It's Over!

 

We did it!

Millions upon millions of people went to the polls on November 3, 2020, to elect the folks that will elect Joe Biden our new President on January 6, 2021. It was a nail biter. The nation is dumbstruck, befuddled, ecstatic, or sad. The people spoke! The states counted! Our democracy works!

I like the Electoral College. My beliefs about it are fervent. I may be a minority of one. This is, of course, the only case in which I think, “we have always done it this way” is a good thing.  I just like the idea that in the United States of America, the States elect the President. The notion that we are a republic resonates with me though I call us a democracy quite often; democratic-republic rears its head often, to cover all the bases.

The AP projected Joe Biden the President-Elect on Saturday morning.[i] Each side wonders what the other side could have been thinking; why did they vote for that man? Within minutes of the announcement, large crowds gathered to celebrate in Times Square, in downtown DC, and in other cities across the nation. Other groups took to social media to condemn the election results, accusing the other side of fraud and threaten armed insurrection. Mitch McConnell has already stated that he would not make Biden’s life easy in the next four years, and they are long-time friends.

The country is sorrowfully divided, and the election results proved it, red and blue, conservative and liberal, coastal and heartland, educated and not so much, blue-collar and white-collar, religious values or none; and fifty other comparisons. We have always been that way, maybe not so much as today, but after an election, we came together to help form a more perfect union.

 Living near the liberal capital of a very liberal state creates a world view for us that seems to differ from The Villages in Florida or the ranchlands of the mid-west, Northern Plains or the rust belt. Each section of the country has its own definition for its values, its aspirations, its demands of its leaders.

I’m one of the dumbstruck. I spend an inordinate amount of time reading newspapers, blogs, and magazines. I make a point of listening to both sides of reality on cable TV. I listen to other people’s views. I like to think I’m reasonably in the know. But, wow!

It never occurred to me that so many people would cast a vote for the sitting President.  How could they? His policies destroyed our role as the global leader, he started a tariff war with China that increased the price of nearly imported goods and lied to the people when he said China would pay the tariffs.  His administration tore babies from the arms of their mothers when they asked for political and economic asylum and then lost them. His daily tweets were daily lies, claiming that covid-19 would go away quickly, or that the reason we had 25% of the world’s cases was that we tested more people. He promised to reduce the debt but increased it to record highs. He promised to drain the DC swamp but filled it with incompetents and campaign workers who went to jail for corruption.  More serious, perhaps, was his constant denigration of our institutions. The litany goes on. The election was a personal repudiation of Trump.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, was able to grow its membership in the House of Representatives, and perhaps keep control of the Senate. It grew control of legislatures and governorships in a majority of the states. That will help them keep control of the Congress for the next ten years, as they gerrymander their districts based on the current census.  

The red-blue map tells a story that the left needs to hear, and understand.  An old adage says that you run to your party’s extremes in the primaries but run to the middle in the general election. Even in the middle of a hundred-year pandemic, half the nation’s voters were willing to stay with the incumbent whose administration fumbled the fight to eradicate the virus. Given a choice between healthcare and economic health they chose economics. The President won 64% of the white working-class men, a traditional Democratic stronghold.[ii] In California, the voters turned down or reversed significant laws passed by the very liberal legislature. Even on the left coast, moderation is a valued value.

Back in 2017, a survey indicated that a lot of people were not in favor of Obama Care, but they liked the Affordable Care Act. How you say things matters. Labels can stop a movement in its tracks; new-green-deal, defund police, Medicare for all, socialism, to name a few. The left-wing progressives who fought for Biden will want to extract their due, and their ideas may be worthy of enactment, but how they are communicated will determine if the people will agree with them.

The most important objective for the new administration will be to restore a country that now considers opposing views to be evil, where members of both sides of the aisle won’t talk to each other, where governing is considered a zero-sum game, and where ideology is more important than striving for a more perfect union. It will take compromise.

 I’m ready for someone to lead us, not bully us. I’m ready for someone at the helm with character rather than sociopathic tendencies; I’m ready for someone who cares about the country and its role in the world rather than himself. I’m tired and I want an end to the chaos.

I’m ready for limits on Presidential Tweets; one per month and make it worth reading.

 I wonder what it is like to go from “Hey Joe” to “Yes, Mr. President?”

 

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[i] The Associated Press is an independent nonprofit news organization that is the gold standard when it comes to projecting election winners and losers.

[ii] Caledonian Record – November 7, 2020

Making Sausage

By the day before Election Day, 2020, over 100 million Americans had voted. In some states, Texas, for example, more people voted early than the total votes in the last election. From the start, this would be an unusual election. This was the first time an impeached president has run for reelection. It is the first major election during a worsening pandemic. Even the campaigning was different.

They say, you know who they are don’t you, that you never want to see the inside of a sausage factory. This election has many of the same characteristics. The President, who had contracted the virus himself, continued denying its seriousness, even to the point of mocking those who followed the health guidelines. He held large rallies across the country. His supporters enthusiastically attended, standing elbow to elbow without masks, shouting their approval of his platform and his behavior. Stanford University estimated that the people who attended his rallies accounted for 30,000 cases of the virus and over 700 deaths because they caught the virus and unknowingly spread it to family, friends, and co-workers.

Former Vice President Biden spent most of his campaign time broadcasting from the basement of his home, holding Zoom meetings, and issuing podcast messages. In the last few weeks leading up to today, Election Day, he and Kamala Harris spent more time in the field drumming up votes. His rallies were small and included rallies where people, wearing masks, stayed in their cars and tooted their approval of his stump speech.

The Republican Party spent a lot of time and effort trying to make it difficult for people to vote or to submit their votes in a timely fashion. There is no other way to describe it than serious cases of voter suppression. It was unseemly at best.

The President is calling for victory to be announced tonight and to ignore all of the votes that have not been counted as of midnight. There are reports that he will declare victory from the White House very early in the evening.

Nobody has any idea as of this morning who will eventually win the election or when all the votes will be counted. It may take weeks to count them all. Stay calm.  Each state has its own rules about how many days it can take to count the votes. It is seldom that all votes are counted on election day.

The election is so contentious that stores in cities around the country are boarding up their window for an expected rash of riots, marches by armed vigilantes, and general unrest. America is supposed to be the beacon on the hill for those who yearn to live free. Let us hope that at the end of the day we will live up to our dream, that the voting process will be calm and that the vote counting will be efficient. Let us hope that the two candidates can accept the will of the people in a gracious manner.   

 

It's Time To Vote!

 

 It’s time to send a message, to let your voice be heard. It doesn’t matter if you want to vote for Trump or you want to vote for Biden or the others in the race. Actually, it does matter. This election is the most important than any in a couple of generations. Not to sound like one of the talking heads, but it is true.

Every sixty years or so, the nation comes face to face with its future. It must decide if what it has been is what it wants to be, or if something needs to change. For many, we are at that point. It’s not just at the top of the ticket either, because the down-ballot may be as important going forward.

Trump and Biden have two different views about our future. Each is convinced that they are right and should be elected so that they can lead us with their vision. Neither, however, has a monopoly on the future. Each brings a lot of baggage to the table. Neither can invoke their dream for the country on the rest of us without control of the Senate and the House. In the last decade or two the States have flexed their federalist muscles, and in many ways gone their own way.

One editorial that I read said that this election isn’t about Trump or Biden; it is about religious freedom. Another said it is about women’s health. Another said it is about same-sex marriage. Another said it is about our place in the pantheon of nations. It is about all of these issues and more. When the issues are real, the people come out to vote in large numbers. Nearly forty million people have already voted. We don’t know if they are for Trump or Biden. Election Day is expected to be a demonstration in chaos. So many people are voting early that it will take days to certify the election.

In some states, the legislature or political parties have passed laws and sued in court to suppress the voting process. Generally, they aren’t even sneaky about it. They admit they don’t want some groups to vote; most often these are Blacks in the South. The President is railing against vote-by-mail, saying that it is a scam to beat his campaign, to make him lose. Most of the country disagrees with him.

I have voted by mail for about twenty years with no problems. This year my concern was that my signature on file with the county election office might not match the one on the envelope that contained my ballots. My signature doesn’t look anything like it did seven years ago. The Secretary of State’s office has computers capable of recognizing certain parts of your signature and they can verify that it is yours. To ensure that my vote would count, I downloaded the “Sac County Votes” app onto my phone. I entered my house number, my Zip code, and my birth date. Voila! “Your ballot is received.” A good first step. I checked the app a couple of days later, “your ballot is accepted.” I’m in! Done!

Federal law gives the States until December 8^th to certify their elections. Keep in mind that we are really voting for members of the Electoral College, not the candidates themselves. The Electoral College members, by law, must meet in their respective states on December 14 to cast their votes for President and Vice President. Most states use a winner-take-all system, so whichever candidate wins the popular vote will win all of the Electoral College votes. The Congress meets on January 6^th, in Joint Session to count the votes certified by the Electoral College. The Vice President announces the winner. If there is a tie, each state can cast one vote in the House for President and two votes in the Senate for Vice President.

Telling anyone whom he or she should vote is way above my pay grade, but I feel comfortable urging all registered voters to get out there and vote. In my state, you can register to vote at the polls on Election Day, and then cast your ballot.

The spelling and grammar check on Word keeps changing election day to Election Day, just as if it is a holiday. Maybe it should be!

Please go vote if you haven’t already. Your country depends on it.

 

Two Roads Divide!

 

“When you come to a fork in the road you should take it.” Even Yogi Berra isn’t sure he said what he said. Frost, on the other hand, encouraged us to take the road less traveled by. He suggested we would never wish we had taken the other. Too often, most of the time really, we want to plow our own road, define ourselves as the ideal for others to contemplate, to emulate, and to follow. There are the few that don’t give a damn.

The last three years have been historical and hysterical at the same time. The histrionics on both sides of the aisle consumed our lives and our way of life. For the most part, the President took the fork in the road and the media followed. I’m tired of it. I could use some good news, something uplifting, something that brings a smile, something to erase the jade. A quest to contemplate only good things, good news, for a while, is a promise hard to keep. At first glance, there isn’t much out there. Oh, it’s there if you look hard enough I suppose. The newspaper in the town in which I grew up writes an editorial each week entitled, “Another Good Week.” They fill it with all the good that happened; a local athlete wins a state championship, a local country inn is named one of the best hotels in the country, Mrs. Castonguay’s pies won blue ribbons at the county fair; local items of interest that make you smile. They are small things, but they tell our story.

My Father-in-law was a lifelong newspaperman, a veteran of Stars and Stripes reporting, the founder of a successful suburban newspaper, and the editor of a country newspaper in mid-Missouri. A small cadre of local people, mostly women, wrote a few column-inches each week about the goings-on in their neighborhood or along their country road. The bad news didn’t show up much, but each week the folks in that county knew who had visited whom, who had Sunday dinner at whose house, which son was home from basic training, and who was headed to St. Louis for the weekend. It was all good news and you smiled when you read it unless you weren’t the one invited for dinner.

For years, he wrote a weekly column, From the Front Seat, which allowed him to comment on the events of the week without being too serious. He brought out the humor in everyday happenings, the things that related to people’s everyday life. Good news! There were hints about the chicanery of local politicians that resulted in changed behavior by the next week. Good News! In one humorist musing, he offered to buy his two daughters brand new top-of-the-line ladders if they wanted to elope instead of going through fancy weddings. He accepted the good news that they turned him down.

Sweden has been busy announcing Nobel Prize winners. The Bay Area picked up its usual share of awards. Berkeley seems to lead the pack with physic awards and Stanford with economic awards. UCSF also gets a lot of recognition for its medical science achievements. Good News! Louise Gluck, a former Poet Laureate, won the prize for Literature. Now she is a Nobel Laureate. She teaches at an east coast university. The last poet to win the prize was Bob Dylan in 2016. Good News!

The traditional TV channels end their news program each evening with some sort of “human interest” story. I’m sure it is their antidote to the bad news of the previous 29 minutes. Who can resist some kid’s lemonade stand giving free drinks to homeless folks, or a kid who sends a stuffed toy to firefighters trying to quell a firestorm? Pulled heartstrings become the good news for the day. OK!

Every day, for months now, a friend has posted pictures taken from her home in Park City that capture the sunsets beautifully, show the changing colors of plants and trees. She includes a “song of the day” that matches the mood of the day. The playlist includes lots of music I would probably never enjoy if she hadn’t suggested a listen every evening. Good News!

Each day illustrates opportunities for grasping good news to help us trod down whichever road we took. Robert Baron, an Auxiliary Bishop in LA recently taped a philosophical talk about the notion of self-invention. The good news is that we can take the road most or least traveled and form ourselves into whatever we want to be. Water takes the shape we give it. Put it in a bottle and it takes the shape of the bottle. Put it in a pan and it takes the shape of the pan because it is malleable. Jean-Paul Sartre taught us that the existential world allows us to self-invent ourselves. That thought has evolved to the point where too many believe that their freedom comes first. That isn’t good news because it puts us before and above others. The good news is the number of people who shape themselves into volunteers at the local food bank, who work with local organizations helping kids, and who that support civic action and activism. Protesting in the streets because we can is good news. The majority of people wearing masks to help stem the spread of covid-19 is good news.

I dropped off my ballot today, like millions of people across the country. Some predict that more people will vote before Election Day than on Election Day itself. In some states that make voting difficult, thousands of people stood in line for hours the first day the polls opened. That is good news for our democracy.

Both Yogi and Frost were prescient about dealing with the fork in the road. You can take the one less traveled by or the other to get where you want to go. On either one, the good news can drown out the bad if we let it. So much depends on how we shape the water, for ourselves or for others. The search, truth be told, is easier than expected. It’s out there if we look. Good News!

 

And the Future Is?

 

“What’s past is prologue.”[i] Maybe, but I’m losing faith in Antonio’s theory that what got us here justifies our next steps. In normal times people vote. Then they sit at home to watch how well their thinking meshes with their neighbors’. One person declares victory. The loser calls the winner with congratulations. They pledge to unite both sides, and the world moves on. How long ago was that? It may not portend our experience next month.

Shaking things up a bit is always a good thing, especially if it makes us question our certainties; The last gasp of breath in an argument lost is, because-its-always-been-done-this-way. It’s been a long time since we have had this much disruption in the governing process and the upending of the institutions that hold us together. The daily barrage of missiles lobbed at our way of life has created havoc, loss of national dignity, and our position as a leader of the free world. Worst of all, our trust in each other, our trust in our institutions, our trust that the common good will prevail is lost. We watch two-hundred-fifty years of trying to be more perfect evaporate before us. We watch as the global stabilization efforts of the last 75 years are shredded by the very power that created them.

At the end of World War II, the surviving nations cobbled together a series of agreements intended to help save all of us from annihilation.  The nations of the world decided that the safety of all demanded a community of all. For the most part, the new approach helped. The UN provides a forum and a mechanism for the nations of the world to cooperate, to discuss their differences, and to help quell uprisings by illegitimate dictators. NATO was created to provide for the basic defense of Western Europe, the US, and Canada against an invasion by Russia or other communist countries; Article five said that an attack against one member was an attack against all members. All the members came to the defense of the US after 9-11. Free trade agreements regulated, to the extent possible among competing marketplaces, global trade etiquette, and arms treaties prevented more use of atomic weapons. It worked as best it could. Hundreds of nations met in Paris and agreed to exert efforts to slow climate change. The US, frankly, was the instigator of these international agreements, pacts, and treaties. Until we weren’t.

An “America First” approach has upended the dynamics of almost every aspect of our relations with other nations and efforts directed at the common good. There was strong support for this new approach from a small but very vocal minority.  Many felt that the two coasts and urban areas had ignored them long enough, especially those who adhered to strongly held orthodox religious beliefs or who lost their jobs to other nations. Globalism became the enemy rather than the equalizing friend. When a parent can’t look forward to their kids affording college or living better than the previous generation, the plight for a different type of leader and a different set of priorities and values can manifest itself quickly and strongly. The willingness to risk upheaval seems worth it.

The COVID-19 shutdown added another illustration of the fragility of our economic system. Small business owners could not survive for more than a month or two. Manufacturing companies learned that they didn’t need low-skilled workers when robots could do the work cheaper. Today’s manufacturing plants now need computer programmers to keep the robots working, but they don’t need many assemblers. President Trump ran on a platform that thumbed its nose at the world on so many fronts that except for our armed forces and our market size we are nearly invisible on the world stage. New world trade agreements don’t include us. International assistance to the poor and the hungry don’t include us. People in other countries wonder if we are a broken nation.

A few examples illustrate the current extreme disregard for our institutional heritage. On too many occasions White House managers instructed the CDC to change its recommendations to meat processing plants, public transit agencies, state school chiefs, and governors to conform more closely to their public relations. The CDC has never been a pawn of the ruling party, but rather known worldwide for its high level of scientific research, practical advice, and in-depth solutions to public health issues. And yet, the President ignored their advice, mocked those who did. Even after contracting the virus himself, he refused to follow practical medical advice. The interference by politicians has caused uncertainty for local leaders and created a lack of trust in the crown jewels of government agencies. Two-hundred-fifteen thousand people have died because the government engendered confusion about how to stay safe in the pandemic, and promoted a lack of trust in the CDC.

The military was never an adjunct of the party in power, to be used for internal control. And yet, the Chief of Staff of the armed forces walked beside the President to a photo op. The administration told the press that it trusted the word of the Russian President over the US intelligence community when it came to questions of interfering in our elections. He even revealed classified information and methods to the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador when they visited the Oval Office. Unheard of!

The administration publically denigrated the Federal Reserve and its Governors because it didn’t lower interest rates quickly enough. While not always agreeing with the Fed’s actions, all presidents have respected its intended independence from political influence.

The White House Chief of Staff, or anyone else in the administration, never rose up in public anger when they learned that the Kremlin and Iran were paying huge bounties for the death of American troops. And then there was the impeachment. And then there is the lying. Most of these things don’t bother devoted followers. Many would say, “Gee you think that’s bad, you ought to see what the other party did when it was in office.”

Back in the mid-1990s, a friend of mine mentioned that his brother was visiting from Bagdad. I asked what impressed him most about the US, on this his first visit. He told me his brother was intrigued by how much we followed the rules. We stopped for red lights; we let people use the crosswalks before we drive on, we stay on our side of the road. The little things make a nation, a culture, a set of norms, and a level of trust. We trust that others will follow the norms of behavior which makes us safer. We trust our public healthcare workers because they follow the science and not the politics. We know our political leaders are politicians, but we still want to trust them to try to make us the best that we can be.   When our leaders lie to us, we no longer trust them. When trust evaporates, brute power steps in. We witness the rise of armed private militias bent on causing civil unrest and we lose trust in our government to govern. We see administration leaders questioning the validity of the election process and deliberately refusing to guarantee a peaceful transition of power, and we lose trust.

A recent PEW survey asked, “has the US controlled the outbreak (COVID-19) as well as it could have been done?”[ii] Those Republicans who got 90% or more of their news from Fox News or talk Radio said yes and 9% said no. Three percent of Democrats who get their news primarily from MSNBC/CNN/NPR/NYT said yes and 97% said no. The graph of these survey results is a picture of the distrust that half of us have for the other half of America.

David Brooks wrote about this collapsing level of trust that is devastating America.[iii] In his seminal essay, he posits that what created today’s situation will not go away if Trump is defeated. “Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common good. When people in a church lose faith or trust in God, the church collapses. When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.”

The question before us is how much we are willing to destroy people’s trust in our institutions, from the Constitution downward, until the nation collapses. Moderates in either party were once the bulwark of the political system. Today they are treated as pariahs; either not conservative enough or not progressive enough. The rule of thumb that candidates run to their bases in primaries and to the middle during the general election was repealed a couple of decades ago. The result is a Congress wallowing more in party ideology than in the true needs of the nation, in mutual hate rather than peaceful bantering with the loyal opposition, of government agencies afraid to carry out their missions, and top-level officials with their eyes on the elections two years from the day they were elected for the current term.

The breach of trust grew slowly over the years until it reached its zenith with our current president who is an expert at creating chaos, demeaning people and institutions, dividing opposing coalitions, and maintaining a strong base of support by like-minded people, all at the same time. Martin Luther King, Jr. told us, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” We could use a little love right now.

What is the prologue to our future? Was it a time when we all pitched in when we followed the advice of public health officials because we were interested in helping our fellow men and women? Was it a time when we trusted each other to do the right thing whether as simple as following traffic rules or the heavier burden of all helping the war effort? Was it a time when, often without success, we tried to make things better for everyone? Was it a time when even in the midst of obvious white privilege we scorned at outright racism and inequality? Was it those times we recognized our failings and tried to pass new laws to rectify the wrongs? Was it a time when America First meant being the leader of the world by working for the good of all, not just for us? … Or is it today?

Do we want the present to be our great-grandchildren’s prologue? Do we want their story to be of a backsliding democracy?

                                 

 

 

 

 

 

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[i] William Shakespeare – The Tempest, Act 2-Scene 1

[ii] PEW Survey – October 2020

[iii] David Brooks – America’s Having a Moral Convulsion – The Atlantic, 10/5/2020

Well, That Was Fun!

 

Right now, go to YouTube and watch any of the past Presidential Debates from 1960 to 2012. Do it now, otherwise, you will forget what a debate is supposed to be like, how candidates for the Presidency should behave, and how we once were.

About halfway through last night’s presidential debate I went out and lit the grill. It was only six forty-five, but I couldn’t take much more. After the debate, I switched back and forth between CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I don’t know why I do that, it just churns the stomach. I proved once again that we live in two different countries. Fox was playing toddy to Trump and MSNBC was Biden’s fawner.

The debate itself wasn’t a debate. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been watching these things for a long time. If there had been a chair or stool on the stage, Biden could have sat on it the whole hour and a half, said nothing, and won the debate by a landslide and the thanks of a grateful nation. My taste in national policy is fairly moderate with hints of liberalism. It’s my East Coast Republican upbringing, I guess.  I wanted to hear what President Trump’s policies for the next four years would be, and what Biden proposed for the same period. I heard neither.

What I heard was the kind of behavior you might expect from a three-year-old brat who didn’t get his ice cream cone when he wanted it. To say the least, the President’s behavior was embarrassing for the nation and a scary moment for our democracy. It was not presidential either. Biden’s call for the President to “shut up” wasn’t the best he could do and didn’t show the respect that the office deserves.

This nation is divided. We all know that. We need someone to bring us together. The nation has elements that spew white supremacy; we need someone to bring us together. The President suggested that The Proud Boys should back off, but “stand by.” You can’t get more racist than that. He didn’t denounce them: instead, he gave them legitimacy.

The validity of the election continued to be questioned, even as people are voting in some states. The broadcast was an opportunity to stop the illegitimate rant against vote-by-mail. One gets the impression that some think this is the first time people have voted by mail. Some states have been doing it for years. Some of us haven’t voted in person for decades. The most precious action a person can take in a free nation is to vote. The process is being degraded by the nation's leader, and that is not good for the union. It is the behavior seen in totalitarian countries, not free nations. Hundreds of thousands of people are marching in the streets of Minsk to protest a President who muddied the vote counting to remain in office.

We were once the leader of the free world, a shining city on the hill, a beacon for the oppressed. We are behaving like a dimly lit hamlet in a deep valley. Watch the Nixon-Kennedy debate to see the contrast, to see what we could be. The difference is stark.

Capitalism, Democracy, etal!

 

A number of years ago a priest, a friend of mine, asked if I believed in God. He said I should ask myself that question every morning. A couple of weeks ago a long-time friend asked me, “Do we want to remain a capitalist society or a far-left socialistic with big government controlling all?” I admit that I don’t ask that question every morning, but maybe I should. It is a timely question what with the election coming up and all. The simple answer for me is that I want a democratic-republic form of government with a capitalist economic system, and no bigger than necessary.  Much like deciding if there is a god, deciding on one form of government or another or one economic system or another is too complex for simple answers. It requires a little wonkiness. 

Pure capitalism and pure socialism are opposing forms of economics. One puts the means of production in the hands of private owners who try to make a profit. The other puts the means of production in the hands of the state. Both require some oversight and regulation. Democracy and Dictatorships are opposing forms of governing. In a democracy, the people run the government. The Vermont Town Meeting is a good example. The US isn’t a democracy, but a republic. In a republic, the people elect representatives who make the laws and regulate their implementation. In some countries, the people even elect their president. In the US, however, the States elect the President.[i] Big government and small government are two philosophies about how to manage government operations. Creating the government system that we want along with the economic system that we want with a manageable size sometimes proves to be harder to accomplish than creating a belief system.

Henry David Thoreau, in Civil Disobedience, opined, “The government that governs best governs least.”  There is your argument for a small government. He may have summarized John Locke’s ideas about governance accurately, but 2020 isn’t 1849. While we live in a country founded on the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, the first to proclaim a nation ruled by “We the people,” the world and the country have changed. I’m a small government sort of person by nature, but complexity requires skilled people and effective management. We are a big country with big issues. We specialize in big ideas and big dreams. It takes a lot of people to make that work. California has 883,400 government employees, local and state. Florida has 424,961, Texas 563,000, and Vermont 14,680. And then there are the two million Federal employees, one for every 175 of us. That doesn’t count the postal service and the armed services. We already have Big Government! Too much I say.

I’m never sure which part of the government I want to cut. Do I want to cut the fire department or the police department? Do I want to cut the county health department or the county hospital? Do I want to cut the national park service or the local park department? Do I want to cut the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, or OSHA? No, but I wish they would do their jobs. Do I want to cut the local planning committee, the water district, the sewer district, the school district, the … well it goes on? I want less government, but how to get it will require a sea change in our expectations about the role of government.

Instead of asking governments to leave us alone to slug out a living and a future for ourselves we incrementally keep asking them to protect us from ourselves. I don’t have young children anymore, which is a good thing if you consider the skill and knowledge needed to install a car seat. The owner’s manual for my car has instructions for installing a car seat, securing a child in a car seat; the how-to starts on page 50, with small print, illustrations, and warnings, ending on page 64. The final entry instructs me to unhook the car seat before I take the kid out of the car. Those fourteen pages of instructions are included because of government regulations and related lawsuits. Whatever happened to throwing the kids in the back of the station wagon with a blanket and taking off to the drive-in movies or a cross-country trip? Do we want to do away with those laws and regulations? Probably not, but 14 pages, really? (The 13 pages that tell me how to use Bluetooth and hook up Apple Car Play, however, seem about right.)

It seems to me that our democratic-republic- capitalist system could use a tune-up every now and then; minor tweaks here and there if you will. What we have now is pretty good for those who picked the right parents or those who work their way up without a privileged life. Our Constitution calls on us to form a more perfect union, which to me means we should always be changing, trying to get better, to do better, to grasp for the wind, to keep from sliding back to the good-old-days, which were not so good for a whole bunch of people.

Let’s try to have a healthcare system that works equally for everyone regardless of economic status or a labor system that shares the profits of the company with the workers. Walmart’s 1.5 million store employees earn an average of $14.26 per hour or $29,660 for those who work 40 hours per week. That won’t pay the rent and buy food in most towns. The top 5 employees of the company made $68,000,000 last year. The company‘s net income was about $60,000 per employee. They could spread some of that around. The federal minimum wage was $7.25 per hour in 2009. The Federal minimum wage in 2020 is $7.25. Georgia still has a minimum wage of $5.15 on the books.

One percent of Americans own about 90% plus of the country’s wealth. We resemble a Russian oligarchy. Instead of lowering the taxes for middle-class people, Congress lowered the taxes for the richest cohort of the nation. Affluent people don’t contribute to Social Security beyond the absolute minimum required, so the retirement of the bottom 30-40% of the country is in danger of being underfunded in a few years.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit earlier this year, 30 million people lost their jobs and nearly five million of them lost their health insurance. In Europe, nobody lost his or her health care insurance. Why is the US, the richest country in the world the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have universal health care or that considers healthcare an employment benefit?

Our state legislatures could stop gerrymandering Congressional and state legislative districts to favor one party or group over the other so that we have a fair representation. The expectation in a democratic-republic is that the people would choose those who represent them. In too many states the legislature chooses the people who will elect them. In the US Senate, about 80% of the Senators represent about 50% of the population which gives them enormous power to pass laws that don’t really represent the will of the majority of people.

Chief Justice Roberts once wrote that the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination based on race.[ii] An interesting observation from someone who came of age and was educated in an era when “color-blind” was devoutly to be wished but didn’t work out as hoped. So once again we need to energize our efforts to ensure that everyone treats everyone else fairly and everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. People are in the streets protesting police brutality, poor housing, lack of good schools, redlining of real estate sales and loans, and other discriminatory actions. We need to fix these things now, not in generations. Too many generations have passed since MLK led the nation toward systemic change. We need leadership that seeks equality under law and doesn’t praise the descendants of Northern Europeans for having beautiful genes. We heard those cries back in the late 1930s and early 1940s

There is a lot more that we can do to improve the country, not because it isn’t a good place already, but because we can’t stop improving. Truth be told, however, it isn’t going to get better until we come to grips with the awful political divide, the chasm that separates us from one another. It is at such a level, that in the middle of one of the worst pandemics in a century, the wearing of a mask, to prevent our infecting other people, has become a political statement. The concept of two political parties arguing over two sets of beliefs and then compromising for the betterment of the country, a requirement in a democratic-republic, is considered capitulation. A Senate Majority leader who held up one nomination for a Supreme Court Justice for ten months because it was too close to an election now promises to ram through another nomination because “we have the votes” even though people have started casting ballots in the presidential election.  This behavior will not sustain a republic, as Franklin warned us at the inception of our experiment in self-rule.

Our instability, caused by political parties most interested in power and ideology sets us on the road of distrust of our national institutions, our expressed values, and our example to the world of how democracy works. We are losing our role as leader of the free world. Russia, a sworn enemy, attacks our campaign on a daily basis, China moves across Asia and Africa at breakneck speed building roads and ports, and Iran funds and arms our enemies in the Near East.  

Our Founders gave us our marching orders. It is up to us to improve on their beginnings.  We can make society equally available to all its citizens, not just the favored few, where everyone has a home, adequate food, and access to quality healthcare. We can be a nation that has great schools at all levels that are equal but never separate; we can have the freedom to walk the streets without fear, even at night; we can have a political system that is fair and representative of all of us and that is chosen by us. That is what democracy is all about, and none of it is what socialism is all about.

I’m going to think about that at least once a week from now on!

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[i] Constitution of the United States, Article II: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not lie an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President,

[ii] Chief Justice John Roberts majority opinion in  Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District, case analysis, Georgetown Law Center, 2008