THE REAL DANGER OF TYRANNY

“XXX.–In the government of this Commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: The judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

With these words, set into the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the State of Massachusetts in 1780, John Adams captured one of the pillars of the American form of government. In revolting against England, Americans did not merely reject King George III. They rejected the entire system of government by a single person or group. This principle of a government of laws and not men is the natural consequence of the founding American ideal that all human beings are born equal and endowed with inalienable rights. It is a critical point, but one that is easily missed.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” That statement announces a community based, not on individual license, but on a fundamental responsibility of every human being for every other human being. We are each responsible for honoring the rights of each of our fellow humans, and that responsibility is what gives us our meaning, and it is even the source of our freedom. We are free because all those people for whom I am responsible are responsible for me.

The enemy of America’s founding ideal rests precisely here. When a government makes its decisions, not based on the laws of that government but rather by the orders of a single person or group, the source of the people’s meaning shifts from the ideals embodied in their laws and constitution to the personal needs and desires of the person or group ruling them. “L’etat c’est moi,” said the imperious Louis XIV. I am the state, and your rights, and therefore your meaning, are defined entirely by me. This is the real peril of dictatorship. The individual has no meaning by himself or herself. Even the dictator’s meaning is gone, because it is completely subjective. It might be something one day and something else another. Moral value derived from one individual is the morality of self-interest, and self-interest is no morality at all.

This is the real, fundamental crisis being caused by Trump’s actions and words. He may or may not have overstepped his bounds with the ban on seven Muslim countries. We have a judiciary to determine that in accordance with the laws and constitutional provisions that express our journey to our ideal. It is what he did in response to that judiciary, and what his people have done in response to criticism, that is far, far more dangerous. He denigrates the judiciary, calls a judge bigoted or characterizes the judge as “so-called”. His advisor tells the press to “shut up and listen.” All this and much, much more describes an attack on the fundamental rights of the people and the checks and balances system that guards those rights. Trump doesn’t want to befriend Putin. He wants to be Putin. His goal is dictatorship, and if he succeeds we will not just lose our form of government, we will lose our very meaning.

We are not a perfect nation. Our worth and meaning lie in the fact that, with all our flaws and failures, we strive for a perfect ideal. The actions and words of Trump and his representatives signal an attack on those ideals. We cannot allow that attack to even begin.

TRUMP AND THE AMERICAN IDEAL

Today is the true first day of the Trump administration. Up to this time, all that he and his representatives have said has been rendered meaningless by their constant contradictions and weasel words. Think, for instance, of the promise by Trump that all Americans will be insured for medical care and then his Secretary of Health and Human Services announcing that all Americans would “have access” to medical insurance. We are thus left to judge them solely by their actions. All the rhetoric — “America First,” “We will win,” “the government is about you” — now gets its real meaning from their actions.

So how do we judge this administration and the Republican Congress that has espoused it? I suggest two possibilities. The first is by its ability to satisfy our own personal wants and needs. Those who voted for this administration objected to the Affordable Care Act because it cost too much and it did not provide adequate insurance. They also wanted lower taxes, a more or less constant Republican campaign promise. They also wanted more job opportunities and higher pay and benefits.

The second possibility for judging this administration is by its effectiveness in promoting the American ideal, which is presented in the Declaration of Independence as the founding notion of our nation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain alienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness …” True enough, the founding fathers excluded, in practice, from “all men” a substantial majority of the population, but the ideal is just that, an ideal, and as such it is clearly meant to cover all human beings.

This second possibility stands in stark contrast to the first. That possibility asks, in essence, what this administration will do for me. I want a high-paying job. I want all-inclusive insurance. I want to pay less in taxes. As for you, as long as I get what I want, I will agree to let you have whatever you want. The measuring stick, however, is me. This is the so-called morality of self-interest. I say “so-called” because it is self-contradictory. Morality is that which I owe to others. A dedication to self-interest necessarily entails a denial of any such obligation.

The second possibility — the American ideal — has often been misinterpreted as a commitment to my own personal liberty. It is mistakenly seen as an announcement that I can do whatever I want, with the tacit correlative that the best way to get what I want is usually to not violate the liberty of others. Freedom, in other words, is defined as license, and that definition perverts the entire meaning of the American ideal. To measure the rights of others by whether or not they serve your own is, at base, a complete denial of the American ideal.

That ideal is a bold and brave and earth-shaking commitment to respect and serve the rights of every human being. Not just those of my race or my locale or my social or economic status or my religion, but every human being on the planet. That colossal ideal is what brought the poor and the hungry and the oppressed of the world to these shores: the knowledge that they would be freed of the chains forced upon them by their birth or their beliefs. It is the inspiration for those words that stirred us long ago: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

Self-interest is not an ideal. It is, in fact, the denial of all ideals. The primacy of self-interest is the root of all conflict. It is the mother of injustice. It is the breeding ground of war. It is the very antithesis of the American ideal.

If, then, we are truly Americans, we should, we must, measure the actions of those presently in power by whether they foster a world that respects all human beings or whether they operate on a fundamental policy of self-interest. If self-interest prevails, the founding notion of America will fall from an ideal to a mere advertising campaign.

THIS ISN’T RUSSIA, IS IT DANNY?

Some years ago, my wife and I visited our daughter in Moscow, where she was studying the Russian language. The Soviet Union had recently been dismantled, and the people were being rapidly introduced to the corruption and gangsterism that would become standard operating procedure for their government and their economy. With their incomes slashed while the bullying few seized massive fortunes, women stood in long lines selling their most valued possessions just to get food to survive. The thugs ruled the streets, even taking over the Bolshoi Ballet ticket office. As the years have gone by, those thugs have succeeded in taking power as a matter of policy. Elections are fixed, the media are controlled by the state, people who oppose the dictatorship are imprisoned or assassinated, and the rich have become dizzyingly rich while the average working person struggles more and more with low wages and decreasing benefits such as health care and retirement benefits.

As Republicans take over Congress and the Trump crowd begins to reveal its direction and plans, we begin to get some sense of the atmosphere in which we are about to be living. The Republicans passed the first step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act, although absolutely nothing has been done to replace it. The president-elect has ignored and even denounced America’s intelligence community for giving the American people information that might damage him. His appointees have made it clear that they will dismantle the country’s efforts to save the environment, they will slash the workers’ rights to organize, they will cut funding to public schools, they will drastically cut supervision of financial industries, and they will, in general, pursue a government of, by and for the wealthy.

Then, yesterday, something happened that was strange and unexplained. C-Span, the channel that airs government hearings, was airing a discussion by a senator about current issues. When the senator began to speak about Russia’s attempts to affect our election process, C-span’s coverage was interrupted and replaced with, of all things, state-controlled RT Russian television. After some time, C-Span’s coverage was restored, and no explanation was given for this unthinkable switch.

Maybe it was an accident. Or, maybe someone was sending a message. A few things, however, are undeniably clear. First, truth has become disposable. The intelligence community made an airtight case that the Russians had acted to affect the election in favor of Trump, but it made no investigation or judgment about Russia’s success in promoting him. Trump first denounced and denied the intelligence community’s conclusions, and then, when his position was finally untenable, he mischaracterized its report, saying that it had found that there was absolutely no effect on the election.

Second, whatever may be the intentions of Trump and his gang, their main motivation has nothing to do with the good of the people. If they accomplish their proposals, health care will cost more and cover fewer, public education will see drastic monetary cuts, workers will see reductions in wages, benefits and safety, and banks and other financial institutions, including most of all Wall Street, will be given the kind of free rein they used to collapse the American economy in the ’90’s and again during the Bush administration.

All this might seem impossible in America. If it were even half accomplished, the American people would rise up and throw the rascals out. The public outrage would eliminate the possibility of Republican hegemony for decades. Trump would be a lame duck president before his second year was over.

Unless. The one thing that has prevented such skullduggery from succeeding in the United States has always been the very first right the founders placed in the Constitution — freedom of the press. It was the press that finally ended Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror. It was the press that finally revealed the truth that Nixon fought so hard to suppress. And it was the press that, despite vigorous attempts to suppress its work, revealed to the public that Russia had hacked and weaseled its way into the American election process.

It is that very freedom of the press against which Trump has announced open war. He has, everywhere he has gone, demonized the press as entirely dishonest, this while ignoring and denying blatant facts. He has refused the press access to him, and, when he finally does appear before them, he mocks and derides them, refusing to acknowledge undeniable facts and blathering on without a hint of substance. As inconceivable as it might have been a few months ago, it is now a distinct possibility that Trump could succeed in suppressing that one thing that stands between us and tyranny.

I have come to understand how 60 million people could vote for this man. They were sick of being ignored, and they were ignored. They are good people, and they are the very backbone of America. They work their butts off, and their tax dollars fuel this government. They want the benefits for which they work so hard and which they so richly deserve. If, however, those assuming power succeed in the policies they seem to be pursuing, it will be these good people who will suffer the most. If Trump and his gang succeed at suppressing the people’s right to know, and succeed also in stripping their supporters of their rights, there will be only one recourse — violent revolution. Until today, I would have said that violent revolution in the U.S. was impossible. But then, I would have also denied that a president would be a habitual liar.

FREEDOM IS NOT FREE

Recently a handsome young man stood, armed, next to Cliven Bundy, ready to use his gun to resist any law enforcement attempts to enforce the several judgments against Mr. Bundy for his refusal to pay the required fees for grqzing his cattle on federal property. When interviewed about why he was doing this, the man said, “I am protecting our freedom.”

I am sure that man is a basically decent person, and I know better than to require such a man to be much acquainted with philosophical considerations. But the man used a term, “freedom,” and if you use a word you generally intend it to have a meaning. If you don’t tell me what you mean by a given word, I have to figure it out from the context. When this man used the word “freedom”, he had a specific meaning in mind, and that meaning is fairly obvious. It is also intrinsically inimical to the meaning of the word “freedom” as suggested by the Declaration of Independence. The difference between the two meanings is a perfect illustration of what I see as the corruption of the American ideal that is taking place today.

The enspiriting core of the American ideal is the recognition that every human being has certain rights, and that these rights are indisputable and inviolable. That acknowledgement, that commitment to the intrinsic rights of all human beings, is by its nature the acceptance of my moral obligation to recognize the rights of every other human being . We are free, under such an ideal, not because we have no obligations to anyone, but precisely because we have an obligation to everyone. We are free because we are committed to a community in which each individual recognizes an obligation to each other individual, and, by committing myself to all those others, I receive in return the recognition of my own inalienable rights. Freedom, therefore, is a product of obligation, of my responsibility for every other human being. I am free precisely because I am obliged to all others.

The American ideal of freedom is radically opposed to, is the polar contrary of, the notion that the individual is isolated and without obligation to anyone or anything. That way of thinking, which is a cancer that has pervaded the entire history of Western culture, deserves a different name. It is not freedom. It is rather license. It is what one could call an “atomic” worldview, in which each individual is a self-contained and impenetrable atom, claiming its space by the assertion of its own power. In such a world there is no morality, no obligation to others, and the sole principle of relation to others is power. And, saddest of all, in such a world there is no such thing as moral obligation, and, therefore, no such thing as meaning or value at all.

That is what was so sad about watching those people gather around this sick, bigoted moral cipher, Cliven Bundy. He was dragging them all down to his perverse level. He was giving them only the illusion of meaning. He was inviting them to a world in which it is, as a great man once said, just a war of each human against the other, and the life of a human being was nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short.

If that were only an isolated incident, just some crazy white man in the desert, It would scarcely warrant comment. What is frightening, because it is so indicative of the moral disease invading American thought and politics, is that people with the ear of the public actually endorsed this madness. A prime example is Sean Hannity, who holds himself out as a prophet of the radical right. He may, individually, be excused because he has rather consistently demonstrated a serious lack of intellect. Someone, however, is allowing him to pour his bile out into the community. Worse, the community is taking it in.

That, above all, is what scares me. Not only is this paradoxically amoral notion of “freedom” being bruited about, but we are listening without recoiling in horror. I fear, not the voice of such insanity, but the coming of the day when we will no longer recognize it as insanity.