Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Saving Egalitarian Democracy And The People And World It Serves From Neo-Fascism, Several Points Of View

Sr. Teresa Forcades is a very important thinker and public intellectual of whom I was totally unaware two weeks ago.  Apparently in Europe and among women religious Catholics, she was already well known but old white men are always the last to catch on.   As well as being a Benedictine Sr. she is a fully qualified medical doctor, having studied at the University of Barcelona before finishing her medical training at the University of Buffalo in New York.  Then she obtained a masters degree in theology at Harvard before returning to Barcelona where she obained a doctorate in public health and the her doctorate in theology from the School of Theology of Catalonia.  No slouch. 

And she's clearly taken the time amidst her practice and study  to think about the primary topic of my modest efforts, the possibility and requirements and prerequisites for having a real, egalitarian democracy.  

I've come up with a list of prerequisites for that possibility, sufficient and accurate information being widely distributed to The People and for what is commonly called The Golden Rule to take root in a sufficient number of people, an effective majority in strong enough form for it to be done even in those occasions where it would not be to their personal advantage or, perhaps especially, their personal preferences.  I have stressed the experience which is being had in, perhaps its most blatant and undeniable form in the billionare oligarchs concerted efforts to prevent equality and democracy, the dissemination of lies, through the broadcast media and, in their latest scheme to do that, through the havesting and use of personal data people have been gulled into giving up to Facebook, Youtube and other internet businesses.   Anyone who underestimates their abilities to destroy democracy, depending on such idiotic slogans as "more speech" in the face of this last decade may as well be in it on the side of the billionaires because if "more speech" was going to do it, we would have a golden age of egalitarian democracy instead of resurgent fascism and neo-Nazism throughout the West that bought into that libertarian crap in the post-WWII ear.  

Here is part 1 of a talk Sr. Forscades gave in Ireland, addressing some of the basic issues of egalitarian democracy in 2015, in the context of the economic collapses in Spain, Ireland, Iceland and elsewhere and the "austerity" being imposed, not on the banks which had caused the collapse, but on the least among them.  You will certainly remember how popular that was with the members of the "free press" who felt that kind of bracing facing the consequences that is always so much easier for those who face it vicariously by assigning the consequences to people a lot poorer than themselves.*  



Here is my quick and dirty transcription of some of the main points she made.

. . .  So, the European Union, [is] a democracy. Before in the introduction, that was named.  A democracy meaning three things for me.  We, I think, have a tendency or have had a tendency lately to reduce democracy something that it's only - my, according to my understanding - it's only an essential but not sufficient and necessary but not [a] sufficient element of democracy, that is voting.

I don't understand democracy without voting and voting meaning a moment where each person has the possibility to think and to decide and to do that in secrecy and to do that with all the warranties that will be processed fairly.  That is clear to me,  right?  Without that I don't understand democracy.

But that is not enough.  When the Indignados movement and another so-called Wall-Street Movement, and the people that were taking the street, mostly young people - and the squares and camping there to say that we need a radical change, were saying, at least in Spain, "they do not represent us."  They call it "democracy" and it is not.  Maybe older people, especially in Spain, that we had the dictatorship not so long ago, thought these people, these young people don't know what they are talking about.  We have been in a dictatorship and what we have now is, of course, it's a democracy.  They have partial reason but I don't think they have all the reason.  I think the Indignados had all the reason.  This is not a democracy. We call it democracy and it is not.  It is not the rule of the people, and it . . . Two things, we need two things besides voting to have a democracy.

One thing needs to happen before voting and one thing needs to happen after voting.   And if you don't have this thing before and this thing after, the voting is a farce.  "Farce" this really is right, farce, right?   A mockery, right? 

OK, what is . . . what needs to happen before voting?  Well, it's quite obvious, before voting you need to have a deliberation.  You need to have space where all the different options can be heard.  You need to have a space with plurality and with enough time.  [It] cannot be from today to tomorrow and then voting.  That's what happened in the Congress in the United States when they had to vote the bail-out of the banks, they had 24 hours and a document of 600 pages.  And this unfortunately happens at other levels of our so-called democracy.   This cannot be handled like that this deliberate,  deliberative moment, it's essential for democracy.  I actually think it's the most important of all three, all of them are important but this one is the one that shows of our democracy, when you come together with other people you listen to other perspectives, you open up to other perspectives, not only your interests and you just ponder the thing critically then you get to think about it, to discuss, to confront, to oppose and this builds up what we call a human community.  And this builds up a sense of common purpose and builds up a common purpose.  I don't mean unique, right, plural, differentiated with all different kinds of accents and diversity but we are working and building something that it cannot be assumed is there.  That's democracy, democracy, it's good that we have to build together and the deliberative process is very important.   If, for example, I'm . . .  somebody tells me, "well we have a vaccine that is 100% effective, 100% sure, do you want that vaccine?   Then I am supposed to exert, to exercise my sovereign of saying "yes" or "no".   What am I going to say,  "yesm give it [to] me twice"  If I just take the information as it comes, so it's obvious that that's very important.

But there is another one.  Even if you have the deliberative process as it should be and you have the voting without manipulation, as it should be, that's still to my understanding not democracy because we need something to happen after the voting.  And that is revocatory?   Is that English word?  "Revocatory"?  [Audience response]  What?  Recall?  Recall is to recall.   So that means that you have thought out and discussed with everybody and, perfect.  You have voted in privacy and freedom.  But maybe you've made a mistake?  And you realize a bit later.  So, do you have to wait four years to just be able . . . or five or six, depending?   Who's to say what is it written in Spain the president that we have now in Catalonia but also in the country, they came to the election with a program,  they were saying  they would do all [of the] following things.  They were voted [in] and the next day they started undoing all that they said they would do.  And most people say,  oh, yeah, that's what they do today, in Spain.  Right, the people answered like this.  Again this is something that points directly to the problem that the Indignados were pointing to.  This cannot be allowed.  How can we just assume this is the way it works?   You just promised some things to get elected, and when you get elected you don't do them.   You might be thinking, some of you, wait a minute, we have the motion of censure,  is that English?  Like in Parliament, right.  But that's the problem, that's also what the Indignados were showing.  We cannot have only representative democracy because [in] representative democracy you can have a motion of censure in the Parliament but in the Parliament you are getting there through political parties through campaigns that are being financed by the same big powers that are vested interests, that have invested interest.  In Spain all the main political parties [do].  I don't know, in Ireland.  In Spain all the big political parties have huge debts to the banks. . .

Under our flawed and corrupt Constitution, as interpreted by recent Supreme Courts, the deliberative prerequisite of democracy is corrupted through the mass media and the manipulation of information by billionaire gangsters and their hirelings and the post-election recall, the quaint notion of "impeachment" which has never been fulfilled for the removal of even the most criminal of elected kings-for-four-years, is clearly insufficient for the purpose.  

Anyone who thinks rescuing  egalitarian democracy from the billionaire oligarch gangsters is going to be done by tweaking our institutions and laws is deluded.  It is going to take some very basic and earth shaking change.  It is going to have to include honesty and good will in strong enough form that it becomes effective in an effective majority who will often have to act for the common good and with justice when they don't want to, when they would not choose to in the absence of a stronger force that impels them to act against their own "enligthened" self-interest.   I have lost any of my naive faith that that could be based on feelings and notions and habits, I think it requires that that majority really believe and feel that they are required to by no one less than their Creator, to put it in Jeffersonian language.  He clearly either never had or lost that feeling as he became more sciency in his thinking, his entire life depended on the enslavement of scores and hundreds of people who he didn't treat as he would have had them treat him.  None of the slaveowning founders nor the Supreme Court "Justice" slaveowners are reliable in that regard.  All of their words and deeds need to be understood with the enormity of that fact foremost in the deliberations. 

*  British social theory is traditionally based in that, as, Phil, that admirable commentator on British politics has discovered, they're talking about killing the poor there, again and blaming their deaths by cruel Tory incompetence and criminality on their victims.   




I will, again, point to Marilynne Robinson's great essay, Mother Country as one fo the best studies of the cold blooded violence of traditional British, English, for the most part, economic and social theory in this regard.  The college-credentialed and scribbling and babbling classes in American have been highly influenced by them, the secular "left" as well as the overtly fascist right.  You can also read her wonderful essay on the topic of austerity, it goes with Sr. Forscades talk, very well.  

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