democracy – We The Center

Today, November 4, 2014, is election day. We are voting for senators and governors and representatives. We are voting on referenda and constitutional amendments. Woven into all that, we are voting for future policies on wealth distribution and education and health care and abortion and gay rights, and, deeper, on help for the poor and disabled and on improving the environment and on how we use our military might.
In all of that, though, we are doing something far more significant. We are, slowly and by the most circuitour of paths, moving ourselves in an overall direction. We are, almost subconsciously, expressing where it is that we want to go as a society, how it is that we want to shape our world for those who follow after. This is no product of any grand cabal, of any secret society consciously directing us in one direction or another. It is simply the play of various forces, pushing us in one direction or another, the combination of which ends up, almost against our will, in defining who we really are. It is the play of a variety of values taking us, regardless of any one individual intention or even of the announced intention of the vast majority, toward a set of characteristics that will define our society for history.
We think that, because we in the United States have defined ourselves as a democracy, we will ultimately be seen as that. There are two fairly significant problems with that assumption. First of all, remarkably few of us understand exactly what we mean by “democracy.” Do you, for instance, know precisely what the American ideal is, and where it is precisely expressed? In this writer’s experience as a lecturer and teacher, not many of us do. For the record, our form of democracy, which Plato decried as the worst form of government, is laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Be honest now: can you quote those words precisely? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness;…” If you were honest, you probably didn’t know that. If we are honest with ourselves, we will probably need to admit that we do not review these ideals in making our political decisions.
The second problem with the assumption is that, in a way, the structure of democracy carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Jefferson is rumored to have said that the price of liberty is license, and in practical fact that is precisely the argument made by those who, oddly enough, want to curtail liberty. Those who successfuly argued to remove all caps on spending on elections argued for that precisely in the name of one of the most basic freedoms of our constitution, the freedom of speech. Having won, they exercised their new-found freedom to gain control of the government so that they could preserve, and presumably, increase their power in our society, not least of all by curtailing many of those same rights, such as the right to vote. In sum, liberty frees up even those who want to curtail liberty. This finds its parallel in the terrorists preying on freedom of movement in America to get on a plane and use it to attack us. The problem with liberty is that, unless it is defined always in reference ot Jefferson’s brilliant statment of our ideal, it can actually become a tool of its own destruction.
So, my great fear, on this election day before which more money has been spent than ever before and more invective and just plain mud has been slung and lies told as truth and hate and bigotry appealed to more than true concern for our fellow humans, my great fear is that we are moving, slowly, imperceptibly, to the acceptance of a national fascism, toward a de facto dictatorship. I feel a movement being driven, not by the recognition of human rights, but by the interplay of various powers all operating solely on self-interest. And, if what I fear is true, what we need now, more than any time in our history, is a revolution, a re-volt, that is, a return back to the ideals that formed the basis for our democracy in the first place. We need to recommit ourselves to an ideal, not of self-interest, but of commitment to the recognition of every human’s rights.
The price of liberty, as Jefferson defined it, is not license. The price of liberty is the sacrifice of self-interest in the constant effort to serve and protect the interests of every human being.
Will we do that? Will we pay that price? I hope we will. I fear we will not.

Some git who is presumably being paid money to do something or other for the American Enterprise Institute, the bastion of pseudo-thought for right wing causes, announced the other day that Pope Francis doesn’t understand the value of “free market capitalism” in creating a “moral society.” I swear, that is what he said.

Let us start with the oxymoron, “free market capitalism.” The correct term is “laissez faire capitalism.” To call it “free”, you have to seriously abuse the word “free” to mean allowing capitalists to do whqtever they want to do. What they want to do has nothing to do with freedom in any sense. The most casual glance at what capitalists have done historically will show that capitalists desire, most of all, monopolies. The practice of laissez faire capitalism has been to drive out all competition and drive up prices as high as the market will allow them. I give you, as a trite example, the recent disclosure that the drug companies were charging, five hundred dollars for a drug that, when produced generically, went on the market for eleven dollars. You might also want to review the “free market” conduct of the mortgage brokers pre-2008 or the “free market” conduct of a deregulated banking industry. You might also want to look at the marvelous things “free market” capitalism are doing for morality in the emerging nations. The air quality in Beijing might be a good place to start. In fact, China is a perfect example of what the “free market” capitalists do to a country.

Oddly enough, what the AEI guy called “free market capitalism” is quite in sync with a Communist political regime. These are the same people who use their money to promote the restriction of voting rights and the continuing impoverishment of the lower economic classes for the benefit of the upper one percent. That kind of elitism is precisely the cancer that pervaded Communist Russia and Communist China. Laissez faire capitalism is far more compatible with dictatorship than with the American ideal. Just ask yourselves why it is that the United States has historically supported dictatorships over those who protested the violation of their rights. Cuba, Argentina, South Africa. The list is very long, and the story is always the same, capitalists insisting on protecting their property in dictatorships.

Second step: Please let us stop confusing capitalism with democracy. Capitalism is an economic theory, and democracy is a political theory. American democracy is grounded in the principle of inherent human rights, and I dare you to find in any writing by any theorist of capitalism any mention of inherent human rights. Capitalism justifies itself in answer to the question: how is a large money economy best organized and operated? Democracy justifies itself in answer to the question: how are a people best served by a government? Capitalism is a tool in service to a people. It is not a moral or even a political principle. If anything, the appropriate model for laissez faire capitalism is war, which is properly defined as the abandonment of morality.

Final step: Morality is the overarching question to which all other principles and theories are in service. Morality is the principle of fundamental human value. The United States was not founded on capitalism. It stands, perhaps alone in the history of the world, as a nation founded on a moral principle, on what, in fact, I consider the fundamental principle of all human value: each and every human being, by virtue of simply being human, has inviolable rights. To say that differently, my value rests entirely in the fact that I am responsible to every human being. The American ideal is not contained in the term “laissez faire.” It is, rather, the over-arching principle by which we judge and control the conduct of capitalists.

Ask yourself this: who are our heroes? Donald Trump? Carl Icahn? Michael Milliken? No. Nelson Mandela? Mohandas Gandhi? Mother Theresa? Yes. Why? Because of their commitment to laissez faire capitalism? No, more likely because they knew the difference between laissez faire capitalism and morality. Capitalism, properly regulated and controlled, is an effective tool to be used in service to the rights of human beings. Laissez faire capitalism, alway hiding behind the term “free” when it is anything but that, is the abandonment of human rights in service to power.

I wish someone would explain that to the git from AEI.