We are a mess. That much is plain. Our aspirations, our pretensions of greatness, appear hollow to the rest of the world now more than ever. Few look to the United States as a place for a better life as they once did.
Robin Wright summarizes our state of affairs in the New Yorker:
The Trump Administration’s ineptitude in handling the COVID-19 crisis, as well as the President’s disdain for longstanding allies and international treaties, have compounded the damage to America’s image. A second poll, released last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, reported that public perceptions of the United States are increasingly negative in virtually all of the European nations surveyed. In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot.” The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small”—as low as six per cent in Italy.
Abdulkarim Soroush, an Iranian reformer known as the Martin Luther of Islam for challenging the absolutists of the faith, tells Wright the country is now a capitalist democracy more than liberal one. Capital is the new tyrant here, and justice unaffordable except to the rich.
“I greatly fear that this may be lost—due to racism, and capitalist democracy and the justice system becoming weaker for the poor,” Soroush explains. “Heaven forbid, if that happens, America would not be the aspiration of anyone in the world.”
This July 4th weekend, what moral authority we once claimed (and had) seems as depleted as our capacity for reinventing ourselves.
Where one finds the greatest need for overhauls depends upon one’s own experience. Digby on Saturday cited an insightful column by David Rothkopf focusing on our system for elections, both rusty and monkey-wrenched. “Ending Trump’s misrule and restoring confidence in the presidency demands the undoing of impediments to free and fair elections,” Rothkopf believes. “That will entail root-and-branch campaign finance reform, an end to voter suppression, new defenses against foreign interference in elections, and reining in the digital disinformation engines. These are perhaps only the minimum demands for restoring American democracy.”
In “Our Time is Now,” Stacey Abrams too sees reforming the electoral process as key to renewal. The historic courage of African Americans in claiming their rights as full citizens has paved the way for others to do the same, Charles Kaiser writes in his Guardian review:
Abrams explains why black Americans have been the natural trailblazers in this fight for justice: “At its inception, our nation served as a refuge to those whose difference placed them in danger; but the same newcomers stole land from and murdered the original inhabitants, enslaved blacks, and stripped them of their humanity, and denied basic rights to women and nonwhites from abroad.
“This history means we understand what is at stake, how our opponents will try to block change, and, most important, our obligation to realize our destiny … a multiracial, multiethnic, youth-driven majority has grown over the last 20 years; as a result, we’ve seen nothing less than a sea change toward progress … Obama was not a fluke but a foreshadowing of how we can win even more.”
Instead of giving primacy to the “working-class white man in Ohio who voted for Reagan in 1980”, as American political reporters do over and over again, Abrams urges us to remember that the daughter of that white voter may now “be married to a Kenyan woman who is waiting for permanent residence and their first child in Arkansas”.
The country’s natural impulse is to shove uncomfortable truths under the rug until we can no longer traverse it without falling on our faces. One of the country’s strengths, born perhaps from the regular infusion of immigrants, is, after all other dodges have failed, to launder our dirty linen in public. Or to mix metaphors, to take the country to the shop for major repairs.
Overhauling this democracy will take more than tinkering with election systems. As Soroush observes, capital is a tyrant. Even after the financial collapse of 2008 and the savings and loan scandals before that, we resisted the expensive and exhausting work of getting under the hood and rebuilding the engine burning oil and the transmission grinding gears. We preferred throwing in a can of “miracle goop” from the auto parts joint and hoping for the best. Our reflex is not to do the repairs, but sweep the problems under the rug.
My late father never figured out that his computer would not maintain itself. No matter what tools I installed, he would not use them. His machine was forever being choked with spyware and malware that slowed it to a crawl. When that happened, he either lived with it, fell prey to pop-up scams promising to fix it remotely for a fee, or he went down to the office supply place and bought a fresh one. Even though the problem was not the box.
The deeper problem here is not in our system but in ourselves, as Shakespeare observed. We refuse to learn basic lessons from kindergarten: to share (power) and to live with one another. We refused to do basic maintenance. We swept uncomfortable matters under the rug for centuries. We are again tripping over them. We let the Civil War’s aftermath fester. The miracle goop has stopped working. The country needs a major overhaul we can no longer avoid. We cannot simply go down to the dealership and trade in the country for a new one.
We paid for this one in blood.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.