Even The Best Possible Outcome Of The Election Will Be Inadequate In The Long Run

THE ELECTION has me so worried that I have been trying to avoid thinking too much about it.  So much is at risk if Democrats don't both win the presidency and the Congress that I can't sleep as it is.  I've been too ill to have much participation in the election, this time.  Which may account for why I'm so anxious.  Being involved, working on it in the past has helped to alleviate the anxiety about it, the feeling that what ever happens for the bad, it isn't my fault.  I can take some comfort in that my district in my state isn't likely to vote Republican though the Second District of Maine could there's little I can do from the other end of the state to have an effect on that.  

New Hampshire, the only state that Maine has a border with, is also believed to be more or less safely voting Democratic, at least for president.  

That leaves what little effect writing something here would be and I'm pretty certain most of those who read what I write will be voting a Democratic ticket.  My political writing has a far more radical agenda than would be effective on an electoral level, radical reform of the Constitution, including the sacrosanct First Amendment and the god-damned Second Amendment,  such a radical reform of the Supreme and federal courts as to find the recent proposal made in the Senate is inadequate.  Nothing less than a Democratic President and Congress imposing term limits on the sitting "justices" that would remove at least the three longest sitting Republican-fascists, a binding ethics code with criminal penalties on the "justices" and summarily nullifying Marbury vs. Madison would be enough to protect egalitarian democracy from what has in our history been the most corrupt of the branches of government in my reading of American history and the daily news.

Getting rid of the Electoral College is another on the must-do list to save even the dangerous and inadequate liberal-democracy we have now.  And scrapping liberal democracy for egalitarian democracy - INCLUDING ECONOMIC JUSTICE - must be on the agenda of anyone who really cares about any real democracy in the modern sense of the word.  There can be no democracy worth trying for which is not egalitarian.  The modern stupidity that puts "liberty," "freedom" as the paramount virtue of democracy over equality is not only stupid, it is a proven flop.  Economic inequality under liberal democracy is the thing which has made us dangerously vulnerable to the billionaire-millionaire world-wide movement to impose oligarchic fascism.  If the Clinton and Obama administrations had made real moves towards real, effective economic justice to the poor, the middle-class and the destitute, the billionaires and millionaires wouldn't have found such fertile ground in which to plant Trumpian fascist rule.  Of course, what little they did being misrepresented by the "free press" was no help but the Ivy-league lawyer-presidents were never going to touch on that because of the false piety given to the First Amendment even as they were lied into impotence through the mass media feed to lie under it.  

The part played by the entertainment industry in this has to be faced in a way that the idolatry of the First Amendment prevents.  Trump as Reagan before him was a product of that industry.  The producers of The Apprentice, its directors, writers and others which created the phony Trump presented on it, the colluding mass media which presented him first as a clown-prince, then as an increasingly frightening dictator  are who gave us this national and world nightmare.  That the stupidest, sleaziest, liar, rapist, crook and con-man to have ever gained actual power in not only one of the states but over all of them was an As-Seen-On-TV fraud should be generating journalism and academic and political commentary and analysis of the dangers that "The Free Press" as entertainment media is stupidly called.  That all of those are afraid to take on the dangers imposed through the modern reading of The First Amendment, starting under Holmes and Brandeis but most of all through the Warren, Burger, Rehnquist and now Roberts Courts, and the vague 18th century poetry of the Bill of Rights proves how far we are from saving even liberal democracy.   I attribute that failure to liberal democracy, itself, what gave us the 18th century structure of government under the Constitution, including all of its intentional corrruptions - the pro-slavery and pro-oligarchy aspects of it - and the false piety for things like the First Amendment.  I have written extensively over the past eighteeen years about the danger of "free speech absolutism" which is a product of the stupidly phrased First Amendment, something which has led even someone as well intentioned as Maya Wiley to foolishly talk about a "right to lie."  It is lies in the mass media, everything from what passes as journalism to the cesspools of "reality TV" which is as phony as can be to hate-talk media and comedy which have brought us here.   The numerous laments about the "death of truth" the profit from the lie machines that are Trump and the like of J. D. Vance have not dared to address the fact that it was the Warren Court, under that dangerously libertarian interpretation of The First Amendment which has produced the delusion that there can be a "right to lie" as granted to the great grey whore, the New York Times and which is the extremely successful business model for FOX Lies.  Murdochian media sets the pace for the rest of it, CNN, the DC and NYC punditry in all of their career polishing vileness.  

Any political or legal ideology which puts the welfare and freedom of words over the lives of People, even under the guise of liberal democracy, will eventually go for those lies which generate the most profit for those willing to lie.  That's as true for "journalism" as it is for hate-talk comedians and shock jocks, it is infamously what makes the legal professions, now judges and "justices" as well as for the jr. level of that in mere lawyers, so famously disreputable.  Judges and "justices" gave their fellow lawyers carte blanche to lie and playing let's pretend even before Holmes, Brandeis and the Warren Courts invented a "right to lie" for the New York Times and, so, all of media.  It's one of the lessons I've had from seeing the antics of the Trump lawyers before judges and "justices" the extent to which lawyers can tell the most transparent lies in legal filings and even before the bench without suffering any real consequences.  You can look at the status of the worst of them and how few of the worst of them have really been removed from the legal profession to see just how much lying is not only tolerated but given free reign in the Courts and the law profession, no doubt out of the professional interest of other lawyers who can expect to profit from that kind of lying while being paid by the billing hour.  You can see that in the career of what Trump took as his ideal advocate, the entirely corrupt and crooked Roy Cohn who was only finally disbarred in the fabled bar of New York as he lay on his death bed, dying of AIDS, even as he lied about even that.   

We are in need of so much reform that even if Kamala Harris gets a Veto proof Senate and a large Democratic majority in the house that most of it will probably not be attempted or even imagined as needed.   I've been considering the skepticism of "freedom" not in the terms that the materialist-atheist-scientistic cult talks about it but as it is asserted under libertarian-liberal democracy, raised by thinkers such as Marilynne Robinson, on one side, and David Bentley Hart on another.  I think the problem with that conception of "freedom" is that it is detached from moral considerations.  I don't mean what most Americans mean by "morals" or "morality," that is the restriction of what Women or LGBTQ+ People do with their own bodies, prohibiting those who want to smoke pot or resonsibly use hallucinogens, harming no one- often not even themselves, I mean the religious morality of doing to the least among us what we would do for God, of doing to others what we would have done to us, OF ECONOMIC JUSTICE TO THE POOR AND DESTITUTE, things like that.   The 18th century definition of "liberalism" as is embodied in the political conceptions of framers of the American Constitution was permissive of the most grotesque immorality of kidnapping and enslaving human beings, of treating them as chattels, of genocide against the Native Americans, of the rankest objectification and submission of Women, etc.  That is the "liberalism" that the prissy "classical liberals" and the tech-bro fascists mean when they talk about "freedom," the freedom of the richest to do whatever they want as the large majority of humanity goes to hell, useful to them only as masses to be manipulated through the lying, algorithm manipulative media can manipulate them, as can be seen in the idiocy of those panels of "undecided voters" who are willing to consider going with Trumpian fascism, yet again.  

But the "left" which is detached from the moral absolutes of religious morality aren't much of help, either.  Well before the tech-bros considered most people as mere "masses" that word was bandied about in such lefty talk, if you go back and read the literature of the American and European and other "lefts" you will find that they were as bad if not worse than the disciples of 18th century European "liberalism" in that regard.  It's no great mystery how they could witness the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. with the kind of equanimity as those who see the crimes of the Israeli government do right now, of the goddamned Green Party Republican-fascist tools like Jill Stein who can't bring herself to admit that Vlaidimir Putin is guilty of crimes against humanity.  

I think the only hope for egalitarian democracy is in that morality, whether it be in the Christian synthesis of Hebrew justice with the Gospel of Love from Jesus or the other monotheistic religions or in the equivalent moral holdings of other, non-Abrahamic religions - though so far in history, those have yet to produce a national government which is egalitarian-democratic.  It's not as if the United States has really accomplished that, either, despite all of the talk about it over the past two-hundred plus years.  Our 18th century Constitution is one of the major inhibitions against equality and real democracy, I think other countries which have more modern Constitutions and a parliamentary system of government have a better chance of taking that step.  You'll never get it under a regime of materialism, intellectual or the far more influential vulgar materialism which even the "intellectuals" of materialist-scientistic-atheism really follow.   You'll never get it under an ideology which puts the rights of words over the rights of living beings, which pretends that privileges granted to artificial corporate entities (such as corporations and "the press") are the same things as rights naturally inhering only to natural living beings, which values legal fictions over even the hardest and most exigent of lived realities, such as flourishes in our "liberal democracy."   If those worked we would never have gone from the exposure of the many crimes of Nixon, including his war crimes in South-east Asia, to the crimes of the Reagan-Bush I administrations, to the Rehnquist Court imposed Bush II regime, to that of Trump in just over a half a century.  All of those crimes, all of them were not only permitted by but happened under the umbrella of what is really permitted under the American Constitution, as acquiesced in by the false-protection of the "free press" and the judiciary, all of them sold to a duped plurality of American voters under the anti-democratic and increasingly non-democratic Electoral College and the gerrymandered, rigged districting of Congress, fed by our lying media.  

Of course, I will be voting by next week for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and a straight Democratic ticket down ballot - I even do that in our local non-partisan elections, now.  I will never vote for a Republican-fascist or a phony turd-party or so=called independent (excepting those who caucus with Democrats, now).  But I am not optimistic about American democracy because the changes necessary to even keep the false substituent we have now won't be made during my lifetime.  But I will be pushing and protesting and pointing out the lies, the hypocrisies and the realities of what is needed.  Starting with the Gospel of Jesus, the radical economics of Abrahamic monotheism, the presence of those in other religious traditions.  I'm not wasting any more time pretending there is a non-religoius force that can substitute for those, there simply is none, including what is sold as an equivalent in our secular civic pieties.  Those have had more than two centuries to produce and they are worse than a flop.  They never really intended to produce equality or democracy.  They certainly have not produced economic justice.