What Happens When The Oligarchs Turn Back To Democrats To Save Their Asses?

TRUMP-MUSK'S TARIFF STUNT of yesterday has put any attempt to restore things by a future Democratic president (or a Republican one, if Republicans give up fascism, which is unlikely) has put the entire world at an advantage because they can unite to extract reparations from the country that has caused this, the United States.   

And I can't say that, if what I suspect will happen, a world-wide economic depression results, that they wouldn't have justice on their side.

This is a result of the stultification of the collective American mind by American media, by Hollywood, by Republican-fascist control of our educational institutions , by the exploitation of America's indigenous mental debility, racism and sexism and bigotry by the oligarchs to divide and lord it over those who have been stultified.  It's not unlike what happened during the original period of such stultification through popular culture and the media created zeitgeist of the stupid and roaring 20s, Republican rule which led to what I think is likely going to be called The First Great Depression.   

I hope that among those things which the rest of the world imposes on the United States is reigning in the traditional, long-embedded mental debilities which have led the United States into a history of disasters, including the Civil War,  the promotion of racism, bigotry, the love of ignorance and lies, though I think they may simply extract economic reparations - I hope not in the style that Britain and France extracted from Germany after WWI, which were a disaster.  

I would love it if they got us to dump the presidential system for a prime ministerial system, though it would have to be thoroughly explained to Americans who have been maintained in ignorance.   Trump clearly is totally ignorant in that way, he is too typical an example of American stupidity.  

We should start thinking of what happens when Trump-Musk-Vance passes, considering the relief of the world after Bush II and Trump I because I think this time the world isn't going to give the Democrat who is handed the ruins to repair a Nobel Peace Prize or the mere praise they gave Joe Biden, this time they are going to have to do something to make sure this doesn't happen again.  They now know they can't count on the American political system,  even more laughably, its legal system to right things.  Now they know that America isn't safely counted on to do that, not after the past fifty years of watching ever more criminal Republicans then Republican-fascists installed by the media and, after 2000 the Republican dominated Supreme Court.   Our Constitution has failed catastrophically  

An Open Message To The White Supremacist Troll With The Neo-Nazi Moniker Whose Pinafore Got In A Twist When I Praised Tabitha

IF CIS-GENDERED, STRAIGHT WHITE MEN were to experience what you want trans-women of color to be subjected to if ONE person who is described that way commits murder, CIS-GENDERED, STRAIGHT WHITE MEN WOULD BE ANSWERABLE FOR THE CENTURIES OF MURDERS OF WOMEN, cis-gendered straight white Women, Lesbian Women, Trans Women, Asexual Women.   They would further be subjugated and deprived of equality for what they have done to Women and Men of Color, People Of Color of every gender in any description.   If even those cis-gendered, straight white men who commit and support such DAILY OCCURRING  violence and oppression, SO COMMON THAT IT SELDOM MAKES NEWS THAT EVEN A BIGOT LIKE YOU CAN FERRET OUT, if your type could could be separated from those who don't practice or support such casual and deadly violence to be subjected TO THE RULE YOU FAVOR,  YOU AND YOUR FELLOW WHITE SUPREMACIST BIGOTS WOULD BE THE ONES WHINING AND CRYING IT LIKE THE FAFO'S OF SOCIAL MEDIA ARE BAWLING OUT THEIR BUYER'S REMORSE NOW THAT THEY ARE THE ONES GETTING WHAT THEY SUPPORTED FOR MILLIONS OF OTHERS, maybe Tabatha would have something to say about that as, in fact, I would.

Cis-gendered, straight, white men, under your rule, would constitute a dangerous criminal class if they were all made to answer for the innumerable crimes committed by them.  As it is, I confine those I place in that class to the subset you are a member of, white supremacists, which include non-cis-gendered, non-straight, white male supremacists, and also the gay men and fewer lesbians, etc. who are white supremacists.  I even include such as Clarence Thomas and other black Republican-fascists in your klan, so how do you like that.  That's you're crowd.   Any CGSWM or others who favor and practice equality and the respect for the rights of all are not part of it and you have no rights to claim to represent them. 

Your type never has to answer in exactly the way you insist Black Women and others are required to answer for such things WHEN IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM.   But you'd wail of the terrible injustice if the same rules you want in place were imposed on you.    Maybe you have to be a radical egalitarian like me to notice when you do that, but now you know that I will notice it.  Perhaps if she notices this she will have something to say about it.   I wouldn't presume to speak for her.  She does that so well, herself.  Maybe if she gives me permission to post your comment that led to this, I will. 

That's part of the equality I want.  And the truth telling. 

The Blind Legal Mania Of The Civil Liberties Industry And Those Who They Gull

 . . . the Pinkness talked.  Not only of the machine entities, but of many others.   Of the insect tribes that piled up over endless centuries huge reserves of food for which they had no need , slaving on an endless treadmill of a blind economic mania. 

Clifford D. Simak, Time Is The Simplest Thing

THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SPECTACLE of the degenerate, drug addled, apartheid billionaire Elon Musk overtly putting another bid in on another American election,  trying to buy himself and the party which he bought in a friendly takeover,  Republican-fascists, a court,  AND HE'S BEEN DOING THAT, PROBABLY BREAKING THE LAW IN WISCONSIN, FOR MORE THAN A YEAR AND IN ELECTIONS IN MORE THAN ONE STATE.   And the goddamned legal system has yet to do something to stop him.   Fining the fascist won't do anything because at least on paper he's the richest man in the world and fines won't phase him.   He is almost certainly enriching himself through buying the presidency for Donald Trump through funding lies in the mass media - the entire reason that the billionaires and millionaires and their sleazebag lawyers and assets on the courts and on the U.S. Supreme Court don't want to end this corruption of our elections system.   It's entirely understandable why Republicans in the past and Republican-fascists, now, like dirty elections run on paid-for lies, because they have a higher purpose, to enrich the already rich like Elon Musk.   It's no wonder why the incumbent members of the Republican caucus in Congress and the Republican-fascist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court believe in trickle-down economics - BECAUSE THEY ARE ABOUT THE ONLY CLASS OF PEOPLE THAT ENRICHING THE OBSCENELY RICH EVER MORE BENEFITS.   Which is pretty much a pattern that was early set in the Supreme Court as the slave-holding majority on the early Supreme Courts repeatedly ruled in ways that enhanced the slave-power of which they were members.  John Marshall, the idolized John Marshall of Marbury v Madison fame, the man whose Supreme Court decisions make up an outsized part of the curriculum of those who are indoctrinated into the folklore which is what a legal education is,  was a major slave-holder holding hundreds in slavery as he ruled, repeatedly to enhance the institution that benefited him financially.  

That is their motive.  This is asking what the motive of the ACLU and other "civil liberties" lawyers who support Supreme Court rulings such as Sullivan v NYT which created a "right to lie" and Buckley v. Valeo in which the Supreme Court created out of nothing billions of times more "free speech" for those with more money by declaring the millionaires and billionaires money is "speech", with which they finance those lies the Supreme Court privileged by declaring their telling to constitute "a right" and, in the one that is so relevant to why Elon Musk has bought himself the presidency and may well buy himself the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, in order to, among other things ratfuck Wisconsin elections for the party he effectively owns,*  the Ruling of the Roberts Court in which the Republican-fascist majority on that court KNOWINGLY KNEW THEY OPENED UP AMERICAN ELECTIONS TO AN UNPRECEDENTED LEVEL OF CORRUPTION,** Citizens United.   

Since when I do this if someone falls on the fainting couch it's likely over me slamming the ACLU,  here's the excuse of that "civil liberties" group from their website as to why they supported the Citizens United ruling.  I will break in with comments but I will note that the entire things places the most basic factor in making ANY government, ANY LEGAL SYSTEM legitimate, the vote, behind their irrational and fundamentalist reading of the First Amendment. 

The ACLU and Citizens United

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that independent political expenditures by corporations and unions are protected under the First Amendment and not subject to restriction by the government. The Court therefore struck down a ban on campaign expenditures by corporations and unions that applied to non-profit corporations like Planned Parenthood and the National Rifle Association, as well as for-profit corporations like General Motors and Microsoft.

That decision has sparked a great deal of controversy. Some see corporations as artificial legal constructs that are not entitled to First Amendment rights. Others see corporations and unions as legitimate participants in public debate whose views can help educate voters as they form their opinions on candidates and issues.

You will notice that the ACLU doesn't address the absolute fact that CORPORATION ARE ARTIFICIAL LEGAL CONSTRUCTS,  THEY ARE NOT PEOPLE, THEY ARE NOT NATURAL, LIVING BEINGS,  they were granted no inherent rights by "nature and nature's god"  they and everything else about them are fictitious entities - as fictitious as the entities that Clifford Simak created in the passage at the top of this post.   Nor do they admit that the purpose of a corporation is for those who have created them to exercise greater power than almost any individual, on their own can wield.  

By pretending that those facts aren't important because "others see corporations and unions as legitimate participants in public debate whose views can help educate voters as they form their opinions on candidates and issues," packs a huge amount of dishonesty into a single sentence.  It's to be remembered that the ACLU are a bunch of lawyers, trained and rehearsed in the kind of lawyerly lying that that profession consists of.   Those "others" who say that are, BY AND LARGE THOSE WHO FAVOR THE POWERFUL AND ALMOST ALWAYS RICH AND THEM HAVING THE ENHANCED POWER THAT IGNORING REALITY HAS GIVEN THEM.   

One of the foremost realities of Citizens United, Buckley v Valeo and other such rulings is that those who oppose unions, when they win elections, work to destroy unions and to destroy their effectiveness by changing laws AND BY MAKING APPOINTMENTS TO THE COURT OF LAWYERS HOSTILE TO THE INTERESTS OF WORKING PEOPLE.     Union leaders who were gulled into supporting such rulings as Buckley v. Valeo or Citizens United may have either been suckered by lawyers or they, themselves, are knowingly supporting rulings that will destroy the very unions who would, then, have a merely theoretical "right" to donate to campaigns for candidates who would be swamped by the far, far deeper pockets of the very corporations and financial interests THEY SO OFTEN LOSE TO.  

As for Planned Parenthood, well, look what happened to Womens' rights to the ownership of their own bodies after that ruling. 

To call the majority of what that campaign money buys, time TO LIE on behalf of the rich and so already powerful to put their lackies and servants and, let's call them what they are, assets into office and onto court benches "education" is cynicism of the type that typifies legal blather. 

IN ORDER FOR SPEECH TO COMPRISE "EDUCATION" IT HAS TO BE FACTUAL, IT HAS TO BE HONEST, LIES CAN NEVER COMPRISE "EDUCATION".    But if you're a lawyer, you don't really care about the truth, you're trained not to, you care about the narrative being sustained and the legal lore being upheld.    If you ever have to wonder how the Supreme Court "justices" lie through their teeth or, in the case of "liberals" who vote against what they purport to believe in, that is how they do it.   As I've mentioned here before, it's how the officially anti-slavery "justice" Joseph Story issued what was, before Dred Scott the most infamous pro-slave-power ruling, the Prigg decision, which said that free Black People could be kidnapped into slavery from Free States under the Constitutional order.  That Constitutional order being whatever those thugs in black robes say it is at any given time 

We understand that the amount of money now being spent on political campaigns has created a growing skepticism in the integrity of our election system that raises serious concerns. We firmly believe, however, that the response to those concerns must be consistent with our constitutional commitment to freedom of speech and association. For that reason, the ACLU does not support campaign finance regulation premised on the notion that the answer to money in politics is to ban political speech.

And, since those who win elections and are appointed to courts and, especially the Supreme Court under the "free speech" theory that the ACLU supports HAVE EVERY INCENTIVE TO KEEP THE CORRUPTION IN PLACE, that will never change, despite the bogus alternatives the ACLU purports to support remaining, perpetually as a theoretical way to insure the integrity of our elections, THE ONLY MECHANISM UNDER WHICH ANY ACTION OF ANY PART OF THE GOVERNMENT, INCLUDING THE COURTS HAVE ANY CLAIM TO LEGITIMACY.    Clearly the lawyers of the ACLU don't much care about the foundational integrity or the legitimacy of what their "free speech" produces so long as, a. the form is kept and, b. they can sucker "free speech-press" supporters into keeping their corporation financed.  

At the same time, we recognize that the escalating cost of political campaigns may make it more difficult for some views to be heard, and that access to money often plays a significant role in determining whom runs for office and who is elected.

Well they should as they were part of making money equal speech in legal fiction and, so, giving millionaires millions of times more of it and billionaires billions of times more of it than any natural human being without millions and billions to spare.  

Clearly, they understand THAT THE SYSTEM THEY SUPPORT DETERMINES WHO GETS ELECTED,  THEY JUST SAID SO.   So the fact that it's the opponents of equality, of equal justice, of economic justice, of workers' safety, workers' rights, environmental protection,  LGBTQ+ rights, Women's rights including their very right to them owning their own bodies (Women having bodies which corporations, even unions, don't have),  and literally everything that so many of those who gullibility donate to the ACLU and hold them up as sacrosanct, support WIN OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND APPOINT MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT WHO DETERMINE WHAT THE CONSTITUTION IS means nothing to the lawyer of that corporation. 

In our view, the answer to that problem is to expand, not limit, the resources available for political advocacy. Thus, the ACLU supports a comprehensive and meaningful system of public financing that would help create a level playing field for every qualified candidate. We support carefully drawn disclosure rules. We support reasonable limits on campaign contributions and we support stricter enforcement of existing bans on coordination between candidates and super PACs.

If you think those who win under the ACLU's supported regime of how campaigns really are run, right now and every second since the Supreme Court started overturning the post-Watergate campaign finance reform laws - which were passed with bi-partisan approval in the 1970s - are ever going to allow that kind of reform INCLUDING THE ENTIRELY UNLIKELY TO EVER HAPPEN PUBLIC FINANCING OF CAMPAIGNS THAT WILL EFFECTIVELY COUNTER THE CORPORATIONS, MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES COMBINED MONEY AND COORDINATION,  you are as stupid as someone who would believe the lawyers who wrote this bull shit think they really mean it. 

Some argue that campaign finance laws can be surgically drafted to protect legitimate political speech while restricting speech that leads to undue influence by wealthy special interests. Experience over the last 40 years has taught us that money always finds an outlet, and the endless search for loopholes simply creates the next target for new regulation. It also contributes to cynicism about our political process.

Experience over the past fifty years, since Buckely v Valeo shows that America has gone from the high-point of the early Johnson administration passing the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid and the rest of the most significant advancement of equality - INCLUDING THE LAWS THAT FOR THE FIRST TIME MADE THE COUNTRY,  POTENTIALLY A TRUE DEMOCRACY -  to a country in which a Supreme Court has installed a president (Bush v Gore) and turned Trump into a monarch and legalized overt quid-pro-quo buying of politicians and, no doubt "justices" on the Supreme Court.   In fact I date the commencement of that corruption to the ACLU supported creation of the "right to lie" in the Sullivan decision.   EXPERIENCE IS THAT THE ACLU HAS BEEN ALL-IN ON CREATING THE RUIN OF EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY. 

As to cynicism, have these "officers of the court" not noticed how cynical the large majority of the public are about the legal profession and the legal system? 

Any rule that requires the government to determine what political speech is legitimate and how much political speech is appropriate is difficult to reconcile with the First Amendment. Our system of free expression is built on the premise that the people get to decide what speech they want to hear; it is not the role of the government to make that decision for them.

I'm not, at least in this case, talking about the government determining "what speech is legitimate and how much political speech is appropriate,"*** BUT IN HOW MUCH OF IT CORPORATIONS, BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES CAN INJECT INTO THE TIME LIMITS OF AN ELECTION THAT LITERALLY DETERMINES WHAT THE LAW WILL BE.   The blather about "the people" getting to decide holds the tacit and clearly false premise that THE PEOPLE fed on lies created with the help of PR professionals and sold to them through repeated retellings on TV can, by a reliable majority overcome that indoctrination WHEN THE EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD IS LITERALLY THAT MOST OF THE TIME THEY CAN'T.   This is the lawyerly-liarly equivalent of the economist-liarly pretense that entirely unsophisticated, unsuspecting People who are gulled by corporations AND THEIR LAWYERS into singing agreements are "rational actors" making rational decisions. 

It is also useful to remember that the mixture of money and politics long predates Citizens United and would not disappear even if Citizens United were overruled. The 2008 presidential election, which took place before Citizens United, was the most expensive in U.S. history until that point. The super PACs that have emerged in the 2012 election cycle have been funded with a significant amount of money for individuals, not corporations, and individual spending was not even at issue in Citizens United.

Again, the ACLU should remember that the mixture of money and politics long predates Citizens United BECAUSE THEY PLAYED SUCH A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN MAKING SURE THE MIXTURE OF MONEY AND POLITICS, WHICH CAME TO SUCH SCANDALOUS LIGHT IN THE NIXON YEARS, CONTINUED WITH SUPREME COURT APPROVAL.   This may be the most cynical paragraph in what is a thoroughly cynical document.   If there had been no such corruption of money on politics before the first campaign finance law was duly adopted, only to be overturned by Court fiat,  no one would have drafted such a law. 

Unfortunately, legitimate concern over the influence of “big money” in politics has led some to propose a constitutional amendment to reverse the decision. The ACLU will firmly oppose any constitutional amendment that would limit the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

And if the goddamed ACLU and the other "civil liberties" lawyers have anything to do say about it, that "legitimate concern" will go unaddressed, certainly unrelieved for the rest of time.    You may ask what the goddamned ACLU lawyers see as the ultimate purpose of this "speech" is if the results will be ever more inequality, ever more corrupt, ever more anti-democratic governance, ever more corrupt Supreme Courts making ever more corrupt and Republican-fascist enabling and empowering rulings?   In fact, I am asking that of them and their supporters.   What is the good of "free speech" when what will result is that any speech which those who hold power will be a. what supports that regime or, b. in the unlikely event that it is even permitted, speech opposing it will be kept impotent and of no danger to them.  

As to them opposing such an amendment to the Constitution, what do they think the First Amendment was?  It was an amendment that was adopted by the Congress and the President, sent out to the legislatures of the various states to accept or reject, and so would any honest elections amendment.   If the First Amendment can be said to have any legitimacy, even any legal legitimacy, it gained it ONLY ON THE PRESUMED VALIDITY OF THE ELECTION PROCESS, BY THE VOTE CAST BY THE PEOPLE.  For the ACLU to oppose measures to ensure that elections are not corrupted by big money is for them to oppose the legitimacy of the entire process, INCLUDING THE VERY CONSTITUTION THEY REST THEIR CLAIMS ON.   There is no reason to believe the First Congress, the legislatures that adopted the First Amendment were of more legitimacy than the electorate or their elected representatives today, when in many places the descendants of those who were enslaved can vote, when Women can vote, when those who don't own property can vote, etc.   

Such "free speech" as the "civil liberties" lawyers gas on about can pile up for centuries and be of absolutely no use to anyone, in case you wonder why this document made me think of that passage from science fiction.   Legal fiction is so much less honest than it is. 

I would like to know exactly how much money the lawyers of the ACLU, especially the "civil libertarians" get from the corporations, the millionaires and billionaires.  Really, I think the lawyers who peddle themselves as idealists under the false banner of the ACLU may be the most cynical of all of them.  At least those who peddle their asses for the most money aren't pretending otherwise. 

* Musk's ability and intention to finance a challenger to any Republican who votes for the welfare of their constituents instead of the way he and his asset,  Trump tell them to, is what is running the Republican-fascist party now.  

** We know that the Republican-fascist majority on the Court knew that because they were presented with the argument that that is what they were doing by legalizing billionaires foreign as well as domestic, buying American elections.    We can know that beyond any shadow of any doubt because last year the Roberts Court also legalized overt quid-pro-quo buying of politicians as long a the payment post-dates delivery of what was being bought.   There is no rational doubt that those two rulings, taken together prove the Roberts Court has knowingly corrupted the elections systems in favor of the party of its majority. 

*** I think in typical lawyer-liar dishonesty they include such stuff in this argument as a means of distraction,  courts, lawyers, INCLUDING THOSE IN THE DAMNED ACLU, are constantly discussing what speech is legitimate.  If they didn't do that then there is not a single thing that could be said by anyone in any court that could be depended on to be factual instead of a lie.   I doubt the lawyers of the ACLU would be reticent to note that testimony they didn't favor was illegitimate if they believed they could show it was false.   Why the speech that is regulated within the confines of a court case is legitimately regulated for its truth or falsity not to mention merely falling within the arbitrary rule of court procedure while political and other speech which can do everything up to and including getting hundreds of thousands, even millions killed is held by the lawyers of the ACLU to be illegitimately regulated is something I'd really like to be able to ask them, though, being experienced in reading what they claim and examining it for honesty,  I wouldn't trust them farther than I could throw the grotesque Supreme Court building. 

Tabitha Points Out The Hypocrisy Of White Republican-fascist Women Who Support Discrimination Against Other People

are whining when YETI doesn't discriminate against them BUT HOLD THEM TO THE SAME POLICY THEY HOLD OTHERS TO.  The same groups that celebrated the Supreme Court reinstitutionalize deial of services to LGBTQ+ People are whining and crying when THEY ARE BEING TREATED LIKE OTHER POLITICAL GROUPS UNDER A COMPANY'S POLICY THEY DON'T SERVICE POLITICAL GROUPS.

I like Tabitha's commentary and style.   There is no group that is whinier and more self-pitying than the privileged. 

The Discouragement of Our Better Intentions And The Cynicism That Fashionably Replaces Those - Part Four

Marilynne Robinson concludes her preface with two questions, one obviously true, the other one true but which needs considerable discussion.

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions?    What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?  After all these things rose together.  The air is thick now with "the people," a phrase that is meant to give authority to the claims and the grievances of those who use it.  That it is often invoked in good faith one may doubt, but the fact that resort is had to it so insistently means that we are still good enough democrats to feel that ultimately authority and reason do and should lie with the people.  Then the old impulse that lay behind the dissemination of information and learning, the will to ensure that the public will be competent to make the weightiest decisions and so conform society to its best sense of the possible should be as powerful as it has ever been,  and more powerful because of the fragility of the contemporary world.  Instead we have slack and underfinanced journalism and the ebbing away of resources from our universities, libraries and schools.  The liberation of the human individual as a social value required optimism which is also amply justified.  This loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing.

It is inescapable that when you use the word "democracy" you have to define what you mean by that or you will end up talking about radically different things.  It is absolutely different if you put the emphasis on "freedom" instead of the equality that will make that freedom available to everyone and of value to everyone.  The history of America is tellable in the freedoms which those with money and power have given themselves in reality, perhaps giving the least among us the theoretical possession of those same freedoms but which they will never get to enjoy.   The crucial point isn't "freedom" the rich and always the richest have always enjoyed the lions share of freedom.   

Equality is and has been lacking in American democracy from the beginning of it up till at least 1965 when the most decisive steps taken towards real, meaningful equality were taken in the Johnson administration.  Steps that were immediately attacked by white supremacists and the Republican Party as they sought to benefit from the disaffected racists who had been traditionally members of the Democratic Party leaving because they opposed equality.  They had nearly a hundred seventy years of precedent of life under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to fuel their resentment.  As that reaction took hold, as the likes of Lewis Powell set out an anti-democratic blueprint to create the oligarchy that the courts he was a member of clearly worked towards and which is reaching its lowest point in the Neronian style decadence of Trump II the target was always equalty, making sure that all the freedom was as concentrated in the same places that the framers placed it, in affluent white men of an acceptable kind.

It is all well and good to talk about democracy but, as my posts on The Trial of Socrates demonstrated, "democracy" as a man-made, artificial thing can be had by a favored, restricted class of those deemed in ancient Athens to be "free men" or "citizens" who hold large numbers in slavery, Women and who exclude even wealthy men who are not part of that traditional group.  Why would anyone not in that group care about such a democracy?   Why would anyone who was excluded from participation care about America's democracy as, in fact, most adult citizens of the country were excluded from even the vote, not to mention the just access to the necessities and, as importantly, the goods of life?  

The times we live in provide, instead of equality and the right to a decent life free from the fear of homelessness, an inability to access healthcare, food, and any number of other things, provids The People with entertainment that is like what was provided in Orwell's 1984 but with better production values, one of the greatest pleasures cultivated by it, hating other People, feeling resentments, and stoking greed after status symbol possessions.  The ersatz religion of the TV style ministires and the variety-show-nightclub churches turn something referred to as "The Bible" into an inversion of the Gospel, the Epistles, The Law, the Prophets hardly mentioned except in their fortune telling games.  

If relgion, if Christianity, especially, among if not the most egalitarian religion if Jesus is to mean anything to it, has to make equality the central moral aspect of it or it will continue to decline.  The United States may well be lost to despotism because it never has been allowed to be pushed to equality despite that struggle having been engaged in since before the Constitution was drafted.  That struggle for equality, NOT THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTARIAN "FREEDOM" is literally the best thing about the United States and it is continually thwarted on the basis of the Constitution or something as illegitimate as the "common law tradition" under the practices of the legal profession, the courts and, especially the Supreme Court.

Marilynne Robinson correctly notes that democracy and prosperity would seem to have something of a direct relationship, as the Biden presidency shows, as the Johnson presidency showed, as the New Deal showed, and the opposite has been demonstrated, as well, in the string of Republican administrations that have thwarted equality all have a record of producing economic hardship going back more than a century Governing of, by and for the millionaries and billionaires produces bad economic results, especially as you go down the economic scale.   Yet our "free press" lies about that because bad times for the many have the possibility of temporarily being good for the rich.  

I think the first question in this last paragraph from Marilynne Robinson's Preface is self evident.  Of course good institutions come from good intentions.  Like religion, like scripture, all of that is a product of human thought, of human intentionality, of pursuing purposes.  If an institution goes from bad to good, it is a product of human intention.  I doubt the change and reform of any bad institution has ever just happened on to the good by accident.  The opposite happening by chance has somewhat better odds, especially if "civil libertarian" lawyers or "institutionalists" are making those choices.  The fact that the common good, the general prosperity, what the familiar preamble to the U.s. Constitution states as its intentions in a way that a non-lawyer would certainly take to be a promise made by those who frame it and would be an integral part of the document, since that is what was promised in the document that they got The Peoples' representatives to sign on to in the beginning.   Here is the lawyerly loophole to that as found at that most august of American institutions, the secular delphic oracle of our idolatry, the United States Courts:

The preamble sets the stage for the Constitution (Archives.gov). It clearly communicates the intentions of the framers and the purpose of the document. The preamble is an introduction to the highest law of the land; it is not the law. It does not define government powers or individual rights.

Establish Justice is the first of five objectives outlined in the 52-word paragraph that the Framers drafted in six weeks during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. They found a way to agree on the following basic principles:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Maybe those largely lawyers who framed it put "justice" first because they knew they needed lawyers to get out of the existing contract promising "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. so famously noted they had promised in the Declaration of Independence but which they never intended to pay up on.  And they appointed such judges and "justices" as would never intend to make them pay, some things haven't changed much since then.

Of those five things promised under the Constitution, the only one that they can be said to have intended to deliver on was the protection of the country from foreign attacks and whatever domestic attacks as would put the wealth of the wealthy and the order that favored them at risk.  It was the rebellions of those who felt duped by the revolutionary leaders, who, typical of revolutionaries who take control, once in power didn't keep their overtly made promises.  That is what led to the drafting of the Constitution.  But they certainly never did much of anything to quell violence against others under the rule of law, they institutionalized it under the Second Amendment, what the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have used to arm a Republican Klan in case egalitarian democracy threatens to become real.  And now under Trump, they have failed even to quell the possibility of insurrection against the very government they instituted or, incredibly enough, an insurrectionist gaining the presidency by election. The Roberts Court, with some Democratic support, nullified the relevant section of the 14th Amendment to allow an insurrectionist to become president.   YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A RADICAL EGALITARIAN DEMOCRAT TO NOTICE THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED. Though you appear to need to be one to admit that obvious and terrible truth.

The slave holders and Indian murdering land grabbers in the Constitutional Convention certainly didn't have any intention at all to provide any of the others on an equal basis, certainly not to those they enslaved, the free Black People that the Supreme Court under "due process" said were allowed to be abducted into slavery as Trump's ICESTAPO are abducting People off the streets today, they had no intention of permitting those for most of the People living in the United States during slavery and genocide against the Native population, Women, to those who were denied the vote due to their propertyless state, and, in the beginning, even Catholic males who met all other requirements to vote in some states.  The history of America is tellable with great accuracy, I'd say only told with any possible accuracy,  as the struggle to achieve equality by all of those groups and others, such as those who were in bond to the wage slave system.  It is incredible that those at the top of the "justice" system, the Courts, deny that those contractual promises are not only a contract BUT FORM THE BASIS OF THE CONTRACT THAT GIVES THEM AND ALL OF GOVERNMENT ANY LEGITIMACY with complete and self-granted impunity AND THAT A DUPED AND COWED PUBLIC WILL ALLOW THEM TO GET AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE THEY'RE THE BIGGEST FATTEST LAWYERS IN THE LAND.

Whatever good institutions we have had under the federal government are either being destroyed or have been turned bad and since the federal government is allowing that to happen, it has to be attributed to the Constitutional order it is happening under, John Adams three-branch theory has failed, the presidential system turns out to be as dangerous here as it has in  other countries that have copied it, the First Amendment has been the engine of corruption under its interpretation by the Supreme Court which grabbed extra-Constitutional powers in the first such failure of the Constitution in 1803, the terrible assertions of Marbury v Madison.  

By their fruits you will know them.  Donald Trump is the fruit of the kind of democracy America has.  As were George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bush I and Richard Nixon.  The fruits of the long struggle for equality, The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, myriads of other rights, which apart from Roe v Wade, were the product of long and difficult and not infrequently deadly struggle which have been have been swept aside by five or six or nine unelected "justices" And that is because of what the Constitution is and always has been apart for a few brief years in a couple of periods in American history when Courts and Congresses and the majority of voters had better intentions.