Unity in Our Democrazy

I’m trying to keep these posts more philosophical and positive, but sometimes the news just gets me down and I need a place to vent…

I do not cope well with what I perceive as injustice and hypocrisy. I react badly in fact. Emotionally. Dramatically. I admit it.  

I must have some karma to deal with around this because it’s been coming up lately on a personal level, for my friends and globally. 

I’m particularly struggling with Republican criticisms that Joe Biden is not doing enough “unifying.” They seem to define unity as giving Republicans what they want even though it doesn’t represent the will of the majority of the people, as demonstrated by the loss of the presidential election by 7 million votes and the fact they represent 40 million fewer voters in the Senate. 

The more I hear Republicans try to throw “unity” in Joe’s face, the more I wonder about it. It sounded great in the Inauguration speech, but what did he mean? What is the vision? How is it to be done? Is it at all possible when we can’t even agree on facts and basic sense of reality? 

Have we ever been unified before?

Is it important that we try?

It has come to light that some of the terrorists who attacked the Capitol were part of a secessionist movement. And not long ago, Texas Republican Rep. Kyle Biedermann who attacked the United States seat of government introduced the “Texas Independence Referendum Act.” 

Out of curiosity, I looked up Texas’s balance of payments to the US government and found that Texans receive almost $20 million more from the federal government than they send to Washington in taxes.  Among the states with a positive balance of payments are Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama. 

Meanwhile, some of the bluest states (in order: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California and Connecticut) provide the federal government the most in taxes: $22 million deficit for New York ranging to approximately $6 million for Connecticut. 

In response to Texas, I’m reminded of the immortal question asked by the great sage President Bartlet: “Can we have it back, please?”

I happened upon an article in The Nation suggesting perhaps there should be a blue state succession. As I don’t subscribe, I wasn’t able to read more than the title, but it made me pause to think about the notion of one nation, indivisible. When we fall so far short of our ideals of “liberty and justice for all” - and we see some states trying to ensure we never reach that lofty goal - are we really better off together? 

This issue has relevance to me in the U.K. as Scotland again discusses whether to have another independence referendum and as the realities of Brexit begin to hit. 

The macro political question of our time is whether governments work better when part of larger organizations like the United States, the E.U and even the U.K, or when they are small and independent. 

(I may look for answers to that question in a future post, but this post is about “unity.”)

When I moved to the U.K., I became aware for the first time of how I was inculcated with a belief in American exceptionalism. Americans are taught and many truly believe they are better than the rest of the world by mere virtue of being American. Our institutions, our land, our people, our traditions, our achievements - we are number one. The best. The shining city on a hill. USA, USA, USA! We don’t spend a lot of time fact-checking that assertion.

It’s strange to be confronted outside our borders by people who no longer (if they ever did) see America as exceptional. The idea of the nation is special, but the reality falls far short - and the rest of the world sees it, even if Americans don’t. Especially now. 

When citizens carrying the symbol of the destruction of the “United” States break the windows of the citadel of democracy to smear feces on the wall and chant calls for the lynching of its leaders, it is hard to argue why America is better than other democratic nations. Or other autocratic nations for that matter.

We survived that battle, but the war for the soul of the country is far from over. 

Is it better to stay together - like two estranged spouses refusing to divorce for the sake of the children? 

What do we get by our continued association? The proof that the institutions created by slave-holding geniuses can endure, I suppose. But practically, how do Democrats benefit?

(For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to conflate blue states and Democratic voters, though I acknowledge these aren’t really the same thing.)

Citizens of blue states subsidize other states, yet have less voice in government. 

The choice of Democratic voters won the popular vote all but once during the past 3 decades, yet the arcane Electoral College that disproportionately empowers small rural (and mostly red) states installed two incredibly unpopular Republicans and made this past election seem close when the will of the American people clearly was not.

Thanks to this system, we had George W and Trump, who rank second to last and last respectively on the chart correlating presidents to GDP growth and the growth of nonfarm jobs. Historically, the economy has done better under Democrats than Republicans, which is why my head pops to see all the memes claiming Trump was great and only Republicans can be trusted with the economy.

And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

The six presidents who have presided over the fastest job growth have all been Democrats... The four presidents who have presided over the slowest growth have all been Republicans. 

It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.

Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.

Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy? David Leonhardt

I also struggle to understand why it seems when Democrats hold the Senate, they require a supermajority to pass legislation. And they cannot pass some legislation - like gun control - at all, despite vast support among the American people. 

(Hey, MTG, you know what ACTUALLY stops a bad guy with a gun? Not letting the bad guy have a gun… check out statistics for gun violence and school shootings in the rest of the world and compare it to gun ownership.)

Republicans also change the rules to ensure they benefit - like claiming the sitting president shouldn’t name a Supreme Court Justice in the last YEAR of his term - UNLESS it’s the president they like. 

(Explain to me again why we don’t make Senators actually stand up and filibuster so the country can witness the obstruction?) 

What exactly are Blue states getting from this relationship? 

I can only see a benevolent effort to stop catastrophe by preventing the formation on their doorstep of a “Confederacy” of gun-toting extremists who want to form a racial caste system, of zealots who want to legislate their religious beliefs, and unregulated corporations that rape and poison the environment. 

I’ve actually been thinking of writing a dystopian film about what would have happened if the North had simply allowed the South to secede. 

It is an interesting intellectual exercise to ask what would happen if the red and blue states sat down with the kids and explained everyone will be happier apart, but I'm certainly not advocating it.  

So again I ask how do we unite?

To begin, surely we must all agree on facts. We don’t have to draw the same conclusions from those facts or hold the same opinions, but we do need to agree what is factual and what is false. We can’t have a network parading as news spreading lies like birtherism, pizza-gate and election fraud. 

In a nation that is by its birth and tradition, diverse and multicultural, we must insist on a standard of decency in the way we treat others. But how do we do that? And how do we change the point of view of people who get their sense of self-worth from their skin color? How do we make people value equality?

To me, it is imperative that the Electoral College, which serves no democratic or useful purpose, should be abolished. If this is achieved through the popular vote compact, fine, but it needs to be done. But how is it to be done when those who currently benefit from the system are hardly about to voluntarily give it up?

We must have accountability for those who promote violence and oppression. No one should be above the law. No one should believe there are “good” people on both sides. No one should take anyone else’s life with impunity, including the police. (Police academies must screen for racial bias.) But how can we do this when Republican leaders have joined the cult?

(By the way Republicans - please don’t bring up BLM. They weren’t trying to bring down America or stop the election. They were trying to raise awareness of the fact Black people are murdered too frequently at the hands of white people. All protests are not the same.)

These seem to me to be necessary steps if we are to come together. But I know they would be rejected out of hand by most people on the other side of the divide. And if Obama’s presidency taught us anything, it’s that if the left takes one step toward the middle for compromise, the right takes a huge step further right to see how far they can drag us.

We are living in a bizarro world when Republicans attack the Capitol and propose secession, and shout at Democrats for being unpatriotic. 

So how do we unify? Where do we find common ground? What happens to all the extremists who can’t see any value in compromise and don’t care about the legitimacy of opposing viewpoints? 

I wish this post provided answers. But really I’m just asking questions. 

If Texas wants to be independent - if it was the will of the majority of its citizens, should they have a right to secede? (Like Brexit and Scotland)  

What about the rest of the original Confederate states. Do we have a right to hold them captive as part of a nation in which they no longer seem to believe? What are we holding on to?

I’m a passionate moderate. I believe in respecting opposing viewpoints. I believe in compromise to find common ground…. 

But the common ground slipped away under the erosion of Fox Fiction and I cannot respect opinions based on lies and bigotry. When history shows factual parallels between what’s happened to the right here and what happened in the early 1930s in Nazi Germany, my tolerance for opposing viewpoints is limited. 

Since George W proved “Compassionate Conservatism” isn’t really a thing, I have felt like Democrats are trapped in an abusive relationship with increasingly dangerous and radicalized Republicans… a call to unity feels frightening. 

Until all Republicans sound like Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger, where is the common ground?

If the goal of a large minority is to gain and hold permanent power rather than serve the national good - the good of all, even those with whom we disagree, how do we achieve national unity? Especially if gerrymandering and voter suppression makes it nearly impossible to vote them out?

We can hope to win over hearts and minds by governing well when we can, working for justice for those who are oppressed by the system and giving them a voice. 

Maybe Joe hopes that if he takes the soap opera drama out of politics, we’ll all go back to our lives and through kindness to one another, bring the nation back together on the local level. Maybe that would work.

But there’s a lot of anger out there on both sides. And my head still pops daily with all the insanity about how it’s time to move on from impeachment rather than hold accountable the man who tried to destroy America.

It’s such a frustrating injustice to see Senators argue to allow a man to go unpunished for inciting this radical, cult-like, violent mob to overthrow democracy. Especially when you know what they’d be doing and saying if it had been Obama or Hillary or any Democrat. 

I love the idea of unity - I really do! But I look at the confederate flag carrying, swastika-wearing domestic terrorists and think of the 74 million people who gave their tacit support for them by voting for Trump, and I wonder how? 

I’m truly asking if anyone out there has the answers!

Joe, I appreciate your calls for unity, but please tell me how? And if you can’t, let’s stop giving the Republicans a talking point and just focus on doing the best you can. Here’s hoping like a broken bone, the nation will heal, and truly be indivisible with liberty and justice for all.