The Fatal Flaws in US Democracy

As history’s most consequential demagogue before Trump said, in crossing the Rubicon two millennia ago, “The die is cast.” In less than a month, we Americans will know whether our nation will stay a democracy, or whether we will follow another demagogue on the long road to perdition.

The polls all say the same thing. It’s a coin toss. The chance of American constitutional democracy ending after 233 years is about fifty percent.

So it’s not too early to take stock. In fact, it may be too late. But better late than never.

Is this all just bad luck, some fatal accident, some cruel twist of fate? Or did our Founders, despite their best efforts, leave us with a fatally flawed structure of government with a sell-by date? Let's analyze.

One thing is clear above all: our Founders didn’t want another king. They wanted to get away from England’s King George III, who had made war on them for having the temerity to declare independence. They risked their lives, fortunes and ”sacred Honour” to duck one-man rule. But did they succeed?

At times, we Americans have dabbled with collective rule. Boards of directors rule our business corporations, which are now charged with many of the most important tasks of our civilization. They grow and distribute our food, build our homes and vehicles, build and repair our infrastructure, and increasingly run or provide the books, remote technology and other products for our education. The boards set general policies and can fire a CEO, but still the CEO rules day-to-day management, much like a king of old. And nearly all CEOs today are male.

A similar partial evolution occurred in our government. Members of our Cabinet have real power and make decisions. But they are always subject to review and reversal by the supreme alpha male. Worse yet, our Congress, which was supposed to check our president, has not only abdicated its Constitutional power to declare war. It has also degenerated into a puerile debating and performative society bent on blaming, shaming, scaring and blocking any forward motion. Just months ago, it could barely keep the government running for less than half a year.

Interestingly, two of the US’ chief rivals, China and Iran, once made further progress. Before Xi Jinping declared himself, in effect, China’s most recent emperor, a committee of nine ruled all of China. Every member of that committee was an experienced and seasoned leader of some aspect or region of China. Each had been elected by all or part of the Chinese Communist Party, with some eighty million members. Most members had known and worked with each other for decades. The successors of China’s two supreme leaders had to be nominated by members of this committee from among their number, and each of those top leaders had to have served an “apprenticeship” of ten years (two five-year plans) on that committee before ascending to one of the top two posts, President or Premier.

I once thought this system was a signal advance over most governments in human history, and I so wrote. What better system than to have top leaders chosen by responsible, if lesser, leaders who have known and worked with the candidates for decades? How could we compare our current American system, in which disinterested, inattentive, disgusted and lukewarm voters in seven “battleground” states will choose our next supreme leader based on thirty-second video ads, or on “news” as propaganda, manufactured for profit by people working for and under a corporate alpha-male leader like Rupert Murdoch?

If Trump wins next month, I will go to my grave believing that Murdoch and Fox will have killed our democracy, in cold blood, for money and for power. Our catastrophic future history on offer now will not have differed much from a younger, stronger, alpha-male contender deposing the current clan leader by personal combat on the African savannah. Is this the best way to run a modern nation of 338 million people?

But I digress. The second possible exemplar of collective modern rule, oddly enough, is Iran. As far as anyone outside Iran can tell, it now has two supreme leaders: (1) the current top Ayatollah, now Ali Khamenei, 84 years old, and (2) the elected president, now Masoud Pezeshkian, 68 years old and a member of Iran’s ethnically Kurdish minority. AFAIK, Iran has no written Constitution, so the relationship between the two leaders depends on their respective vitality, connections and political skill. Perhaps it’s an unstable system, and it may produce some surprises; but I can’t shake the feeling that, even in this odd configuration, two heads are better than one, especially when the elder one is 84.

The point of discussing China and Iran is not to praise them. Both are hardly exemplars of good governance, let alone democracy. The point is to show that social evolution can produce random changes for the better, just as do the random mutations (“copying errors”) in our biological DNA, which are the basis of our biological evolution.

The point is also to show that those random changes, even if beneficial, can fade away and disappear unless recognized as having value and deliberately preserved. Xi’s declaring himself autocrat, thereby destroying the collective power of China’s once-ruling committee, may have been one of the saddest steps backward in humanity’s collective social-evolutionary history.

The deeper message is that there is no simple answer to improving human social organization. Anything that purports to preserve the status quo indefinitely will inevitably fail. And that is precisely how our Founders failed us.

They drafted our Constitution as if they were Moses on the Mount. They made amendment so hard as to engrave the status quo perpetually in stone. So the tough compromise between slave and free states, which produced our Electoral College, our permanently malapportioned Senate, and such things as the runaway filibuster [Search linked source for second occurrence of “broken”], are now likely to end with a coup de grace of our entire democracy. The end could come early next year, with the inauguration of a grossly unfit pathological narcissist in the mode of ancient Rome’s “mad emperors” Nero, Caligula and Commodus—all rolled into one.

A nation able to evolve into a real democracy, in which the nationwide popular vote elected its highest leader, would never have incurred this risk. In fact, the narcissist would never have been president, even once; Hillary Clinton would have instead.

So why do we Americans, after all our industrial and commercial successes and self-proclaimed “exceptionalism,” seem about to fail while Britain, though faded, still soldiers on, despite the insanity of Brexit? For answers, we should look to adaptability and evolution. Seemingly random changes that enhance survival succeed and persist. So it is with societies—a fact we have yet to recognize and our Founders most certainly did not.

As far as we know, ancient Rome’s democracy lasted only a few hundred years, then turned to empire and eventually fell. Similarly, the democratic phases of ancient Athens and Sparta lasted only a few centuries. Our American constitutional democracy has lasted only 233 years and already seems poised to fail. If it falls, its demise will have been directly traceable to flaws in our Constitution—a foundational document that sought to compromise, for all time, wildly conflicting visions of human freedom and brutal human bondage.

In contrast, England’s democracy has persisted for 809 years since the first Magna Carta in 1215. Its secret is a system without a written constitution. Its laws and government continuously practice the art of adaptation, as wise leaders come and go but consistently improve the whole with time and experience. None of them is constrained by an outmoded written document revered as Scripture; experience, wisdom and common sense are their guides.

For me, the gem in Britain’s crown of adaptive government is its system of “common law.” We Americans have it, too. But for most of our short history, we have been systematically replacing the common law with overly detailed statutes that, in their unnecessary and sometimes counterproductive specificity, futilely try to control the nuances of a future that no one can foresee.

England’s common law does nothing of the kind. It hasn’t for most of those eight centuries. Instead, it lets wise and circumspect judges decide each legal case that comes before them in the narrowest possible way. Collectively, those decisions control, as “case law,” future decisions. But they do so only to the extent that future decisions rest on the same or closely analogous facts, and only to the extent future facts do not (rarely) justify reversing earlier precedent. Thus, British common law evolves the same way that our species has and that most of us do throughout our lives, through trial and error, step by step, making limited decisions under the circumstances directly before us, ever informed by present reality.

English “common law” is thus an adaptive tapestry of individual decisions, each made in response to specific, detailed facts by an experienced, wise, morally grounded and empathetic judge. It’s both a modern and longstanding exercise in the evolution of human society. It changes and adapts as history and human circumstances change.

As far as I know, it’s the wisest and most effective form of human governance ever invented. It befits an island nation, free from most human conquest, whose miserable weather motivated extraordinary devotion to reading and thinking. Not for nothing did the Brits produce three of the four greatest thinkers in human history: Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin (the fourth being Albert Einstein, a German Jew).

As for the common law, so for the entire British system of government. It has no written constitution. It does not attempt to predict, restrict or control the future. It merely provides the best wisdom available to handle and resolve disputes and solve social problems arising now. It leaves future decisions and future evolution where they belong: in the future. With this foundation, English democracy has evolved, mostly peacefully, from a strong monarchy, through a two-House parliamentary democracy, to the present system in which the House of Lords is a mostly powerless (and harmless) appendage to the House of Commons.

So what should we Americans do? First, we have to survive the current division. The only practical way to do that is to elect Kamala Harris president. If we cannot manage that, our short experiment in democracy will likely end soon and ignominiously. Even if it survives, it will have reduced chance for success, hobbled as it is by both an outmoded Supreme Scripture and a Supreme Court that won’t hesitate to make up its own statutes, on subjects like presidential immunity, out of whole cloth.

Even if we survive this cusp, the same organizational impediments will continue to hobble us. Prominent among them will be direct primary elections. There true believers fired with partisan zeal constrain voters’ choices of “democratic” representatives in the general election, making rule by wise leaders picked by their peers for experience and wisdom virtually impossible.

One of the greatest American judges never to reach the Supreme Court was Learned Hand, of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. He once ended a copyright decision with the words, “Our Constitution is not a straitjacket, but a charter for a living people.”

Unfortunately, this optimistic claim was wrong. Not only has our Constitution become a straitjacket. Our very Supreme Court has instructed us to interpret it with the mindset prevailing in 1791, when it was ratified. The current Court thus forces us to look back over two centuries to decide, among other things, how to handle reproductive medicine and prevent public massacres using automatic weapons that no one could even imagine in 1791. It would be hard to invent another judicial philosophy so regressive and so poorly adaptive.

So if I were to write advice for a time capsule, to instruct future generations how to avoid a third debacle like the Fall of Rome, it would be far shorter than our broken Constitution:

Don’t try to outdo Moses and write legal prescriptions for all time. Don’t try to “put it all in writing,” because that will discourage evolutionary change. Trust your leaders, but be sure they are wise and of good character; maybe test them, using modern scientific methods of evaluation, to weed out the dullards, the grifters and the psychopaths, before they first run for office. [Search in linked source for “Enlightened”.]

Don’t specify too much and dive into too much detail in statutes; leave details to expert regulators, whose work is easier to change. Don’t try to predict the future, which, as famed baseball catcher Yogi Berra once said, is hard to do. And don’t fear the “administrative state.” A society with details managed by experts is inevitable and will become more so as human knowledge and expertise continue to expand far beyond the reach of any single mind.

Instead, form the institutions of your society with tested general principles, among them complete parliamentary democracy, without a trace of minority rule and without minority or individual vetoes. Rely on a continuous flow of highly educated men and women trained in realism and critical thinking, indoctrinated in humility, and infused with a zeal to put other people, their nation and their species first, in all their thinking. Make sure your decision makers—most importantly your judges—come from this group and decide as many lawsuits as possible based on the common law.

Put nothing vital in the hands of a single leader or a small group. Have your institutions check and balance each other, but not so much as to create long-lasting divisions like the ones that destroyed American democracy. Have all vital executive decisions made by a medium sized committee—about a dozen or so—by majority vote. And make sure that committee is fully representative your society, including the majority gender: women.

Most important of all: recognize and tolerate no absolutes. Free speech is important, but it cannot be allowed to devolve into license to promulgate lies and propaganda, let alone by the richest and most powerful corporations and people, who will only peretuate their oligarchy. Just so, self-defense should be a right, but not one that licenses weapons of war on ordinary streets and in ordinary homes. Otherwise, the AK-47 will be just the beginning of horror in random human massacres, as drones with AI inevitably evolve in deadliness, evasiveness and accuracy. Make sure that the government you found recognizes reasonable exceptions to every rule. (That’s yet another reason to let evolving wisdom, not absolute nostrums, prevail.)

* * *

Evolution created us humans. But our biological evolution does not run nearly fast enough to save us from our global and continental divisions, our nuclear standoffs, or the planetary heating that our now-deliberate use of fossil fuels is accelerating.

Only our deliberate, conscious and rapid social evolution can save us. That will require laws, institutions and a social structure that, above all, are flexible and adaptive and open to wisdom, empathy and continuing constructive change. We Americans do not now have such a social structure because our Founders had an unrealistic conceit: that they could create a specific plan for the ages in a few pages. Even Yogi Berra was smart enough not to believe that! If Trump wins in November, our Founders will have failed decisively and perhaps irrevocably. Then we need no longer revere them as gods.

For societies as for individuals, the most important lesson of our current agony is flexibility. The absence of a written constitution did not stop either England or ancient Rome from becoming the two longest-lived democracies in human history. In fact, it helped.

If American democracy ends soon, we will have proved conclusively that “getting it all in writing” is a societal evolutionary disadvantage. Without the ball and chain of our written Constitution, we could have reformed our government, after our brutal Civil War, into something like a working parliamentary democracy, with representatives evenly apportioned according to population.

So our human species must take the lesson that trying to stop social evolution is a fool’s errand. No immutable basic law or tablet from the mount will us survive, let alone thrive. Only continuing wisdom and adaptability will do that.

As for actual Scripture, its historical and present use by divergent cults as excuses for brutal wars continues and expands today. That terrible blot on our species’ history shows no sign of abating. Jesus’ advice to “Love they enemy” and “love thy neighbor as thyself” is worth preserving, if only we could hear and follow it among all the scriptural nonsense and ideological noise. Otherwise, we Americans, like the rest of our species, need to stay as flexible and adaptive as possible, subject only to time-tested, hortatory principles like those.


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Sometimes Only a Poem Will Do

I

His words are demented.
His thoughts make no sense.
His co-workers hate him,
From Milley to Pence.

So why would one pick him?
Only cult members know.
He dotes on himself;
His Reason is slow.

He praises himself,
As we’re all taught not.
His “yes” and his favor
Are easily bought.

Just flatter and laud him,
And he’ll have your back.
Be you felon or despot,
He’ll lie like a hack.

And how does he lie?
So often and strong,
That his avid supporters
Can’t tell right from wrong.

II

Is this all we have?
Is this who will lead us?
No, we have a choice.
There’s someone who’ll heed us.

She’s noble and female,
A mother by choice.
A trained prosecutor,
With a lawmaker’s voice.

She’s held public office,
For twenty-one years.
She’s put away bad buys
Without fuss or tears.

Her focus is us,
Not herself or her needs.
She sees what we want
And she’ll get it with deeds.

She’s been an “Apprentice,”
But not for a clown.
She’s spent four years working
For a Prez of renown.

Joe Biden is old;
He’s frail and he stutters.
But he’s done more for us
Than have most others.

He picked her with gusto;
He made her his heir.
He passed the baton
With thought and with flair.

III

They’ve not come from prisons;
They don’t eat your pets.
They do come from hellholes;
But have no regrets.

They’ve stepped over snakes
In the Darien Gap.
They walked many miles;
They’ll all take the rap.

So why do they do it,
and so risk their skin?
The reason is simple:
They all just want in.

They come from bad places
Of near-constant dread,
Of thugs and gang bangers
Who shoot for the head.

They crave what we’ve got.
That want a new life:
The chance to improve things
Without war or strife.

The work we won’t do
They do for poor pay.
They’ve no rights or papers,
But yet still they stay.

These desperate people
Are pawns in low games:
They work for big business,
But the GOP calls them names.

IV

A voting machine:
So simple a thing.
It lets you decide,
Who’ll rule you next spring.

The people who come here
Don’t know from voting.
They want only peace and work,
And what they came toting.

But you have a choice,
And it may be your last.
When the Man says he’ll dictate;
You’d better think fast.

Our Constitution’s paper,
Our Declaration, too.
Only we can enforce them;
And that means you, too.

If you vote wrong,
Or don’t vote at all,
What happens next year
Will be your own fault.

V

They’ll come from the country.
They’ll come from the town.
They’ll come from the highlands,
Where the waters rush down.

They may not have voted,
But they’ll do so now:
The stakes are too high,
To sit out or bow.

They’ll come in bright dresses.
They’ll come in blue jeans.
They’ll vote for their futures,
Behind little screens.

They’ll come hard this time,
Where they didn’t come before.
Because this election
Means oh so much more.

They’ll come for their children.
They’ll come to stay free.
They’ll come for a new chance
To say who they’ll be.

The thirty percent
Who don’t vote sometimes
Will drop their excuses
And heed these weak rhymes.

They’ll vote for their future
With an eye to the past.
They’ll vote for a woman
Whose values will last.

And when the dust settles,
The Man will be gone.
His lies will undo him;
His hate will harm none.

And we to Ben Franklin
Will shout with great glee:
Our Republic stands yet,
And so do all we.

---Jay Dratler, Jr.

NOTE: Believe it or not, this poem was inspired by a Russian poem [scroll to bottom for actual poem], one of the greatest patriotic poems I have read. If Russian peasants rising to save their nation from a Czar’s bellicose folly can inspire rhymes, then why shouldn’t a free people rising to save their democracy? Everyone has my permission to reproduce, publish and display my poem above with attribution but no cuts or edits.

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Tribalism Can Destroy Us

We humans—all of us—stand at a cusp. Our world is going up in flames, literally.

Some of the flames come from our own explosives, deliberately ignited: in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, in Russia, in Sudan, and in Ukraine. Some come from our near-half-century neglect of planetary heating due to our burning fossil fuels. Two summers ago, 5% of Canada’s forests went up in flames, poisoning our American East Coast with life-threatening small-particle air pollution. If that rate of destruction keeps up on average, let alone if it accelerates, all of Canada’s life-sustaining and carbon-capturing forests could be gone in a single generation.

We style ourselves “Homo sapiens”, Latin for “wise man.” But what we’re doing with ourselves and our planet is anything but wise. And I haven’t even mentioned the most horrible form of “fire”—nuclear weapons that can leave our cities in rubble and the land around them poisoned with radioactivity for millennia. The risk of their misuse is greater now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, sixty-two years ago.

We know that, as our species’ population zips by eight billion, there are too many of us. Yet China has abandoned the one-child policy that had raised it from a poverty-stricken third-class nation, despite its size and long history, to the brink of global economic leadership. And the United States, still clinging to first place, is now flirting with forcing women to have babies whether they want them or not. In general, many nations are trying to increase their populations, both to support the rise in their mostly idle seniors and to gain perceived advantages over others.

Meanwhile, we are all, collectively, exhausting the limited resources of our planet on which we depend for modern life. Oil and gas are running out, almost certainly within a generation or two. [See Point 2 in linked source.] Fish and seafood stocks and bird populations are declining, as we deplete them for food, and as rising ocean temperatures—over 100 degrees Fahrenheit off Florida this summer!—decimate them.

What drives this self-destructive behavior? Are we suicidal as a species, what I’ve termed “suigenocidal”?

Maybe. The root cause of all these evils, I submit, is something deep in our species’ DNA: tribalism.

Horrifying examples abound. Russia wants Ukraine’s territory, although Ukraine was Russia’s own “Mother Country.” To get it, Russia is willing to destroy some of the world’s most beautiful cities, massacre civilians at random, idle one of the world’s great breadbaskets, and risk another Chernobyl at Zaporizhzhia. Russia doesn this despite the fact that its language and Ukraine’s, although different, use much the same Cyrillic alphabet are mutually comprehensible, like Spanish and Italian or Spanish and Portuguese.

Israel and Palestine now provide perhaps the bloodiest example. Their two tribes have been killing each other in numbers for over a year, leaving Gaza a broken field of rubble, parts of Lebanon and Northern Israel in ruins, untimely deaths totaling nearly 100,000, and close to two million people homeless and starving. And for what? Because they couldn’t get together like rational beings and share the ample land.

While still mostly peaceful, the two Koreas provide perhaps the weirdest example. They speak precisely the same language, which no one else speaks. They share the same writing system, Hangul, which, according to my analysis, may have the most efficient alphabet of our entire species. They share the same peninsula where they socially evolved. Yet there is a wall between them, a no-man’s-land called the Demilitarized Zone. They threaten each other with war constantly, as if they were not brothers, genetically and culturally, as much as any people on Earth.

Science has discovered the root cause of this insanity, if not a cure for it. It’s tribalism, and it’s apparently innate. Give children as young as three years orange or green T-shirts at random; tell them they are on the “team” of the corresponding color. Then watch them impute hostile and nasty motives to each other as they “interpret” deliberately ambiguous drawings of children with orange and green T-shirts interacting.

Tribalism are us. We divide up and oppose each other, in teams, on the slightest provocation or pretext. It can be language, nationality, religion, skin color, facial features, whom or how we love, where or how we work, or political party. And the divisions can be strong enough to split families, create lifelong enmity, and even motivate mayhem or murder.

If you doubt this for a moment, just take a close look at team sports. Competing “tribes” in football, baseball or basketball—or, abroad, in what we Americans call “soccer”—are an obsession for the vast majority of our species. It may be an “innocent” preoccupation, but it’s the same innate impulse that, pushed to extremes, makes war so bloody and inhuman.

About two thousand years ago, a very wise man warned us about all this. His name was Jesus of Nazareth. He penned two pithy slogans to remind us of his warning. I call them the world’s first “bumper stickers,” though he gave them to us two millennia before there were cars.

“Love thy enemy,” he told us. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Clearer admonitions against tribalism would be hard to find. Yet today we Americans have a tribe of evangelicals, who purport to follow Jesus, but who took a leading role in writing a near-thousand-page manifesto describing precisely how their tribe could dominate others’. It’s called “Project 2025.”

Of course Jesus was right. We can overcome our innate tribalism with another innate characteristic: Reason. Reason and its offspring, Science, have made us the dominant species on our small planet. They now let us prevent disease with vaccines and replace overused joints. They give us hope to reach the planet Mars and maybe, someday, the stars. Wasn’t that what the now-fading Western Enlightenment, which produced our nation, was all about?

Imagine what might happen if Russians and Ukrainians cooperated to harvest the Ukrainian breadbasket and to use Eastern Ukraine’s iron to build ships and trains to export all the food it produces. They could feed all the now-starving Palestinians and Sudanese and much of the world. The now-starving orphans of Gaza and Sudan could be educated and raised to adulthood as evangelists against the very tribalism that now threatens their survival.

Imagine how well the Israelis and Palestinians could make the Middle Eastern deserts bloom if they worked together, rather than trying to kill each other. Imagine how that region would flourish if the Saudis and Iranians helped them, rather than taking sides as if this deadly struggle were a macabre football game.

Imagine what an industrial and scientific powerhouse the two separate Koreas could be if they joined as one. Together, they could rival Japan in advancing science and creating products to enhance human life worldwide.

But today’s most dangerous locus of tribalism is in none of these places. It’s right here in our own country, the United States of America. It’ll be on all the ballots that we must cast in less than a month.

In the document by which we Americans once divorced from England appear the words, “all . . . are created equal.” That’s as clear a rejection of tribalism as Jesus’.

But do we heed those words? Will we heed them enough to vote for the woman who wants to bring us together, with Reason, to solve the many problems that face us? Or will we vote for an aging and increasingly deranged man who seeks to divide us for his own aggrandizement and will set us against each other in so many ways, just has he has in his endless campaigns?

Once our nation was uniquely promising in welcoming the “huddled masses” of oppressed foreigners, from every tribe, “yearning to breathe free.” Will we continue to honor that noble and rational tradition?

Will we all work together to use the Reason that, along with tribalism, is part of our DNA? Or will we Americans degenerate into tribal wars internally, just as our species appears to be dissolving in them globally?

When you think about it, that’s really the only question on the ballot, for it subsumes all the others. All else is mere detail. Reason and cooperation, or raw tribalism leading to mindless hate and destruction: take your pick. As Jesus recognized and told us so long ago, you can’t have both.

P.S.   To underscore the arbitrariness and the “division for division’s sake” effect of Trump’s alternative MAGA universe, WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin has just published an analysis of the many points in common between Kamala Harris’ policies and those of pre-MAGA Republicans.   They include: (1) patriotism over partisanship; (2) a strong national defense; (3) capitalism and free markets subject to reasonable regulation; (4) stable and sensible rules for business; (5) confidence in America’s international leadership and positive impact on the world; (6) faith in democracy as a potent force for good worldwide; (7) strong support for allies like Ukraine and Israel against tyrannical and violent regimes; (8) the independence of the Federal Reserve; (9) a nonpartisan, professional and expert civil service; (10) support for NATO; (11) reliance on scientific expertise; (12) an ethical and nonpartisan judiciary; (13) a healthy middle class; and (14) a fair, efficient and equitably enforced tax code.

 

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Leadership and Kamala Harris

The “secrets” of good leadership are pretty open and simple. You maintain a system of good principles and values that don’t change. You apply them to resolve disputes and problems and improve the lives of your people. When the facts change—or when you learn facts that you didn’t previously know—you change your approach, but not your principles. And when you make a mistake, as all humans do, you ’fess up, correct the mistakes as much as you can, and move on.

In theory, that’s not hard, is it? But human nature makes it hard. In a democracy, “winning” requires convincing the people, even at times when the right course of action is difficult or unclear. Sometimes it’s easier just to delude and deceive the people, or to incite and follow their raw emotions, rather than lead them.

In my 79 years, American presidents of both parties have given us examples of good, bad, superb and abysmal leadership. Let’s take a few salient ones.

Republican Dwight David Eisenhower (“Ike”) was both a great general and a great president. As Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, he led the greatest seaborne invasion in human history, on “D-Day” at Normandy, France. He made the invasion easier by ordering a fake force of rubber tanks and planes on fields in Southern England, directed at Calais, not Normandy.

That may have been the most successful military feint since the Trojan Horse. And it was the beginning of the end of the Nazis’ evil empire and the Holocaust.

When Nasser’s Egypt seized the Suez Canal in 1956, England, France and Israel began to take it back by force, and the Soviet Union started rattling its saber. As President, Ike solved the problem by putting the Suez Canal—still today one of the world’s most important commercial arteries—under UN Control. In the process, he began advancing an “international order” of rules, principles and institutions that has lasted 68 years. It’s just breaking down today.

Ike sent federal troops to the South to enforce the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate schools. He also built the Interstate Highway System and chewed out the anti-Communist demagogue Joe (NOT Gene) McCarthy, but unfortunately only in private. And, on his way out, he warned us all about the military industrial complex, which today is busy churning out, for private profit, hideously expensive big planes and ships that are sitting ducks for today’s AI-enhanced drones.

Ike’s Democratic successor John Fitzgerald Kennedy (“JFK”) was an inspiring and resourceful leader. In his inaugural address, his told us all to pull together for the common good. “Ask not,” he told us, “what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” He created the Peace Corps to spread American values abroad. And when the Soviet Union threatened us by staging medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, potentially putting our entire Eastern Seaboard within fifteen minutes of nuclear annihilation, JFK got the missiles out.

Rather than order a bloody invasion of the island nation, as some of his generals had advised, JFK blockaded the island nation and secretly made a deal with Soviet leader Khrushchev to remove the missiles—all of them. In return, he agreed to remove our similarly threatening missiles from Turkey and never again to try to invade Cuba, as we had done by supporting a failed invasion by mostly Cuban volunteers at the Bay of pigs. The thirteen days of uncertainty before that deal took hold were the closest our species has yet come to self-extinction. But JFK managed the crisis adroitly; when he got assassinated, Khrushchev reportedly wept.

JFK’s Democratic survivor, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), was a mixed bag of leadership. On the one hand, his legislative skill and legendary persuasive power leveraged the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inspiring moral leadership to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two crucial laws have become the legal foundations of our still agonizingly slow approach to racial justice. LBJ accomplished this feat just two years after racist Alabama Governor George Wallace had stood in the statehouse door and declared “Segregation today . . . Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever.”

LBJ did this with a combination of moral suasion and legendary legislative arm-twisting. A vulgar man, he once bragged that he had his rivals’ “peckers in mah pocket.” (Nearly all members of Congress were men in those days.) As part of his so-called “Great Society,” LBJ also pushed through Congress Medicare and a number of anti-poverty programs. Had all that been his legacy, today he would be hailed as the greatest president since FDR.

But after Communist North Vietnam had kicked the French colonizers out and had attacked a corrupt and brutal but non-Communist “democracy” in the South, LBJ made perhaps the most disastrous mistake of any postwar president. He set our nation on a course of escalation toward our first—and still today, our most bloody and disastrous—major military defeat, massively escalating our role in the War in Vietnam. In the process, he abandoned our long national quest for an “international order” in favor of half-hearted, unilateral military force, caused the death of some 50,000 Americans, and cemented our reputation in many parts of the world as an imperialist loser.

Perhaps the most pathetic part of this debacle was its alleged “reason.” Although every expert on Vietnam had advised that Vietnam had resisted Chinese domination for most of a millennium, LBJ heeded the advice of Robert S. MacNamara, JFK’s (and LBJ’s own carryover) Secretary of Defense. MacNamara had made his reputation as a car-maker at Ford. He had had virtually no experience in foreign policy before becoming SecDef. He touted a superficially plausible theory that, if Vietnam “fell” to Communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow, falling like “dominoes.”

Of course, nothing of the sort happened after our defeat. Before he died MacNamara apologized for his “domino theory,” but not for the untimely deaths of 50,000 Americans and an estimated 3.5 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.

I could go on in similar detail, but the trail of American leadership narrows considerably after LBJ. Reliance on clear and good principles and values faded. Instead, our presidents increasingly resorted to demagoguery, fear-mongering and pandering to win elections.

Republican Richard M. Nixon was the first great fear-monger of our postwar era. Picking up where Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery left off, he constantly emphasized the threat of Communism, not just from the Soviet Union and then-“Red” China, but from inside our nation itself.

We had helped win the greatest war in history, and our moral and political leadership had established the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the global postwar order. But Nixon’s incessant fear-mongering made us fearful and suspicious. And the fear and suspicion that Nixon had fostered to gain power remained in force through JFK’s narrow win over Nixon in 1960, JFK’s and LBJ’s presidencies, and Nixon’s presidential victories in 1968 and 1972.

Nixon did do some good things. He signed into law the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”). With his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he “went to China”—despite his earlier, relentless fear mongering about it—and eventually opened diplomatic relations with it. During the inflation caused by the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970’s, Nixon dropped some Republican orthodoxy when trying to fight it: he even tried price controls, until they didn’t work.

But Nixon’s fatal flaw was his lack of principle. He craved power more than he respected any principle. Fear mongering had brought him to power, and he apparently had few moral restraints. When he presided over the Watergate break-in and the “Plumbers’” attempts to fix the 1972 election using illegal means to dig up dirt on Democrats, a then-principled Congress appeared poised to impeach him, and he resigned in 1974.

Long before Nixon resigned, he had prolonged our dismal War in Vietnam by: (1) claiming to have a “secret plan to end the war” that never materialized and (2) concealing and thwarting sincere efforts by the North Vietnamese, at the Paris Peace Talks, to end the war early by making major concessions. Thus, contrary to his famous protestation that he was not, Nixon had actually been “a crook,” both in approving or condoning the Watergate break-in and torpedoing the Paris Peace Talks for his personal political benefit.

In retrospect, Nixon’s principle-free approach to politics seems a watershed. Despite his resignation in disgrace, his political tactics encouraged others to take a “game-playing” approach to presidential politics, albeit with delayed effect.

Nixon’s Vice-President, Gerald Ford, succeeded Nixon after his resignation. He was a stodgy and uninspiring but honest man. To avoid the spectacle of criminal trials for a disgraced former president, he pardoned Nixon. No doubt his doing so sealed his fate: a nationally unknown Democrat, Jimmy Carter, won the presidency at the next election, easily defeating Ford.

Today we all know how principled Jimmy Carter is, after his half-century of post-presidential service, both here and abroad. A real Christian, among so many who use Christianity as a political prop, Carter just celebrated his 100th birthday. He remains determined to stave off his metastatic brain cancer just long enough to vote for Kamala Harris.

A nuclear engineer while in the Navy, Carter was undoubtedly one of our most intelligent presidents, and the one with the best understanding of physical science. Realizing the vast potential of solar energy, and knowing about the limited supply of fossil fuels [see Point 2 of linked source], he had solar panels installed on White House. Ronald Reagan, his successor, took them down.

Reagan was also Richard Nixon’s successor in demagoguery. He had reached the presidency by exaggerating and exploiting public fear of disorder arising from protests against the War in Vietnam, and unrest among American college students, including the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.

But Reagan’s immense popularity as president also derived from another successful, unprincipled innovation to American politics: pandering. I’ve written a whole essay on how Reagan relentlessly exploited the human vice of selfishness, elevated it to a matter of political “principle,” and incorporated it into the general notion that government is bumbling, restrictive and evil and that private business does everything best. I won’t repeat that essay here.

Suffice it so say that Reagan’s political battle cry—“It’s your money!”—was a direct assault on the patriotic selflessness that JFK had promoted in his inaugural address. It was the foundation of a generational drift away from patriotism and self-sacrifice, from higher tax rates on the wealthy, and from government regulation of such things as pollution of our air, water and soil, and unsafe food, water, drugs, cars, trucks and planes. It was the primary cause of the biggest non-wartime deficits in our national history. And all this is still going on today.

Pandering to natural human selfishness was just the beginning. Pandering to tribalism also became a dominant theme of Republican politics. It morphed from racism to xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia, and today, to trans-phobia. Even the most principled (and most competent!) Republican president of the last half-century—George Herbert Walker Bush (“Bush the Elder”)—pandered to racism by using the image of a released Black re-offender, Willie Horton, as alleged evidence of Democrats’ softness on crime.

To put it mildly, pandering is not leadership. It’s following. Indeed, it’s following and exploiting the worst instincts of the worst people.

Pandering is also not a principle. It’s a tactic. Inevitably, it gets in the way of serious, effective solutions to political problems. For just one example, how can you lead people of different races and backgrounds to get along if you pander to the tribalists, haters and dividers among them?

So we can summarize the last thirty-odd years of American presidential history easily. Bill Clinton discovered that pandering—in the slightly more subtle form of “triangulation” (aka following the crowd and co-opting the opposition)—could win elections. I’ve written a whole essay on that subject, too. By pandering to Wall Street, the billionaires, the rising oligarchs, and the “bigger is better” trend among financial institutions, Bill Clinton—a Democrat—won elections by virtually abandoning every economic principle that Democrats had stood for since FDR. The result, unsurprisingly, was the Crash of 2008.

The final ignominy was the presidency and now is the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. He self-evidently has no principles but his own personal advantage, and he has raised fear-mongering and pandering to high arts. He incites and reinforces paranoid fears of hapless migrants with lies about them taking jobs, bringing crime, and eating pets. And he claims, contrary to fact and common sense, that they do not come here hoping for a better future but are being foisted on our innocent nation by unnamed foreign leaders releasing them from prisons and insane asylums.

When you abandon all principles for fear-mongering and pandering, it’s easy to abandon truth and honesty, too. And that, dear readers, is precisely where we stand in this election: a choice between embattled and neglected principle, on the one hand, and, on the other, demagoguery, fear-mongering, pandering and political campaigns unhindered by the most basic truths, such as who won the last presidential election.

Where does Kamala Harris stand on this sad spectrum of societal degeneration? An incident early in her political career is indicative.

Mere months after assuming her first elective office, District Attorney of San Francisco, Harris faced a difficult dilemma. A thug was charged with killing a San Francisco police officer, in cold blood, with an AK-47. The evidence against him was pretty strong, as a second officer involved in the incident had been an eye-witness. The question for Harris was whether, in the maiden voyage of her political career, to seek the death penalty for the accused killer.

Harris had promised not to seek the death penalty in her campaign for the office. She had done so out of principle: she believed that it is applied unfairly, randomly and discriminatorily. Did she back down for this politically charged and extreme case? No. She stood her ground on principle and never backed down.

Police turned their backs on her in the Hall of Justice. At the funeral for the slain officer, hundreds of uniformed police were present. Senator Diane Feinstein, then the doyenne of California Democratic politics, publicly advocated for the death penalty, in an obvious attack on Harris. These public displays of displeasure would have chilled the heart of anyone who, like Harris, had sworn to uphold the law and required the police’s cooperation to do so. But still she didn’t back down.

According to the Frontline program that covers this aspect of her career [Set the times at 48:00], Harris later did other things, and made other compromises, to restore her reputation among police—and the public—as an effective and even stern participant in law enforcement. But, to my knowledge, she has never wavered in her opposition to the death penalty, while putting away many criminals—from murderers to violent members of cartels and other criminal gangs.

You can argue the death penalty on both sides. But one thing is obvious to any law professor: in this country the death penalty is routinely applied unfairly and unequally. The number of cases in which entirely innocent Black people and other People of Color have sat on Death Row for decades before more careful reviews of their cases exonerated them continues to mount. Every professor of law has colleagues who participate in “innocence projects” that strive to keep the penalty from being applied to innocent people, often after they’ve waited on Death Row for years or decades.

Finally, there’s the dismal recent example of Marcellus Williams. He was a Black man just executed in Missouri despite requests by current prosecutors (due to weaknesses and racial bias in his trial), and pleas by the murder victim’s surviving family, that he not be. It’s impossible to review his case and many others like it without concluding that the death penalty is less an instrument of justice than a juggernaut of random State oppression.

My own view on the matter is that the death penalty should be reserved for the most extreme cases of well-proven (or admitted) mass murder, in which a vanishingly small probability of judicial error does not justify the cost to the State of keeping the mass murderer alive and incarcerated. But neither my views in the abstract nor yours matter in this instance. What matters is that Kamala Harris is a woman of principle, who doesn’t change her mind or her heart on important principles for expediency, public pressure, career enhancement, or electoral advantage.

As you survey presidents and presidential candidates since Carter, it’s hard to find ones who didn’t abandon important principles just to win. Although I thought he was right to do so, George Herbert Walker Bush reneged on his public pledge not to raise taxes. Bill Clinton jumped on the bandwagon of financial deregulation, helping cause the Crash of 2008. George W. Bush started two unnecessary wars to avenge 9/11, one that ended in debacle and one that is even now collapsing in stalemate, while Barack Obama got bin Laden with two helicopters and a team of Navy Seals. And if Donald Trump has any principles besides his own personal advantage (as he sees it at the moment), it’s hard to discern them.

In my view, the only presidents in the last half-century to stand on principle consistently when the chips were down, and to show leadership in so doing, were Jimmy Carter, Barck Obama and Joe Biden—a man too old to reach the young.  Isn’t it time we had another, younger, more vigorous one?

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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The Boundless Ambition of JD Vance

Last night’s vice-presidential debate made one thing clear. If only by default, JD Vance has become the brains of the Republican ticket and likely of the GOP. In ninety short minutes, he did all he had to do and more.

First and foremost, Vance “normalized” Trump better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Using lies, half-truths and endless repetition, he put a faux-rational policy gloss on the three bent pillars of Trump’s campaign: (1) that unlawful immigrants are destroying our society; (2) that Trump’s economic policies are mainstream, “common-sense” and (to the extent actually adopted) are working; and (3) that Kamala Harris is a know-nothing, do-nothing lightweight. Vance even tried to normalize Trump’s proposed massive deportation project by claiming it would start with criminals and maybe just end there.

Second, Vance performed the traditional “attack dog” role of VP wannabes brilliantly. He kept Harris in focus for the entire debate. He mentioned Trump only to respond to criticism and doubt and—once in a while—tout Trump’s alleged “policies” or praise his economic record. Vance blamed Harris for everything bad that had happened or didn’t happen under Joe Biden, completely ignoring John Nance Garner’s sage observation that the office of Vice-President “is not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Third, Vance exploited Trump’s malignant narcissism as might a professional psychologist. With only weak attempts to cite facts, Vance insisted that Trump’s economy and job creation were the best in one or another impressive time period. Thus Vance brilliantly reinforced his role as Chief Sycophant to the Narcissist in Chief, who was no doubt watching every word on live TV. In my 79 years, I’ve never seen a subordinate pol so outdo Shakespeare’s Iago (whose whispering in Otello’s ear led to the latter’s emotional collapse and downfall) in making himself indispensable to so flawed a boss.

Finally, Vance did something that would have been totally out of character for Trump. Multiple times, especially toward the end of the debate, he morphed smoothly into a lover of country, a practicer of Reason and compromise, and someone willing to work with others for the good of our nation. In this respect, he brilliantly exploited Tim Walz’ well-known virtues, so that often Walz simply had to agree.

Yes, JD Vance lied baldly at times, twisted the truth often, shifted his shape like a science-fiction alien, and excused the inexcusable. But it does no good to hide the truth, especially from ourselves.

Vance’ performance was skilled. His delivery was flawless. In crispness of speech, avoidance of stammering, and clarity in making points (even if based on lies or half-truths), he outdid Walz. Although Walz’ goodness and love of country shone through, Vance sometimes made him seem like a parochial from Minnesota with no business running the whole country. And Vance was a master of mood and tone: at times stern or angry, at times conciliatory, and at times even reasonable and accommodating.

By any measure, Vance “won” the debate, putting his cat ladies and pet-eater lies in the rear-view mirror, at least for the moment. At least he seems to have done so among those who count: those perhaps-mythical voters who still haven’t quite made up their minds. If the debate were a show, Vance could win an Academy Award or an Emmy, or at least a nomination for one. Trump must love that; perhaps he’s even jealous.

Most of all, Vance stuck a huge blow for himself. To the extent Trump’s growing senile dementia allows, Vance made himself indispensable to the GOP campaign and to a possible Trump presidency. In less than two hours, Vance became, in my view, the de-facto leader of the Republican Party.

No one—least of all pathetic, cowardly figures like Mitch McConnell the Senile, Lindsey Graham, or Ted Cruz—had ever done anything of the kind. I would cite “responsible” establishment GOP figures if I could, but most of them have jumped ship, retired, or been “primaried.” Vance is the sole young, wily, embattled warrior standing alone on the field when all others have died, been wounded, or have fled.

So this self-made Yalie has come a long, long way from being the forlorn child of a drug-addled single mother in Appalachia. And his journey has just become a sprint, in the mere two years since his dipped his toe into politics.

What does all this mean? Vance is infinitely smarter and saner than his putative boss. I suppose that’s a good thing. The last thing I want is someone with growing signs of senile dementia, plus longstanding narcissistic insanity, with his finger on The Button. Trump’s state of physical and mental health has so visibly deteriorated in the last year that part of me is glad that Vance will be in the White House if Trump wins—and will undoubtedly have Trump’s ear, at least if anyone can.

It’s possible, if not probable, that Trump, if elected, could die in office or be “Amendment-25’d” for behavior that even the vast ranks of GOP sycophants could not tolerate. In that case Vance, with his supreme ambition, may be an instigator, if not a facilitator, of the ouster.

Vance could well be a much better president than Trump could ever hope to be. But who knows for sure? If Vance rises with Trump’s demise or fall, Vance would be the second-least-experienced president in American history. He would have had two years in the Senate, plus the truncated part of Trump’s second term under his belt, as compared with Trump’s zero years in elective office before his first inauguration.

To me, a much darker implication clouds this relatively sunny picture. Vance’s performance in the debate, and in taking over the GOP if I’m right, will catapult us Americans back four centuries into pre-Enlightenment times.

We will have become a society in which men (so far, no women) become top leaders through flattery, sycophancy, shape-shifting, lying, subtle treachery and bald cunning, as if the Enlightenment had never happened. We will have set the historical clock back four centuries to Shakespeare’s time. Our nation, which once personified the Enlightenment, Democracy and Reason, will have led the way to their demise.

(In my view, direct primary elections are the primary culprit (pardon the pun!). They have replaced the “smoke-filled rooms” in which experienced, wise pols once picked the best among tested leaders to run for office. The self-evident result is that such worthy institutions as Fox and X, which now control the mob, also control who runs in general elections. But that's another story.)

So we live in fateful times. We hold in our hands the fate of our democracy and our nation, the fate of the Western Enlightenment, and (with planetary heating and consequent extreme weather accelerating) the future of our species.

The rational path is to do what we can. That’s why I don’t despair about Vance’s wild ambition, or about the few so-called “undecideds” that he may have attracted to Trump’s cause.

Instead, I worry about the vast ranks of voters who have not been lured to Trump’s cult by Fox, X or other online deluders. I worry about voters who still hanker for Reason, love of country and love of their neighbors (as not coincidentally Jesus advised). Maybe, just maybe, if we can get most of them out to vote we can put JD Vance’s rocket-propelled ambition and Trump’s growing dementia and narcissism all to their just rest.



For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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