A Call For More Democracy In America

 From Lewis Lapham, during the Covid lockdown and the aftermath of George Floyd: Uncivil Liberty; The labor of democracy never ends.

I think I finally get the attraction of Donald J. Trump.

For reasons of national security, most of them specious, the government classifies American citizens as prospective enemies, reserves the right to tap everybody’s phone, open everybody’s mail, declare the American people unfit to mind their own business. The capitalist subjugation of democracy makes money the measure of all things, sets the exchange rate for our value as human beings. The terms and conditions of the two witness-protection programs build up in the citizenry a stockpile of fear and resentment akin to the dead trees in a mismanaged California forest. The sight of George Floyd dying in Minneapolis touched off the wildfire of nationwide protest on May 25, 2020. Donald Trump’s tossing a rhetorical match into the same compost heap of fear and resentment elected him president of the United States on November 8, 2016.

The sheep think Trump is one of them, not the wolf in sheep's clothing. Trump convinced the sheep that his protection is better for them than the protection they together in a democracy. 

Trump staked his claim to the White House on the assertion that he was “really rich,” embodiment of the divine right of money, unbossed and unbought and therefore free to say and do whatever it takes to make america great again. He declared his candidacy in the atrium of his eponymous tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in June 2015, there to say, and say it plainly, that money is power, and power, ladies and gentlemen, is not self-sacrificing or democratic. The big money cares for nothing other than itself, always has and always will. Name of the game, nature of the beast.

Not the exact words in Trump’s loud and thoughtless mouth, but the gist of the message that for the next seventeen months he shouted to camera and crowd in states red, white, and blue. A fair enough share of his fellow citizens screamed, stamped, and voted in agreement, because what he was saying they knew to be true, knew it not as precept borrowed from the collected works of Karl Marx or a Ralph Lauren catalogue but from their own downwardly mobile experience on the losing side of a class war waged over the past forty years against the country’s increasingly angry and debt-burdened poor by America’s increasingly frightened and selfish rich.

We have become not freemen, but Thoreau's wage slaves:

 And so it has been for the past forty years. America’s democracy ceased to move forward as a living force with the election in 1980 of President Ronald Reagan that was the dawn of a bright new day for the old-line Tory plutocracy currently managing the country’s affairs with little care for anything other than itself. By the mid-1980s the share of the nation’s income drawn from dividends, interest, and rents surpassed the share earned in wages. In 2020 the fifty richest Americans hold as much wealth ($2 trillion) as the 165 million people in the poorest half of the population. In the time elapsed between the two calculations, governments of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich (Reagan’s, Clinton’s, and Obama’s, as well as those of Bush and son) stepped up the privatization of the public good, enacted more laws restricting the freedom of persons, fewer laws restraining the license of property, let fall into disrepair nearly all the infrastructure—roads, dams, bridges, schools, hospitals, power plants—that provide the democracy with the foundation of its common enterprise. The lockdown of the lion’s share of the American people in the prisons of unredeemable debt has been accompanied by the plutocracy’s product placement of a leadership class that consists of the several hundred thousand bookkeepers who run the corporations and the banks; guide the universities, the think tanks, and the philanthropic foundations; staff the law courts and both aisles of Congress; own and operate the news and entertainment media; assign to money the last, best, and final word on what is done and not done—on earth as it is on television.

And the following reads to me as more important now than when first written:

 Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, had learned the same lesson, that it is not the “feeble spark of benevolence” in the human heart that prompts men to aid and abet one another in the throes of disaster. It is the recognition of their being part of the collective and therefore immortal life of mankind that induces “a more powerful affection” than self-love, which, like Trump and CNN’s synods of self-righteous scolds, is always small-minded, grasping, and sordid. The stronger feeling draws men to “the love of what is honorable and noble, of the grandeur and dignity and superiority of our own characters.”

sch 8/18