What to do when democracy fails - autobiographical

What to do when democracy fails
by Paul Stephens

It's time to admit it.  Democracy in America has failed.  We no longer have any of the elements of a free society.  We no longer have self-government.  We no longer have the Rule of Law, or independent judiciary.  We no longer have civilian control of the military.  We no longer have a free press, or the opportunity to organize politically in order to change our system and "leadership class," such as it is.

And worst of all, every trend is towards more centralization, more polarization, more wealth and power for the elite 1%, and less for everyone else.  It's like slavery has become respectable, again.

This didn't just happen in the last week, or over the past 10, 20, or 30 years.  All the elements were in place 40 years ago, or even 80 years ago, or 160 years ago.  1846, "the Year of Decision," as Bernard DeVoto called it, marked the beginning of "the American Empire."  And we can even go back to 1802, when President Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers and author of several key state documents and institutions, was negotiating to pay $15 million in gold to Napoleon, to support his wars of conquest against Britain and Russia, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, and even Egypt - roughly the same agenda which Adolf Hitler would follow in the Second World War, except that Napoleon emancipated the Jews, while Hitler liquidated them as a destructive, alien element.

Just think about that for a minute.  The fledgling US Republic, dirt-poor and with very little government or taxes at all, scraped together the equivalent of a year's operating expenses - much of it borrowed from Dutch-Jewish bankers - to pay Napoleon for a "territory" which he didn't in any sense own.  It was pure "foreign aid", and to a dictator the likes of whom the world had never seen since the height of the Roman Empire.  In effect, we, the people of the United States, right then and there, threw in our lot with the heir to the French Revolution (a revolution which President Jefferson admired, and to some extent even helped to foment).

So, we can go back that far to find the roots of our current situation.  Basically, it has ALWAYS been this way in The United States of America.  We have been fighting world wars since the early 1800's, and our very existence as a nation depended upon French, Dutch, and other foreign nations which helped us gain our so-called "independence" from the Britsh Crown.

We learned all this in elementary and middle school, right?  Well, we learned most of the "facts" (or some of us did - I was an avid reader of history and biography from the 4th grade on - because we had a library and schools which encouraged such reading, which no longer exist).  And coming from a literate family which also read history, and had history books at home, it was easy for me to do this - even while our family was dysfunctional with alcohol, drugs, divorce, sex and gender issues, as well as poverty and lack of any middle-class income.

When I got to high school, I was testing at the top 1% (which I had actually been doing since the 2nd grade, I later found out), and began to discover others in my "intellectual class" - the children of doctors, lawyers, large land-owners, engineers, and business people - and I was able to "integrate" myself with them - even while I was considered to be something of a charity case and odd-ball.

It was my 2nd generation Norwegian grandparents who saved me from a life of ignorance and destruction, by  more or less bribing me to take music lessons and be confirmed in the Lutheran Church.  Even though I was by that time an atheist, and never attended a Lutheran service for another 12 years, I was "confirmed."  I had some identity which I could claim, when everything else went wrong.

People tend to live and think in herds.  I didn't.  I could never understand how people simply went along with whatever their friends and families were doing.  No one seemed to question anything, and if they did, they were punished for it.  In college and afterwards, I joined a few organizations and tried to find some sort of "peer group" or people who followed some of the same ideas and politics which I did.  None of them lasted very long until I took psychedelics, dropped out of graduate school, and began to re-learn everything I had ever known and believed through different "filters" and pre-conceptions.  I found that there were different religions, philosophies, and traditions which seemed to fit much better than WASP Judeo-Christianity and the "linear thinking" behind secular American culture and its commercialized economy and lifestyles.

Growing up in Montana, I only knew white people - those of European descent, plus a few Metis - mixed blood Native Americans.  My aunt had married a Jewish man, so I had a half-Jewish cousin, who never really identified with those traditions - partly because Jewish belonging is matriarchal, and her mother wasn't Jewish.  I probably knew a few people with some African-American descent - even a few with Arabic or other Islamic and Asian backgrounds.  I remember one Chinese family, the Wongs, who still live here, and a Japanese exchange student, but I never had a conversation with any of them in high school (or with the many black people who lived here, then).  Among those I knew, none of them defined themselves as being "people of color" or otherwise "different" - it was bad for one's job and marriage prospects, among other things.  Everyone I knew, in those days, was trying to "pass for white" as they said in the South, and in fact, Great Falls was racially segregated up to about 1970, as the history of the Ozark Club has revealed.

And so, I went off to college as something of a confirmed racist - even though I wouldn't have admitted it at the time.  I agreed with Goldwater entirely, opposing federal laws which forced the "integration" of private facilities, although I understood that the government on whatever level couldn't discriminate.  But I had nothing against black people, and when I got to college, I began to have conversations with them - very strained, at first, I must admit.  It wasn't until I was in a French class with African Americans, and who were much better at learning a language than I was, that I began to understand who my friends should have been, and that race had nothing to do with status among the intellectual or cultural elites I hoped to join.

So, whatever happened to Democracy in America?  We will continue to explore that question in future installments.