THE FATAL DEFECTS in American democracy are defects put in place by the authors of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the anti-democratic nature of the Senate, giving that anti-democratic entity the power to stack the Supreme Court and other courts with Republican-fascists as they used to stack them with judges and "justices" either already friendly to or with a direct financial interest in slave holding or those who could be talked into it by legalistic, Constitutional arguments. Then there are two of the most dangerous to us, the absurd "rights" granted to the artificial entity "the press" and the related empowerment of lies and those ready to murder us with guns, the idols of the First and Second amendments in the so-called "Bill of Rights".
The question I was asked was what do I think it would take to really make American democracy secure and, at bottom, without those tools handed to the gangsters, the billionaires foreign and domestic and their paid and associated goons and thugs, honed and sharpened by amoral lawyers, judges and "justices" being removed, the actual words changed in light of the experience of the evils they have wrought for the entire period they were in place - especially against People of Color, the Native inhabitants of North America, other minorities - will not ever stop being a danger to equality, economic and social justice and government by a free People of good will.
And I don't see any or much evidence that even witness to what those have brought us in the Trump disaster in the ongoing danger to American democracy by the very same forces who gave us Trump and who profited from that rule by gangsters I don't see any evidence that Americans in the media or out of it are willing to face the ultimate sources of that danger, the manipulation of the words of the Constitution and the traditions of the American legal establishment that shaped and formed the real life presence of those words and the absolute necessity to take the weapons so made away from those who would impose oligarchic gangsterism on us.
I think it's going to take a terrible experience as proved to happen in ancient Judea in the talk by Walter Breuggemann which I started transcribing yesterday. I think it's going to be far worse, I wouldn't be surprised if a level of mass murder of Hitlerian or Maoist proportions might be involved, I wouldn't be surprised if nuclear weapons weren't used in the near future.
The stubbornness of habits of idolatry, those in individuals and, even more so, those embedded in self-interested establishments and the habits of educated thought are difficult to overcome. Look how enduring the habits of European and Near-Eastern and Asian paganism have been after two-thousand years of professed belief in The Gospel of Jesus and the Epistles that form most of the New Testament. Little to none of the actions of those governments and within those societies seem to have been influenced except in the most general of trends by the teachings of Jesus. Which, I agree with Jurgen Habermass is the actual source, along with the Jewish Law which Jesus extended, of literally everything that can be considered good in modern egalitarian democratic life. We, especially white Americans, some of those who have benefitted the most from that religious extension into the moral basis of government are the readiest to give it up as the demand to extend it universally is pressed.
The habits gained from received wisdom, a conventional American education and the knowledge that if you've seen through the pious lies of America's "civil religion" (one of the most putrid of phrases to come from one of our least honest "justices") you wouldn't dare to say it because so many others won't have seen through them or dare to admit the problem. Lying won't get you fired from most media companies in the United States, telling the awful truth about this is an almost certain guarantee of it. But no one's paying me and I can say what I think. Perhaps that's one slight comfort, the destitute have freedom of thought and no vested interest in maintaining pious lies.
No, I'm not optimistic about the near term or even the extended future, assuming there is to be one. And the United States Constitution as the idol of American civic religion is one of the bigger obstacles that face us, apart from the mass electronic media that gulls and lies and incites and kills. American fascism, Republican-fascism is a true polytheistic cult of materialism, most of it vulgar as can be, some of it more abstract, none of it spiritual. It is matched by a neutered, denatured "liberalism" and "leftism" which have hankered after even more abstract material gods, Krysten Sinema is, actually, a good example of what comes of that, as is the Green Party and the various lunatic Marxists and anarchists before them and even today.
Since I'm asked to predict what's going to happen, I'm not going to lie about what I think is coming. If I was going to do that I wouldn't have answered the question.
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