Yascha Mounk's Ideas About The Dangers To Democracy Are Worth Reading And Thinking About But I Don't Buy It All

Anyone who reads much of my blog knows that one of my foremost concerns is how to protect, extend and enhance egalitarian democracy.   By egalitarian democracy I mean allowing the exercise of rights in a framework of mutual respect and the sustenance of the biological and physical basis of life, the equal and liberal provision of not only what is needed to sustain the body but for everyone to live a decent, peaceful life in as much security and with as much respect as it is socially possible to provide.

I am not only an opponent of all non-democratic systems, I am opposed to the anti-egalitarian system which goes by the name "liberal democracy" which enables the strong and powerful and merely fortunate in their attempt to hoard wealth, to manipulate factions against each other to enhance their power and their ability to steal more.   I have come to the conclusion that such "liberal democracy" the 18th century "enlightenment" idea is part of a continuum with anti-democratic systems and that egalitarian democracy is not a part of that continuum but a genuine alternative.   I have also come to the conclusion that, certainly in the West, but likely everywhere, that alternative is going to be supported by a religious view of people, of animals and living beings as having a definitively different status than non-living objects, in terms of the human species and human societies and human institutions, including government, will be found in the holding of monotheism that people are created in the image of God.*

The conversation that Michael Enright had with Yascha Mounk over the real peril democracy is in is something I'm going to be going over more this week, a lot of what he says I can agree with completely, some of his other ideas, I'll have to be convinced of.  I think there is a lot he leaves out and I don't think he has addressed in anything I've so far found which I think gets to the real basis of the problem, which will violate some of the most sacred of scared cows in polite society, I think polite society is the source of a disproportionate amount of the problem.

I found a lot of the conversation and the excerpt of Mounk's book that I've read were seriously deficient - I don't know if he addresses the problems with such things as amorality, especially the permission of serious lying which is the real source of the attack on democracy and rights.  Given the fact that American democracy is being murdered by the judicial permission of lying, as much as allowing billionaire oligarchs to ratfuck our elections THROUGH SELLING LIES ON FACEBOOK AND FOX AND SINCLAIR, no academic discussion of it which doesn't acknowledge that the amorality of free speech - free press absolutism IS THE MEANS OF THE OLIGARCHS PUTTING FASCISTS IN POWER.

A population dominated by people who don't know the truth, who believe lies designed for easy sale, who are manipulated through fear and resentment will not be a  People who can sustain democracy.   The foremost fact of almost all of the Western countries in which fascism either has defeated or endangers democracy is the fact that the media is controlled by those who hope to benefit from people believing lies.  The United States has been led to that disaster by 18th century "liberalism" in all of its scientistic, materialist amorality.  It uses the words of slave owners and wealthy merchants first put into documents such as the U.S. Constitution for the purpose of enhancing their own wealth and control.  As Mounk points out in a really troubling excerpt from the book he's touring around, Madison and Hamilton never intended the United States to be a democracy.   It is something I can't resist pointing out that I've been saying over and over again here.

America’s political system is by design. The United States was founded as a republic, not a democracy. As Alexander Hamilton and James Madison made clear in the Federalist Papers, the essence of this republic would consist—their emphasis—“IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share” in the government. Instead, popular views would be translated into public policy through the election of representatives “whose wisdom may,” in Madison’s words, “best discern the true interest of their country.” That this radically curtailed the degree to which the people could directly influence the government was no accident.

Only over the course of the 19th century did a set of entrepreneurial thinkers begin to dress an ideologically self-conscious republic up in the unaccustomed robes of a democracy. Throughout America, the old social hierarchies were being upended by rapid industrialization, mass immigration, westward expansion, and civil war. Egalitarian sentiment was rising. The idea that the people should rule came to seem appealing and even natural. The same institutions that had once been designed to exclude the people from government were now commended for facilitating government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

As the idiots eat up the "Hamilton" crap as seen on Broadway, no one who is troubled by the devolution of American democracy into fascism should ignore the role that 19th century abolitionists, suffragists, economic reformers, etc really played IN OVERRIDING THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION TO PRODUCE A MORE DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY, and how they have been thwarted by the Judiciary and for most of its history the Senate, and the "free press" in that struggle.  American democracy, the only thing that has made the government of the United States tolerable in any way is a creation of those who struggled against the Constitution, not originalists and the fascists of federalism. 

In his discussion with Michael Enright he and Mounk discuss the problem of people not liking to be addressed with complex ideas, something which I commented on here as recently as last Wednesday.**  I do rather bristle at a Harvard guy using that problem to try to limit the possibilities of democracy, I don't think that The People are any less equipped to deal with complex issues than interested elites who are so notably ready to act from corrupt motives.  I think we have no choice but to try to limit the effects of those problems through the staffing of institutions of governments and by radically rewriting the most basic Constitutional provisions to take that into account, but only on the basis of egalitarian democracy, not on the ease with which elites, economic, legal, intellectuals, in underestimating both the capacity of The People and their own classes' history of corruption.  The elitist and often corrupt Benjamin Franklin, in the discussion of what kind of government the new United States would have, noted the foolishness that a government of the wisest would be.  The wise are so often able to convince themselves that what they want is what is good.

* In the commentary on the opening of Genesis in the excellent Christian Community Bible (often slammed for it being too much a manifestation of Latin American social justice and liberation theology) it says:

Creation and Modern Humankind

When the Scriptures say that God creates everything and is before all things, it exalts man who comes from God and is no longer a product of chance.

The Scriptures free people from anguish.  Primitive people thought they were dependent on the caprice of their gods; even the Greeks, so proud of freedom, accepted the weight of a destiny from which no one could escape.  Their aim to dominate nature was blocked by fear of offending these gods, their masters.

The Scriptures, on the other hand, present believers not afraid of the hidden power of the stars (they are “lamps” at God's service), nor of any cures in their destiny when they look for the secrets of the universe; it is no accident that the great thrust of civilization originated in the Christianized West.

I wouldn't put it exactly that way,  I think it's possible for other, perhaps even "primitive" people to have a similar view of people that would produce that kind of freedom.  I do, though, doubt it will happen under polytheism and that atheism is fatal to any aspiration of it.  It is certainly true that any assertion of universal rights is not sustainable under materialism. 

** I don't know if the general public has the ability to appreciate these matters on a basis more subtle than they learned to think of them from Hollywood westerns where you're either good or bad, sometimes that being based on no substantial moral difference but just because you're manipulated into rooting for the guy in the white hat.   I don't know if Steve Almond is demanding a level of sophistication that Americans have been stupefied out of being able to navigate by entertainment media.  I look at our history and wonder if Americans have been able to regularly think more subtly than in those terms.   If that's a human limitation, it is a dangerous one for self-government and any means of avoiding the dangers of it have to be taken.