respond to all sorts of lethal and otherwise harmful events, and not get hung up with  terrorism and crime. 

             Indeed, it's better to prevent a terrorist attack than to respond to one; but terrorist attacks are a whole lot less frequent than ordinary fires and explosions and high-speed car pileups. And robust response to all sorts of "Shit Happens" events can come with just about no costs in civil liberties.


            Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were more right than they may have intended with "Find the cost of freedom." Right: calculate the cost and do the bloody value judgments; and that's literally bloody: the cost of freedom has always involved innocent blood. 

"Two Cheers for [Participatory] Democracy!" (29 April 2014)

"The trouble with Socialism is that it takes [up] too many evenings."

—Usually attributed to Oscar Wilde,

sometimes given as "The trouble with democracy."

"Two Cheers for Democracy" —  essay by E. M Foster (1938)

           
           I worked off and on with a young writer on his script titled Home Owners' Association and fairly seriously joked with him that he should move the story more toward Horror.

            Part of "The horror! The horror!" of late has been some neighbors attending HOA Executive Board meetings. These are good people, with an agenda I support, but a handful are full adults, indeed, "senior citizens," and native-born Americans, but unfamiliar with how meetings run and organizations are organized.

            They were audience members at a meeting of the Board, with the right to speak briefly at the beginning of the meeting but after that, in theory, auditors: people who listen, as an audience, not officers having a Board meeting.

            HOA's are pretty democratic, but they aren't democracies, and some of my quite nice and ordinarily courteous neighbors wanted — demanded! —participatory democracy. This got me thinking about participatory democracy and to what extent it is always and necessarily A Good Thing.

            It isn't. Not always and necessarily good.

            If in a sense all we mortals have is time, limited time, and if taking our time is imposing on us; if the essence of slavery is other people's appropriating one's labor — then any system that appropriates one's time and labor for every goddamn little decision and mickey-mouse project is at least problematic. Hence, there is much to be said for systems that allow representative government and for the control-freak twerps who enjoy making every little decision and doing mickey-mouse shit-work to do it
.
            Now the twerps do tend to take over political parties and unions and countries and all, in what Robert Michels called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy," but until they do, most of us most of the time would just as soon let them run things.

            Though sometimes we (or at least some of my neighbors) want to yell at them, and every now and then you need a revolution and participatory democracy … until a new group of twerps arises to run things.
            Still, some systems can go a long time with reasonable, limited democracy and avoid cycles of mob rule, tyranny, oligarchy, aristocracy, bureaucracy, and other unpleasantness.

            New England town meetings seem to work, at least for New England small towns, and we had a pretty good system in my college fraternity chapter.

            Technically, and formally, the Illinois Alpha Kappa Chapter of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity was an elective constitutional monarchy, with sovereignty (such as it was) shared between the initiated brothers in the chapter and our elected President — significantly called "Rex," the Latin word for king — and to some extent the other officers. That is, powers not specifically reserved to the Chapter, or specifically assigned, were "Rex's prerogative," as in "royal prerogative." The Chapter, however, controlled the constitution and by-laws, and the Chapter president had to obey the rules as well as enforce them.

            I was serious about "elective constitutional monarchy."

            The practical problem, actually, was to keep the brothers involved: I think "buy in" was the management jargon later applied to such processes. In my fraternity, I took the job I usually wanted, which was vice president. As Oedipus's brother-in-law/uncle Creon explains to Oedipus, being close to a king is better than being king: you get clout without the responsibility (around line 710). Anyway, I was the VP, the Archon, and much of my job was being hatchet-man/consigliore/"Bad Cop" for the President, but part as well was — more directly than the President and even against the President — enforcing the constitution and by-laws. And also, to ensure some "buying in," coming up with ways to get the Sovereign Brothers involved in tweaking the rules. Or making significant changes: for "buying in" it's the process that's crucial and the product somewhat secondary.

            Anyway, we were democratic in debating rule-changes and over-all policy, and somewhat to my surprise, looking back, the system worked well: most of the decisions the Chapter made were sensible if hardly profound, and if I had disagreed, I had to admit, looking back, that the group was right as often as I was, or maybe more often.

            This is intriguing because a fair number of the brothers were, individually, screw-ups I'd barely trust to decide on a lunch menu.

            The Chapter successfully operated as a deliberative body most of the time, and not a small herd, or whatever you call a gathering of folklore lemmings — or like the current Legislative Branch of the government of the United States.

            Our debates would move around a circle of the brothers (not just in circles), and everyone would get a chance to speak, going from the young man highest in seniority to the new-initiate punk who was "LMIS" — low man in seniority — in his pledge class.

            "Da younger guys" would hear "da old farts" talk first, but those lowest in seniority got the last word, which is the privileged position in a debate of endurable length.

            With a deliberative body, it can be true that "All of us are smarter than any one of us."

            There are, though, limitations, starting with when a deliberative body degenerates into "group think," and there are also the standard questions/objections about just who the demos is and are in a democracy.

            The brethren were male, of age (if not always adults), free — if you want to see pledges as our slave caste — mostly White, and almost all native-born US citizens. (It was a heavily Jewish fraternity, so for those for whom race matters more than is healthy, most of us weren't really white. On the other hand, our few goyishe[r] brothers were incandescent White, and the one guy whose first language was Spanish was of old Spanish stock, from a family that looked Old Money and circulating figurative blood of deepest blue.)

            Still, the formula from the technical hero — I played the role; it's a bit part — in Aristophanes's The Congresswomen is "I'm Athenian, male, of age, and free," and that was what was required to be part of the demos in the democracy of ancient Athens; so my fraternity was doing better than the near-archetypal democracy of Athens. We were also a whole lot more democratic than the University of Illinois: pledges generally became active brothers and "citizens" after a semester and four days (for a truncated Hell Week); Athenian slaves took a whole lot more time to become free, if ever, and students were graduated and pushed out of the community and never received even the limited powers of members of the faculty.

            So two cheers for participatory democracy, and the full three cheers for participatory democracy during the brief flowering of a legitimate, popular, low-body-count revolution, before the crazies, fanatics, and/or bureaucrats take over. Still, most of the time you need something else.

            Representative governance is good, when it works. Something like my fraternity chapter was just fine: for a group of some fifty pretty homogeneous guys, all high school graduates, all who went through a semester of indoctrination and entered a mini-institutions, with very young traditions, but traditions and a written constitution and by-laws.

            We met regularly at the ol' frat-lodge, but usually fairly briefly, and not all that often: democracy didn't take up a lot of evenings. The rest the time, those who liked to run things ran them, and there wasn't all that much to run.

About that Second Amendment ... (30 Oct. 2014)

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What TV news I watch is from an elliptical trainer, and I work hard to avoid commercials — every time you listen to a commercial the hucksters win — so I skip channels a bit and set the TV to mute fairly often and listen to an audio book. So I'm often confused about who said what on which program, but I got the clear message that my fellow Libs Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Chris Hayes, and/or Rachel Maddow got fairly shocked by the idea of a Republican candidate for office addressing gun enthusiasts and bringing up potential use of firearms to defend oneself against — i.e., shoot at with intent to wound, kill, or maim — various folk in the Federal government.

Uh, yeah. That goes with a reading of the Second Amendment that I heard from the 1960s on. The logic is straighforward. The Second Amendment is second only to the First — free speech and all that — in that the Right to Bear Arms ensures the other rights against the threat of a tyrannical government.

After all, Tom Jefferson and the guys held as self-evident axiomatic "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights [...] That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Under the Bill of Rights that we eventually got from the Revolution (or Counter-revolution, if that's your theory), citizens of the Republic could exercise our rights and peaceably assemble and shoot our mouths off "to petition the government for a redress of grievances." But let's say there's no redress: not this time, not for a long time. Let's say the newfangled Federal government, or "any Form of Government" starts destroying rights rather than protect them? Well then it is our right, nay, our duty to try "to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as  [...] shall seem" to us "most likely to effect [... our] Safety and Happiness" and renewal of The Tree of Liberty.

Governments, however, don't like to be altered or abolished, and they fight back, with guns. (Mr. Jefferson was clear as to just what would water/manure the figurative Tree of Liberty.)

Now as a practical matter, the real revolutionary parts of revolutions are often pretty bloodless in the initial takeover. The fighting back comes after a bit, and what decides it isn't usually the weapons the peasants and revolutionary pros have but, instead, which way the troops finally decide to point their weapons. When the soldiers refuse to fire on the crowd and shoot instead their officers — or when military leaders join the rebels — that's when the revolution wins, at least for a while (until it gets betrayed ... and eventually the cycle starts all over again).

Still, at least in the initial stage of the revolution and maybe in the following guerilla warfare, it helps to have a well-armed populace to secure The Right of Revolution.

Which "Right," unfortunately, usually means some hotheads or fanatics gunning down cops or a standoff like Ruby Ridge and the siege at Waco leading to a skirmish and death. Or Shay's Rebellion. Or leading up to something as major as the US Civil War.

Which leads to the side of the Second Amendment coming from the other side of Tom Jefferson's life and that of a goodly number of the Founders and Framers: The need for well-armed White folk to put down any "servile insurrection" (or Indian attacks), or, later, just "uppity n*ggers." "[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms," except for brief periods, meant the right of White folks to keep firearms, while you can — or more likely I can — get arrested for "open carry" of a knife.

(The joke is that a Liberal is the guy who brings a knife to a gun fight; in terms of "home defense," I live the joke.)

Anyway, Jon or Stephen or Chris and/or Rachel shouldn't be surprised at gun fans indicating a willingness to shoot agents of the Federal government: Federal Marshals, FBI, ATF — whatever. That's part of the theory. It's also close to rebellion, insurrection, or treason, and the Federal government can be expected to shoot back. Maybe not Sherman's march to the sea this time, or even a drone strike, but far heavier shit than dreamt of by people who hold such theories.

And if they keep talking that way and arming themselves quite so assiduously, then we can expect even more militarization of our police forces and the irony of the Second Amendment working not to preserve the Republic but to put it in danger.