The Middle East and Democracy

George Bush supposedly wanted to build democracies all over the Middle East and that's something that Americans love to hear. I suppose that we love to hear the people's cry for democracy because we assume, naively, that they will turn into something very much like us. That, of course, is never obvious. Consider, for example, the Palestinian elections in which people freely chose to be represented by the extreme --- Hamas. Also, consider where democracy in Iraq is likely to go. "Oh, no, that's not what we had in mind!"

The most recent event, of course, is the 18-day victory of Egyptians in removing Mubarak from office. But are they on their way to democracy or what else? And, after all, is it really democracy that people are after or something else?

If you mean by "democracy" that people make all the decisions with regard to their collective problems, then America is no democracy and never has been. What we have is a so-called "representative democracy" or "democratic republic." We follow a general rule of majority decision in choosing those who will represent us, and they follow a general rule of majority decision in acting and making law. But the great stabilizing feature of our government is its anchorage in a constitution, held as "fundamental law" and protected by a system of "checks and balances." If that is what Egyptians aspire to, more power to them, and good luck. Even in America, it is not at all clear that the system works well.

Why is America not exactly a great example? Mainly because wealth always seems to come to the forefront and take command. It has an ingenious way of using the law to advance its own interests. So America is actually more like an "oligarchic republic" --- that is, a constitutionally sanctioned rule of wealth. Consider the great difficulty that we have had in providing health care to Americans. We have been trying for decades without any success whatsoever. Now, for the first time, the Obama administration has succeeded in providing something. But, wait. The first business of the new Republican House is to vote to demolish it. Why? In whose interest is our government working? In the interests of wealthy insurance companies and over-priced physicians and hospitals, of course. Health care is BIG business. We can't let the government interfere in that. Of course, that's not the end of it. Republicans also want to demolish National Public Radio, the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Oh, and by the way, isn't it obvious that "global warming" is just a fraud concocted by money-hungry scientists? Do Republicans ever look outside their little world of profit and greed to see what the rest of the world is thinking and doing?

Well, back to the Middle East. Like others, I am thrilled by their desire to free themselves from the rule of dictators. But they will need more than 18 days and crowds of young people to turn their governments into systems that work for freedom and justice and that avoid immediate collapse into corruption.

A Comment on the Church

I've lost much of my interest in politics so I think I will discuss religion for a while. I was thinking about this while I walked downtown to coffee this morning. I suppose my mind was joggled by the weekly message on a little church I pass --- something to the effect that "Jesus saved us from our sins." Sin is a very strange concept but it has been enormously successful in trapping huge numbers of people for over centuries. It is doubtless to me that there are certain things we can do that are wrong to do. There are grounds for judging "right and wrong." But this does not mean that wrong things are sins. The notion of sin is actually quite unrelated to the issue of right and wrong acts. Christian theology wants to have us believe that we begin life "in sin." Even the baby is mortally encumbered by sin far before he/she can do anything that has moral scope. It seems to me that this is more-or-less equivalent to saying that life itself is viewed as evil. If we believe that, then there is no hope for us except what's offered by the church.

Christian theology has the formula for saving us from evil and stepping beyond sin. What is the formula? Being faithful to their theology of course. What this is, in my mind, is nothing related to the existence of a deity but rather a crass political usurpation of power over vast populations of people. It has been very successful. What better way to make people cower at your feet than to convince them that they have been created evil and impure and that their only path to redemption is to do everything that you tell them.

That, of course, is not all. At some point in the beginning, theologians realized that the one impulse in humans more powerful than even the need to eat is sexuality. Hence, all forms of sexuality had to be brought under church control. Now, even if people are a little hesitant about admitting sin in the abstract, they can become mortified by their own instinctual desires. And the Catholic (the traditional Christian) is not permitted sex in any circumstance but one in which conception of a child is possible, even intended. Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" gives us a vivid picture of mortification-onto-damnation in the life of a young believer. I won't even bother to consider what this principle has done to world populations and how it maintains people in poverty. What interests me at the moment is what a shrewd political move it was to capture sexuality in this way before people felt free to own it themselves.

And if that isn't enough, Christianity was built on the foundation of yet another Achilles heal, the dread of death. If the physical body is desiring sex, the spiritual mind is anxious about death. The mind, too, must be imprisoned. Thus, Christian theology promises life-after-death and adds the quaint picture of hellfire versus heaven. It's a very scary road, life, and only the Church can guide you through so long as you are obedient and generous.

All of this is theology --- which is pretty much raw politics --- and has nothing to do with Jesus. I don't find any of this in Jesus' teaching, which is actually rather socialist in its leanings. As Nietzsche said, "There has been only one true Christian, and he died on the cross."

What will they do?

The interesting thing about politics, these days, is that, now that the Republicans have full power in the House, the whole question is what will they do with their new-found power. There are certain things that Americans want their government to do, but it is not at all clear that the Republicans are tuned into those wishes. Instead, they seem to be reaching out to achieve certain fantasies of what the American people want --- like re-defining "rape," throwing out the entire healthcare legislation, etc. And, of course, in spite of their heroic need to follow the Constitution to the letter, they spent their first three days violating the Constitution right and left.

The simple fact remains that Republicans hate government so much that they are terrible governors when they hold the power. All they want to do is tear things down, and the more they can give out to their rich corporate friends in the process, the better. After complaining about the failure of bipartisanship for the last two years, now is the time for the Republicans to demonstrate how they can work with Independents and Democrats to solve some of the urgent problems we face.

Economies and How They Work

The world's biggest nightmare, these days, is "the economy," but what is it.

Generally speaking, the economy is a system of production and consumption, but there are different systems. There are, for instance, regulated economies and unregulated economies, planned and unplanned. If we include ownership as part of the system, then Communist economies involve ownership of the means of production by the community; Socialist economies involve ownership of major production by the political system; and Capitalist economies involve ownership of production by individuals. Communist economies tend to be planned and regulated; Socialist economies tend to be regulated at least; and Capitalist economies tend to be unplanned and unregulated.

One way or another, a system of economy ought to be for the mutual benefit of the people. Everyone contributes through production of what they can manage and everyone has an opportunity to consume what they need for their livelihood. Unfortunately most systems break down. Even Communist systems that supposedly embrace the "mutual benefit" notion in principle tend to fail because of the difficulty involved in planning. Capitalist economies don't even try to embrace the "mutual benefit" notion but, rather, rest their faith on the bizarre idea that everything will work out OK if you just leave it alone (Adam Smith).

That is pretty much the picture of where we are today. America is such a super-inflated Capitalist system that it would vastly prefer to destroy itself in a mire of individual greed rather than look anything like even a regulated Socialism. Under the theme of "globalization" our Capitalists (owners of our production capacities) are moving Capital into the rest of the world where they can produce with lower obligations to the labor forces and at lower costs of most resources. Under the theme of "free trade agreements" they can then turn around and export/import their products for American consumption. But what's left out of this picture? The American worker of course! When Capitalists perform their productivity in a way that excludes the mutual benefit of allowing their own countrymen to share in the production, the "system" is broken. Americans have to produce in order to consume.

Right now, Americans seem to believe that politicians must create jobs for them. They ignore the fact that it is Capitalists who create jobs by hiring workers to engage with the means of production they own. What can politicians do? They could hire Americans to do government jobs, but the same American voters do not want "big government"! They could regulate the behavior of Capitalists so that the system works for American workers. But the same American voters are opposed to government regulation!

All I can say to the newly seated Republican House-of-Representatives is Good Luck. They will certainly need it. So far as I can see there is only one way, given these political preferences, in which the Capitalist system in American will be "healed." Capitalists will have to be lured back onto the mainland and that will only happen when American labor and resources are sufficiently cheap to meet the Capitalist's greedy expectations. That means re-making the American Dream into a vision of a Third-World Country. How proud will we be then?

In the Shadow of Imperialism

In 1939 Vladimir Lenin published a small book titled "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism". What is interesting about this little book is that it proposed a solution to a problem in Marxist theory. That problem was the fact that the major Capitalist economies of Europe and North America had not fallen to revolutions of the proletariat as anticipated by Marx's analysis. Critics of Marxism were crowing about this, claiming that history was proving Marx wrong.

Lenin's analysis was actually quite convincing. He observed that the system of imperialism in which all of the Western economies were engaged systematically relieved the tension between a potential proletariat and the capitalists. How? Very simply, imperialism provides a mechanism for exporting the proletariat class to the underdeveloped world and allows the formation of a comfortable middle class in the Western world. Since the needs of the middle class are reasonably satisfied, there is no motivation for revolt against the system. Meanwhile, the impoverished proletariat class lives far away in countries that are invariably controlled by militarist dictatorships maintained in place by Western powers. The revolution of the proletariat is rendered impossible and Capitalism has reached its highest stage.

However, after the Second World War, which was really a war for territory fought by the imperialists, the whole colonial and imperialist division of the world began to fall apart. India, Indochina, to name only a couple cases. What is even more interesting is the present trend in the United States. The movement that we like to call "globalization" is a different way of ending imperialism, but it is destined to have similar affects. In the US today we have large corporations moving their operations off-shore and into faraway places where labor and resources are cheep. As a consequence, the American middle class is losing any hope of maintaining itself. Either employment is simply not there anymore or wages are forced to compete with laborers in the underdeveloped world. If this phenomenon continues in its present direction --- and I have every expectation that it will --- we are moving back into the situation of Capitalism as Marx's analysis originally had it. That is, we are rapidly moving toward an American society in which a tiny percent of people (Capitalists) have enormous wealth and power and the huge majority of people (Proletariat) have nothing but a flimsy hold on day-to-day survival. In other words, without imperialism to save the system, we are headed back directly into the experiment that Marx predicted. Will the American proletariat ultimately revolt and overthrow the Capitalist system?

It is hard to tell. You'd like to think that people don't really like to have their noses rubbed in the dirt for very long. But, on the other hand, a massive number of Americans continue to vote for Republicans who, after all, are the very ones who turn around and rub their noses further into the dirt. Go figure!

The "Living Document" Argument

In the preceding blog, "Reading the Constitution," I left the "original meanings" versus the "living document" arguments as an open question. Clearly, the Constitution itself is silent on this issue and gives us no directions as to how it should be interpreted in future time.

Here I want to argue for the "living document" approach. A few things are clear. The Constitution uses language fitting the time of its creation, makes provision for a government sufficient to the physical and social facts of the time, and imposes restrictions that were often prompted by the more-or-less recent experiences as English colonists and as a confederation of separate states. In order to understand the Constitution in this overall context, we often have to interpret its language and, in order to do that, we have to make use of numerous historical documents, including essays and letters written by the many people involved in these discussions.

It is also clear, however, that the nation has changed in many ways in the more-than 200 years since the Constitution was written. Not only has the nation itself changed but the physical and social context within which it exists has also changed. It was quite impossible for the authors of the Constitution to even imagine what these changes would be or how they might affect the conditions of governing. For instance, how could the authors foresee that citizens living on their own farms, constituting more than 90% of the US population, would eventually become such an insignificant portion of the population that the US Census would drop them as a category (being now less than 1/2 %. And yet, today, it is precisely the overwhelming shift from a rural agrarian population to an urbanized population that presents government with its major issues and problems.

We are faced with the situation in which the Constitution is either respected as a "living document" that copes with the changing context of government by appropriate and imaginative re-interpretation or understood as archaic and irrelevant, which would mean that we have lost our fundamental laws. In my opinion, it is far better to maintain the fundamental character of the Constitution as law by interpreting it as we can in the context of our actual world than it is to pretend that nothing has changed and to chain ourselves to the fears, opinions, and wishes of the original authors.

Reading the Constitution

What does "supporting the Constitution of the United States" actually mean? We know what the Constitution said originally. After all, we have the original document in hand. However, the document itself provides for making changes, or amendments so it is possible to say exactly what the Constitution said at any particular time, depending on when it was last amended. All of that is clear.

What is not so clear is what parts of this document mean, amended or not. We have to ask, "how do you read this section?" Well, when we read anything, we usually start out, at least, reading it in terms of a contemporary understanding of the terms, phrases, idioms, and colloquialisms used in the text. However, with any old document, there is a long history of meanings that may have changed in substantial ways. Hence, reading a section of the Constitution can vary significantly, depending upon what historical period we give emphasis to in our reading.

Today, we are faced with the fact that the Constitution itself is completely silent on the question of how it is to be read. That is, it gives no more credibility to those who would read it in its original meanings (so far as we can determine those from other historical sources) than it does to those who consider it a "living document" that we should read in a contemporary framework. Yet Conservatives want to insist that we read it in its original-meaning context. Unfortunately, they assume this but give no compelling argument for it.

Take the so-called "interstate commerce clause." Some Conservatives want to say that the Constitution does not use the expression "interstate commerce." That, of course, is true. What it actually says is that Congress has the power to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." What is at issue, then, is how we read "regulate Commerce . . . among the several States."

So my Conservative friend, Longshot, wants to claim that we read this literally as "States" and not as "people of the States." He goes on to claim that "a good case could be made that the intent of this power was to regulate the trade relations between the states in the Union.  This would prevent the states from erecting trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas."

I have to say that I find this argument pretty shallow. When do states themselves engage in commerce with each other? I suppose that the State of California might sell certain resources to the State of Nevada. While that is certainly possible, it is far more likely that what the framers of the Constitution had in mind was that persons in one state might engage in commerce with persons of another state. This situation might prompt a state to lay a tariff on commercial goods passing across the state line; but isn't that precisely what Congress was empowered to prevent. If we look back at the document itself, there is no impulse to suggest that the only commerce to be regulated was literally that with foreign Nations rather than commerce with the people of foreign nations. It was a question of things crossing over boundaries between foreign nations and our national boundaries, no matter what the agency of commerce.

The reason for the Conservative argument is that Longshot doesn't want Congress to have power over people in a state, only the institutionalized state itself. You can regulate my state but you can't regulate me.