A Constitution Subverted by Greed

Today I sing a song of loss, of mourning. I grieve for a lost Republic, a loss of innocence that never was.

But my song is not a bare lament; it’s also a song of hope. For I am a rationalist: I believe that Reason and understanding have a chance to make us whole and free, as we often styled ourselves but never really were.

We can rise from the ashes of division and despotism, but only if we know how we got here. To do that, we must fully recognize the origins of our Constitution in the vice of greed.

What, after all, was slavery, but the apotheosis of greed in the complete subjugation of many for the benefit of a few? And what, pray tell, explains every flaw and defect in our Constitution better than the desire of the Slave States to preserve slavery as an institution as far into the future as anyone could then see?

If the truth be told, our Constitution created a caricature of democracy in our upper house. With the passage of time, it has become a mockery. It preserves forever each State’s two senators. So today California, with a population of 39.4 million, has the same vote in our Senate as Wyoming, with 587 thousand. Thus each Californian voter enjoys about 1.5% of the representative voting power in the Senate held by every voter in Wyoming. And this is so despite California’s 2024 GDP of $4.1 trillion (ahead of Japan!) being over 100 times Wyoming’s $40.5 billion.

More to the point, our twenty-six least-populated States now command a majority of the Senate while representing less than one-fifth (!) of our total population. [See the Endnote below.] Similar, if less grossly disproportionate, inequities inhere in our Electoral College.

But our Constitution’s worst failures are failures of omission. It failed to prevent our leaders from subverting democracy by custom, tradition and internal rules of both Houses, if not literally by law. These developments have, like a rotting fish, only gotten stinkier with time. Mostly begun in the decades and centuries after our Founding, the worst involve excessess of minority and individual power wrought by the filibuster and its modern derivatives.

I’ve posted an entire separate blog on them. Suffice it to say here that the filibuster and filibuster-derived Senate “holds” give every single senator, in practical effect, personal, individual veto power over legislation and presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation. And now the House Republican caucus, with its so-called “Hastert Rule,” has arranged things so that, in a closely divided House (like our present one), a 26% Republican minority of the whole House can veto any bill.

No wonder Congress has trouble getting things done! No wonder good, thoughtful and experienced members are leaving it, in terrifying numbers. No wonder our national legislature is approaching a state in which virtually all in the dominant party have become the Demagogue’s lackeys and sycophants! In reality, today’s Congress is a thinly veiled instrument of minority rule.

When individual legislators in the Senate and one-quarter-plus-one minorities in the House can gum up the works of the whole Congress, we don’t have a democracy, let alone a parliamentary one. At best we have minority rule. And when individual representatives of a single state can exercise what amounts to personal veto power, we have anarchy.

So if you wonder why our nation is turning to despotism before our eyes, and why our current president—the least talented and most bent person ever to occupy the Oval Office—was never removed for his crimes, you have to look to our Constitution. And you must acknowledge its historical subversion by the South and self-seeking minor-state pols, beginning with slavery, our original sin.

The deeper question is “why now”? Why, after two and a half centuries, are the deep and abiding flaws in our Constitution just now producing their natural consequences?

This is where greed comes in. It’s been with us since the beginning. It was, after all, the primary motivation for developing our nation’s infrastructure with the labor of innocent Africans ripped from their homes on another continent and pressed into brutal slavery an ocean away. And it was the leisure of their masters, provided by slaves and their drivers, that enabled them (in the South) to devote their lives to politics, and so to achieve supremacy in both constitutional and extra-constitutional political manipulation. Our Northern (Free State) Founders, in contrast, had to both work for a living and manage their own homes or farms. John Adams and Ben Franklin, for example, were of that sort.

Nothing illustrates the dismal contradictions and hypocrisy inherent in our Founding better than the life of our most “intellectual” Founder, Thomas Jefferson. To his credit, he penned the immortal words “all . . . are created equal,” which we’re still struggling to give real meaning two and a half centuries later. He also started our first Patent Office. Yet he owned some 600 human beings as slaves throughout his lifetime. After he died, his estate had to sell many of them “down the river” into misery (excluding his mistress Sally Hemings and their children, whom he freed, some posthumously).

Along with his slaves went his massive collection of European wines and books, all just to pay off his considerable debts. So our greatest thinker among our Founders was hardly an ascetic. While he penned the most glorious language of equality and the Enlightenment, in his private life he was a paragon of greed and excess. These traits in our leaders hardly began with Donald Trump or Elon Musk.

Our Civil War, which we fought to abolish slavery, is still the bloodiest single war we have ever fought. About 600,000 Americans died in it, on both sides, more than we lost in all of World War II. In the post-Civil-War Amendments (the Thirteenth to Fifteenth) that followed, we tried to remedy the defects in our Constitution. But the desire to hold our still-fractured nation together, to reconstruct a gutted South, and to heal the wounds of national division took precedence over reformation of our democracy.

The name we have given to that period tells all: “Reconstruction,” not “Reform.” It took us another century, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to begin to give Black people here a shot at the legal equality that the Civil War Amendments had promised a century before but had never delivered.

Still the structural defects in Congress and in our democracy remained, as they do to this day. And today a revanchist government, with Project 2025, is bent on exploiting them to run backward at Warp Speed.

Anyway, the history of the twentieth century drives two points home. First, the most brutal and dangerous conflicts among our species are the same as ever, and the same as for every other animal species on this planet: fights over territory. WWI was precisely such: it changed the map of Europe and the Middle East. WWII was also, with the deceptive novelty of disputes over Soviet Communism thrown in for additional motivation.

Just so today are Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s long battle with the Palestinians, and North Korea’s threats against Seoul. All are essentially struggles over control of land.

These struggles will only get worse. There are already far too many of us humans on this planet. And overpopulation will jet-propel territorial disputes as land suitable for habitation and agriculture decreases while planetary heating pushes population centers away from the Equator toward the Poles.

Second, disputes over economic philosophy are not the primary causes of wars. Unscrupulous leaders on all sides use them to incite enmity against foreigners, just as they have used distinctive ethnic traits and differing customs, habits, religions and cultures for all of human history. (For all his talent in shepherding Britain through WWII, Winston Churchill was absolutely maniacal in demonizing Russian Communism after it.)

Yet in fact humanity, if most notably in the developed world, is gradually coalescing around certain principles of the Enlightenment and human rights, and has been for some time. These principles include freedom in personal choices (where to live, whom to marry, what work to pursue), fair wages, fair working hours, decent housing, good health care, an education befitting and enhancing one’s capability, and the right to participate in government. And the societies that seem best at practicing these principles, for example, in Northern Europe, Scandinavia and Japan, also seem (according to surveys) to have the happiest and most contented lives and greatest longevity.

So the conflicts epitomized by cartoon depictions of capitalism and socialism, or by conflating socialism with Communism (a gross error of fact!), are but a sideshow in our species’ biologically-motivated quest for exclusive control of territory, which planetary heating will only exacerbate. Yet insofar as conflicts over territory permit, the quality of individuals’ lives will depend, in each nation and for the foreseeable future, on how this socialism-capitalism tension plays out.

So as over-the-top capitalist greed in our own country threatens to subvert our precarious democracy and turn us into something like pre-war Italy, whom do you trust, in general, to lead us?

Do you trust people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, or even their blander and more socially conscious counterparts, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet? Do you trust the ones who’ve made outlandish fortunes from the current system and want it to continue or get even “freer” to ignore or exploit the “little people,” which could include you and me?

Do you trust lifelong or “conventional” pols, who go along to get along, even with an obviously dangerous and viciously immoral cretin like our current president? Do you trust so-called “moderates” like Susan Collins, who claim to be thoughtful but almost invariably do what keeps them in the Demagogue’s and his lackeys’ good graces, without apparent thought to your or “the people’s” welfare, let alone the long term?

Or do you trust people who and whose ancestors have been swimming upstream for four centuries? Do you trust people who, or whose ancestors, never (or rarely) enjoyed the “good life,” never were able to “rest on their laurels,” never had the luxury of letting other people do their own homework, and have been struggling, along with their families, just to get a piece of the equality and prosperity that this nation has promised immigrants for so long?

If the latter, then you have to put Black candidates, along with naturalized immigrants and the native-born sons and daughters of legal or undocumented immigrants, high on your list of leaders and candidates to support. It is they, above all, who still understand what made America great and still have their eyes on the prize.

Our Demagogue has high emotional intelligence. How else could he get so many voters to believe so many things that are just no so?

Yet emotional intelligence alone is not enough. Reagan had that. He was one of the most charming men and inspiring speakers ever to hold the Oval Office. But it took him more than his whole first term to summon the intellectual curiosity to ask his generals how many would die in a nuclear war with the USSR. (To his credit, he started serious disarmament talks once he heard.) And he lacked the analytical intelligence to see how his tirade against our own government as “the problem” would lead inevitably to the rise of private greed and corruption and a loss of democracy to oligarchy or despotism. His relentlessly bad-mouthing government started the movement that led directly to the presidency of Donald Trump.

It takes more than intelligence (even of both kinds, emotional and analytical) to save a collapsing society. Adam Schiff has analytical intelligence galore, and surely enough emotional intelligence not to offend anyone unintentionally. But he lacks the fire in his belly that people on the way up or in have, like Zohran Mamdani.

This doesn’t mean I won’t vote for white leaders or even send them money. I would of course vote for Schiff if I lived in California, and I’ll send some money to Sherrod Brown in Ohio, where I lived for eleven years. But for this cycle I’ll spend most of my contribution money on minority candidates and GOTV organizations that work in communities of minorities and recent immigrants.

Call me a reverse racist if doing so pleases you. But I hope to live to vote for someone like Wes Moore, Maryland’s governor, for president. Not only did he summarize, in five minutes and in simple terms, the principles of the Enlightenment in his victory-night speech. (I later learned he had had a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.) Not only did he push for one-year pre-K for all of Maryland’s kids because science says that’s the best way to develop children’s brains and give them a shot at a good life. He also handled the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse with professionalism and skill—with quiet thought and action, not blaming—no doubt as a result of his military leadership, which the vast majority of our current pols lack.

At the end of the day, this is not about skin color or “culture.” Jefferson was right: science now tells us that our DNA is all 99.9% identical. We all really are created equal, just as he wrote.

Thus what matters is education, experience and motivation. There’s nothing like being part of a family (or larger group) that has struggled for generations to achieve the recognition, status and relative generational wealth that most white citizens enjoy, only to see it all slipping away in a general sociopolitical decline. If anyone has the motivation to halt that decline, it’s people whose ancestors have kept their eyes on the prize for four centuries, as well as those who struggled for years to get here from “hellholes,” and years more to become citizens, only to see the “American dream” curdle like spoilt milk.

Of course we need more than good leaders, even inspired ones. What we need most of all is a Constitution that actually creates and maintains a democracy, meaning consistent and reliable majority rule, with far fewer (or no!) individual-senator vetoes. But what we have is a Constitution designed for minority rule, subverted by time and a bit of anarchy (with so many vetoes) and specifically arranged to be hard to change, all for the original purpose of preserving the institution of slavery for as long as humanly possible. Unfortunately, with the nation now so bitterly and completely divided, we have little chance to improve it, short of secession, a second civil war, or a revolution.

So at the moment, we must put our faith in “new blood.” We must put our current, tired, mostly-white gerontocracy out to pasture ASAP. For me, that means electing lots of talented Black people and immigrants and with strange names, each with a fire in his or her belly to realize Jefferson’s (and MLK’s!) abstract dream, but this time without the hypocrisy or the greed. Even if their chief motivation is advancing folk just like them, their success will restore a modicum of democracy for all of us.

It’s a longshot, but at the moment it’s all we’ve got. And if enough white native-born citizens like me coalesce around Black and recent-immigrant candidates, we might create the same kind of positive-feedback loop that elected President Obama, the most effective president at improving ordinary Americans’ lives since LBJ.

Endnote on Senate’s Minority Rule: As of the latest (2020) census, the half (25) of our States with the smallest populations contained less than 1/6, or 16.67%, of the total US population. The state with the 26th smallest population was Kentucky, with 4.5 million people, or less than 1.4% of the total 2020-census population of 331.4 million. Thus, if Kentucky’s two senators voted with all the senators from the 25 least-populated states, senators representing a total of less than 20% (less than one-fifth!) of the total US population could command a Senate majority.

That’s how far from majority popular rule our Senate is. And our Constitution explicitly perpetuates this minority rule unless every one of the small states affected consents.

As if all this were not bad enough, routine use of the filibuster and of Senate “holds” (in effect, vetoes by individual senators) has exploded since the last quarter of the twentieth century, making minority rule and individual vetoes routine. [Search in linked source for second instance of “broken government”.] Permalink to this post