An Inconvenient Democracy

You would think our current democratic process - leadership through character assassination - is an improvement over our previous approach: leadership through actual assassination. To a certain extent you would be right. However, you have to admit that a process hopelessly addicted to any form of assassination is not exactly a meaningful improvement. It is more a vicious cycle of mass denial. 

Our politics dwell in that twilight zone, somewhere between our yearn for truth and our fear of the unknown. It is a dimension where every major election year we relieve ourselves as sole guardians of our convictions. At that juncture we full-throttle towards the moral high ground, grass-rooting vicariously through something we call a politician. We then entrust said politician with our convictions in the form of a vote. With every major electoral cycle, we experience an added level of anxiety, anger, and disdain for those who are not betting on the same facts we are. This is our life-or-death directive we are holding up, like a biblical reenactment of Abraham offering his son to a god's sacrificial whims. This is also the politics of fear, fueled by our human addiction to drama. 




Enter center stage our modern day demigods: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and many others. In the dark shadows of the stage, a supporting cast of senators, congressmen, members of parliament, humming "Don't Cry for Me...". As we witness this opera ad nauseam, it eventually becomes soberingly clear that our political perceptions were more blindsided than we knew.




I'm not sure I know how to put this, other than these are not the leaders you're looking for. Nor have they ever been. That's not to say the past has not offered decent leaders, whatever you conceive that to be. It's just that our passion for someone or something to change the world, or to bring our world back "again", may not be as enlightened as we think it is. 




For the record, I'm not advocating dismantling our well-intentioned democratic system. Even if I was preaching such a heresy, I couldn't possibly come close to the damage our common leaders have already done. Politicians have been eroding the constitutional rules of engagement with or without your consent. To be sure, some of the erosion makes sense: change must take place for evolution to do its thing, whether we like it or not. A country that reveres the word "freedom" couldn't continue to engage, with any remnant of a conscience, in slavery, or native genocide, or misogyny, or segregation (apartheid). 




Yet in spite of the painful progress, every year a freshman class of politicians is always eager and ready to expand the dark side of democracy. This perpetual dark side has a perceived impact of turning democracy into a zero-sum game. "Gridlock" I believe is the term du jour. When millions of citizens are easily spooked away from the hard-earned fundamentals of democracy, we have a problem. When a handful of wise words such as "well regulated militia", "unreasonable search and seizure", or "no laws respecting the establishment of religion" are distorted from self-evident truths into political agendas, our mission to form a more perfect union has failed.




Be that as it may, come November, by all means vote. But for the love of humanity give the drama a rest. The change you're looking for will never in a million years come from politicians. The closest that humanity has come to great leadership is when a very limited number of human beings told their followers exactly the opposite of what 99% of politicians do: go lead yourselves. A man in a tunic over two thousand years ago asked his followers to stop casting stones. Seventy years ago, another man in a tunic told his followers to stop demanding change, and to be the change. And perhaps the last time this great country was graced by an inspired agent of change, sixty-six years ago a man had the audacity to tell his followers to stop demanding someone make the country great again. Instead, he challenged them to start asking themselves: what can they do for their country?

All three of these wise men were assassinated. Actually assassinated. Because democracy, like the truth, is relentlessly inconvenient. It was not designed to vindicate our convictions. With its deepest regrets, and much to the heartache of democracy, the truth will not be making an appearance at our upcoming political party conventions. It has a real universe to run. So turn off your TV sets over the next couple of weeks, and go find leadership in its right place… where it’s always been.

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Why I'm Not Feeling The Bern

First, I do feel the need to point out that of all candidates, Bernie Sanders is one of the most principled politicians the United States has to offer in 2016. One of the burdens of the U.S. is the unethical purchasing of political power. If anyone is doing an impressive job at minimizing the purchase of his/her campaign, and therefore her/his convictions, it's Bernie Sanders. Even "self-financed" billionaire Donald Trump is not last in outside / "dark" money (PAC): Trump is second to last in PAC funding, at almost $2 million as of March 2016. Sanders is dead last at under $50,000. (OpenSecrets.org)

Second, I also feel the need to point out that Sanders is one of the most socially empathetic candidates in the U.S. political mix today. The shaming of social empathy has traditionally been a dark political pastime of the U.S., even by moderate liberals. Conventional wisdom dictates that survival of the fittest is seriously eroded by "excessive" social empathy, like a mother and a father who tiresomely disagree on what nurtures and what weakens the child. According to the same conventional wizards, social empathy is the damning of the poor: it makes them lazy and weak (Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen"). This prevalent suspicion, embedded in the American quilt, is the fundamental reason the U.S. is in the bottom half of the thirty most developed nations when it comes to social progress. (Social Progress Index)

You would think that those two significant attributes would be enough to feel the Bern. After all, haven't we always turned a blind eye towards the darker side of politicians, as long as we believed they were enlightened in matters that are most important to us? (Something future generations may call Trumping, much in the same way we use the term Machiavellian today.) But more to the point: with those two impressive Sanders attributes highlighted, is there anything about him that would even require the old blind eye?

The answer to that depends on whether you believe that the dark side of socialist democracies are the lesser of two evils. With that I am offering the reader the courtesy of not insulting his or her intelligence, by taking it as a given that ALL man-made socioeconomic systems have a dark side.

Even more importantly, the answer to the blind eye question depends on whether you believe that a vastly less homogenous nation like the U.S., vastly larger, with vastly more significant technological and scientific contributions to the planet, can or should wear the "Nordic Model" skinny jeans (the Nordic Model is the socioeconomic system of five European nations: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). If you believe that the shiny side of the Nordic Model is not heavily fueled by a fiercely "offshore" capitalist model, then you might want to challenge your own sense of social fairness. The offshore dog-whistle by the way is in great part code for "let's do our dirty business in nations where they give much less of a shit about social fairness than we do". If you have not considered that the Nordic Model is still greatly benefitting from the war chest of its non-social heyday, then you might want to vet Bernie Sanders' idealism a little better. Don Corleone's way of life did not magically clean itself up after a whole new generation. You can put lipstick on a pig, but you're still addicted to bacon.

Here's the heart of the matter: the conservative rich are not laughing at Sanders because they think he's a dreamer; they're laughing at him because they know where the money that will be used for "free" healthcare and "free" education comes from. And they know how it's made. Because it's not your mom and pop's money from back in Pleasantville. In case that doesn't sink in, please think back to the Scandinavian heyday war chest. And to the Corleones: Bernie is like Kay Corleone (Diane Keaton), when she begs the conscience of her husband Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), "I thought you weren't going to become a man like your father... Because this all must end... this Sicilian thing that's been going on for two thousand years."  

The Corleone boys don't do lipstick, Bernie.

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This is not the election of a lifetime. The elections you make for yourself every day when you wake up are the elections of a lifetime. Stop falling in love with politicians preaching change, and be the change. These are not the droids you're looking for. 

This is also not a call for a non-vote. By all means, do vote. The democratic process, as frustrating as it may be, is still the healthiest way we have so far in our evolution to propose a general way forward. But destiny is not up to our leaders. It never has been, and it never will be. There is only one destiny, and it's the collective sum of all individual destinies. The only thing you can do to help change the world is focus on your own destiny. Only then will your vote truly count.

Just be aware of one slight rule of engagement, when it comes to focusing on yourself: the more you take without giving, whether in love or in profit, the more insignificant your destiny will be. Even if it makes you a billionaire. Especially if it makes you a billionaire.

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