America is Broken

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“Everything from who can vote, how they vote, who influences that vote, who is elected by that vote and who is accountable having been voted in, is broken.” — Charles M. Blow, NYT pundit, yesterday.

Pessimism is never in vogue in politics. Donald J. Trump may be the most horrendous leader in our own history plus the non-monarchical history of England and its democratic progeny. Yet he has the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and his deluded masses believe it.

Ronald Reagan began our moral and political degradation by teaching us, contrary to the credo of every organized religion, that it’s right and proper to be selfish and greedy. Yet he had to declare the beginning of his deeply immoral reign “morning in America.” It was morning, all right, the morning after Walpurgis Night.

The process of our moral and social dissolution that Reagan began is coming to its ghastly conclusion this very year, 2020. In theory, the impeachment process provides a chance to stop and perhaps reverse it. But its dismal conclusion is now inevitable: no witnesses or documents and therefore no real trial. The slogan “a government of laws, not men” will prove itself a lie, as Republicans whom Trump insulted, bullied and marginalized, most of whom have every reason to hate him, kiss his ring and line up like zombies to save him from removal from office.

Once that happens, there will be only one last chance to save American democracy from sliding over the cliff entirely: the coming presidential election. Trump’s re-election, which is entirely possible, could spell the end of our democracy. By the end of this very year, the United States could be confirmed as a corrupt, venal oligarchy brought low by entrenched minority rule, widespread disenfranchisement, violence, bullying, lies, fake news and propaganda, including foreign disinformation.

The irony of this year’s number, a metaphor for clear vision, requires us to see. Blow’s column yesterday, quoted above, is depressing but absolutely accurate. Yet even it doesn’t tell the whole story. It focuses on the voting process and the coming impeachment debacle, but there is more.

This week Congress will forfeit its power and its constitutional role. By letting the president determine whether and how he and his minions will testify before Congress, Congress will, in effect, confirm the president’s power to dominate two of our three branches of government. (The third he and Mitch have already suborned by stealing Garland’s appointment and securing Gorsuch’s and Kavanaugh’s.)

This precedent will outlast Trump’s presidency, however long or short. Just like ancient Rome’s Senate, Congress will become a mere appendage to imperium.

It gets worse. The upcoming election, our Republic’s last chance for survival in any recognizable form, will be skewed. What will skew it is not just the massive disenfranchisement of which Blow writes. We also have rampant gerrymandering inherent in our Senate and our Electoral College, and more inherent in Republican partisanship at the state level, plus a Democratic primary season that exalts two of our least representative states and last bastions of aged white privilege, Iowa and New Hampshire.

But it gets still worse. In making this last point with his usual incisiveness and brevity, David Leonhardt reveals a startling fact. Sixty percent of our population lives in towns of 50,000 or fewer people.

Think about that. Like Iran, our bitterest enemy, we are actually a nation of peasants. Not only that: we magnify their influence with a skewed governmental structure intended from the outset to magnify the power of agrarian interests and to preserve the horrid institution of slavery.

Just as China is commiting its vast resources to science and technology, our people are turning away from science toward superstition and religion. They are willfully foregoing vaccination, preparing to fight a Christian jihad against Islam, rejecting and oppressing minorities and worthy immigrants, and dragging their feet hard against fighting global warming. If Iran were not so small and relatively powerless, it and we could be entering a senseless era of religious wars to match those within Catholic and Protestant Britain, which produced today’s Northern Ireland and the chief impediment to a clean Brexit.

The final horror is, ironically, a fruit of our own American science and technology. We invented the Internet and gave it to the world for free. It permits every single person on line—now about one-third of our entire species—to communicate with every other, individually and in groups. The theory of “many-to-many” communication has now become practice.

But what have we done with the vast potential that we created? Have we magnified the power and wisdom of men and women like our Founders, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Franklin? Have we amplified the voices of those who know the flaws inherent in our species and design clever institutions to circumvent them?

Not hardly. Instead, we have amplified the influence of every demagogue, crackpot, conspiracy theorist, foreign spook, fake newsman, religious extremist, business avatar of greed, and native propagandist. All of them have conspired, willy nilly, to make and keep Trump president.

We have marginalized the best and exalted the worst. In politics we have Trump and McConnell, Graham and Jordan. Business/capitalism is our primary religion, far surpassing Christianity in real adherents and influence. In it, we have Murdoch, the late Ailes, the now pathetic and grotesque Harvey Weinstein, plus the recently fired Muilenburg and the cleverly imperial Zuckerberg. We’ve excelled in science and technology but we have failed utterly in social management, basic human psychology, and moral philosophy.

So the American century is over. American democracy is finished.

So, most likely, is our entire species’ second great trial of democracy worldwide, after ancient Greece’s and Rome’s, which jointly had a near-millennial run. Without throwing away realism, it’s hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future without leaders like Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdoğan, Kim, Orban and lesser demagogues and authoritarians like Modi, Putin and Xi. After all, alpha-male clan leaders are our species’ evolutionary heritage.

The only remaining uncertainty is how precipitously the US will decline. Much depends on this coming fall’s election. Whatever its outcome, the Western Enlightenment is over. George Orwell’s dismal prediction has come to pass. He missed only China’s meteoric rise.

So our species’ future now lies in China’s hands. That may be humiliating to the “West,” which for at least four centuries thought it had all the answers. But there are three reasons for hope.

First, modern China never wanted, and still is trying to dodge, the role of global leader. As with individuals, the best leading ones are usually those, like our own George Washington, who try to duck the mantle and accept it only reluctantly.

Second, China’s “Communist Party” is a complete misnomer. With Xi’s self-accession as leader for life, China has reverted to its ancient empire in all but name. The so-called “Communist Party”—80 million strong—is but a successor to China’s ancient Mandarin class. It’s much bigger, much better educated, and infinitely more technocratic than the old one. Besides Germany, today’s China may well be the nation most deeply committed to science and technology as solutions to mankind’s intractable problems, including global warming.

Finally, the Chinese people are intensely practical. That trait probably derives from China’s inefficient written language, which makes abstract thought difficult and delays the age of maturation and education toward complete fluency in writing.

But whatever the reason, the Chinese are not prone to bouts of fevered pursuit of verbal abstractions, let alone religious wars. They threw off Communism in a less than thirty years, as distinguished from Russia’s near seventy. Since World War II they have fought only two external wars, by proxy, against us in Vietnam and Korea, and then only for the practical purpose of protecting their homeland with compliant border-buffer states.

The Chinese as a group have never had a religion as muscular or proselytizing as Christianity or Islam. Their oldest and most widespread religion—Confucianism—is little more than veneration of elders and ancestors and respect for authority. In a world where any teenager, dangerous demagogue, religious fanatic or mere nutcase can create and promulgate fake news with startling verisimilitude, that may not be a bad thing.

Some day, the West may come to understand how the toxic combination of the ungoverned Internet and our First Amendment has brought America down. But it’s far too late for slow understanding to arrest our rapid, nearly complete decline.

So we’ve got to learn to respect and work with China, not fear it. Just think of the effective quarantine of Wuhan and the surrounding cities, some 20 million people. With a coronavirus that appears capable of spreading during its incubation period, that quarantine is an absolute practical necessary. But could you imagine it happening in Chicago, let alone all of Illinois? What we should fear is cults that duck vaccination and nations that eschew science and believe God is on their side, not China.

Erratum: An earlier version of this post referred to the movie magnate and accused serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein as “Epstein.” I regret the error.

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