It’s the beginning of December and I’m slowly getting my company put back together after the move. And it looks like the Biden’s are getting ready to move into the White House.
We’re all waiting breathlessly for the place to be vacated.
For a guy who never really wanted to be president, Trump sure has been dragging his feet in conceding defeat.
The news I’ve been able to watch has all been patronizing the normalcy that is sure to follow a Biden victory. Let’s make America Obama again. This is gonna be great!
I can already see the rightward leaning of the leftist party that is being assembled is intended to assure the right wing party that, we’re all in this together.
That is the duopoly, right there.
From the left wing democrats to the right wing republicans, the constrained political spectrum of the establishment works to prevent an honest democracy for the public and it appears the next in line to prove it will be, Joe Biden.
The democratic presidents always want to work with their opposition, those who violate the constitution and suppress democracy, while branding the unrepresented masses as radicals.
Economic security for all is not a radical idea. It is the least the government should do when spending public money.
Aside from facilitating democracy, public money should be spent first on providing food and shelter for everyone who needs it, with an opportunity to be safe and prosperous and an obligation to be educated and productive, or hospitalized.
No hunger, no homeless. No corporate welfare.
I pointed out in a previous post that the rationalizations for the establishment to deprive the public of a democracy would be coming soon. Here’s a good example of that, imo, written by Richard Kreitner.
American democracy was never supposed to work, he writes.
His title implies the constitution is intentionally flawed, which it is, but I’m guessing he won’t say how. We’ll see.
The intention of the constitution is to prevent democracy, he says, which on its face I find absurd. It’s true we have never really had an honest democracy, for many reasons, but that doesn’t mean the constitution was not a noble attempt, for its time, to provide a logical process towards a more civilized society and a more representative government for the public.
Despite what I will assume are Richard’s noble intentions, his first paragraph implies expediency should be the measure used to determine if we are actually a democracy, or not.
He has just lost the benefit of the doubt.
Truth seekers, philosophers, and democratic debaters everywhere will admit promoting the general welfare is necessary for a civilized society. The pursuit of happiness requires things, like peace and justice, democracy and the common good. The constitution is a roadmap towards that civility from a time when people could legally own other people until eventually, they could not.
Now the constitution enshrines that update of understanding as the law.
They recognized then, as we do now, that change is inevitable and needs to be facilitated without violence, if possible. The intention of the constitution is an appeal to the law instead of using violence.
Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.
The law is a tool. Elected representatives determine how it’s used and to whom it serves, and whether or not it “works”.
The constitution allows the government to tax or to borrow or both. It’s a political choice. The policy result of that choice is the measure of democratic success, or fail. If democracy doesn’t work, don’t blame the constitution, blame those we have elected.
Richard concludes his first paragraph suggesting Biden’s agenda is something that needs to be crafted. As if build back better is different than change you can believe in, or make America great again for that matter. So far I’m not convinced this article isn’t anti-democratic propaganda, but we’re just getting started.
Up next, paragraph two..
First of all. Paragraph two implies the framers were united in their intentions, citing Madisons opinion as proof. Sorry Richard, that’s not nearly enough to support the claim of antidemocratic intention in your title. The constitution is a clear outline for democracy, not the prevention of it. Let’s continue.
First sentence of paragraph three needs to be refuted as well. There are so many premises predicated on falsehoods in that paragraph its hard to begin, but I’ll check a few, like;
Without specifying which provisions in the constitution are anti-democratic he proclaims them to be working as intended, for a globalized investment scam that didn’t even exist back then.
He then goes on to cite the modern day scammers as being of the Madison mind, who think their scam is fine, but good policy would be a scam, to them. So that opinion is valid, supposedly, to the author of this article. Let’s continue.
It really doesn’t matter who was against democracy.
The fact that a democratic process is outlined in the constitution and can be amended to achieve a better democracy is enough to validate the noble intentions of its authors, to me. As flawed as they themselves and their era might have been, their work continues to stand the test of time, at least in theory.
The next paragraph alleges the senate was designed to prevent democracy and the economic equality that would inevitably result from a more representative government. It’s a cynical theory and probably true to some extent but probably not the primary motive.
It should be recognized that the bicameral design of the congress is intended to consider our economic divide, to avoid conflict.
Representatives are elected to represent the public. Senators were originally elected to represent the state and the establishment but they are now directly elected by the public. That doesn’t mean that the senate was an antidemocratic idea. It just means the system was designed to recognize the conflicting interests of the establishment and the public, in order to represent them both, for stability and balance of political power, to promote the general welfare.
In 1913, the 17th Amendment gave people the right to vote for their senators instead of their state legislatures.
The senate was upgraded in 1913 to be more democratic, to be chosen by voters statewide. It’s the house that needs that upgrade now. Congressional representatives should be elected statewide, like senators are. Gerrymandering should be ended, completely.
The constitution the framers designed was federalism. It was a brilliant peice of socioeconomic design for its time, but vaguely defined and rarely considered. Each state was to have autonomy from the other states, was the intent. It was not to prevent states with large populations from having equal representation, as Richard writes. States were called colonies back then and there was only thirteen of them. Census was spotty at best. Now we have national political parties that transcend state borders which violates the intention of federalism, right there.
Things are different now. If the majority of voters in a state want to vote for senators that suppress voting rights, the problem is with those voters, not constitutional theory, or design.
We need to educate antidemocratic voters to prevent antidemocratic senators from being elected in the first place. If we legislate an adequate electoral infrastructure, commensurate to our needs and ability, that could happen.
The author ignores the litany of violations committed by those who swear to protect and defend the constitution. So far he’s blaming the constitution and not those that violate it. To me, that is antidemocratic propaganda. That’s what he’s doing, imo.
It is not antidemocratic intent to design the electoral college and the senate the way they did, when put into context of the era in which the constitution was written, so long ago.
The intention of the electoral college is to prevent the government from voting for itself to prevent corruption and cronyism. The establishment subverts the intention of the law by calling themselves “parties”. We’re not the government, they say, we just work here. As if the parties and their electors don’t profit “under the United States government”.
Most electors would be disqualified if the constitution was interpreted correctly and enforced as necessary.
We’ll revisit that in a later post.
So far I’m still a fan of the document and claims of antidemocratic intent by its authors are far from convincing, to me. Let’s read on.
The next paragraph mistakenly claims what he calls “paralysis” to be only a decade old. It’s been much longer. I’m just saying. And Richard assumes a government controlled by the Democratic Party might have pursued court packing and statehood strategies, and the like, even though they never did in the past.
His next paragraph claims political solutions require a constitutional amendment, when they don’t.
We just need to upgrade our ability to achieve a more honest democratic consensus with an apportionment act that reflects the economic diversity of the public. That would do it.
When representatives are more representative of those who elect them, economically, the government will begin to function as intended, economically.
A successful constitutional convention is an impossible pipe dream for democratic reforms and we all know it. Advocating that tactic is an act of futility and should be recognized as a distraction from other more sincere political solutions that could actually work, like the aforementioned.
So in conclusion, the antidemocratic intentions by the framers alleged by Richard in his article are not true. What he calls antidemocratic intentions are actually reasonable and arguably prudent safeguards for civility, imo, that cannot be changed anyway, without a super-majority.
The constitution doesn’t work because it is being violated. And it doesn’t work because money is representation.
If you think about it.
It is devaluing an educated electorate that diminishes our democracy. The constitution doesn’t do that, we do.