MAYBE LISTENING TO THE SPEECHES, watching and reading the available content of the Biden Administrations Summit for Democracy would make me feel less depressed and pessimistic. It is one of the things that turned me from a Biden skeptic into as close to a true believer as I have been in a continuing American presidency since I was a young, callow and naive semi-believer in the Kennedy administration. Finding out what it really was, later, was a major disappointment. Only with Biden I'm grown up and have passed through cynicism and would-be sophistication and the stupidity of believing that belief was an involuntary response to external stimuli instead of an active choice made. I choose to believe in the Biden administration with open eyes, eyes open to its mistakes and limits as well as its promise.
I should and might focus on it more, as I take the chance to listen and read and think about what's said but one thing I know to the point of absolute conviction that a democracy that is merely an expression of the "will of the majority" with the "civil liberties of the minority protected" is no where near enough. No idea of a "level playing field" of "objective consideration and decision" is going to be what is needed. As I have pointed out to some controversy, the original conception of democracy in classical Athens was an appalling thing, a traditional, local establishment of old families whose votes were taken and allowed to matter, none of their many slaves, resident foreigners, those not in the ruling class or women mattering much or allowed a decision.
The original American Constitutional system was similar in structure, white-property-owning men who met certain criteria were the only ones allowed a voice in the adoption of the Constitution - a Constitution made by a narrower group of rich white men, almost to a man slave owners, many of them engaged in genocide and land thefts to the West and written very intentionally, openly and specifically to enhance their privileges - everything good about subsequent American history, abolition, the various civil rights movements, the labor movement, the enfranchisement of Women the enfranchisement of racial and ethnic minorities and others, the environmental movement has been mounted in opposition to that Constitution and the Bill or Rights - now one of the most potent tools of those who attack those two centuries and more of progress to return us to a slave-owning-oligarchic-apartheid system has been far, far more than expression of the will of those who are allowed to vote and to have their votes count, in line with our appalling anti-democratic Senatorial system and the corrupt, evil, anti-democratic Electoral College.
What fueled all of those demands for equality, for justice that are the best thing about us, probably the only good thing about us, when we manage to do better, is not merely self-government where the majority rule, it is when that majority that can take effective control intentionally chooses equal justice, equal rights, the just distribution of economic goods, on the basis of good will. And that is found no where else in sufficient quantity in any place I'm aware of except by the religious choice of those who make it. It is not necessarily a choice of Christians to follow Christianity or Jews to follow The Law or Muslims to follow the Scriptures they recognized or engaged Buddhism, as I learn more about other and "minority religions" I find that they also contain the content to move things in that direction. If the "Summit for Democracy" avoids that necessity of finding a sufficently potent motivation for acting out of that kind of good will, you can have all of the voting and vote counting and tabulating and swearing in you want and it won't do it. The Republican-fascists in the Senate who uniformly are driving us into gangster rule were almost certainly put there by the majority of the voters in their states, though those in the House may or may not be there due to the rigging of things by Republican-fascists in control of the state governments they control, something done immediately after the Constitution was adopted, one of the framers of that document giving his name to the practice from one of those states who love the mythology that they had some kind of moral superiority to those with more overt oligarchic habits.
Without good will being actively promoted by the Government, as the true foundation of electoral democracy in its supposed modern meaning, not that of an Athenian style pact among ruling gang families, things will devolve as they have here, as they never really escaped in places such as Britain and only sometimes do in all of the would-be democracies everywhere. When that good will, in all of its unfashionable corniness and seemingly naive stupidity for suckers, is not actively promoted as the moral basis of democracy, it is doomed. And our Constsitution, our First Amendment has been interpreted in a way that has knocked the knees out from propagating it. By the Supreme Court at the behest of the "civil liberties" industry. They have helped more in the destruction of democracy than any other institution than the media, the "free press" that glories in its cynical embrace of the kind of wisdom that Walter Brueggemann points out. Jeremiah saw through that a long, long time ago. We are still suckers for what he saw was the problem then.
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