Frank's Musings

Jaime Reskins’ argument in the 9/28/22 NYT opposes the Jan. 6 insurrectionists’ claim that their right to interfere with the functioning of the government is protected by the Constitution. He states that any such right is absurd on its face because the Constitution set up an authority to define and defend the very order its drafters had established.

There may be a higher principle which guaranteed the legitimacy of the colonists to rebel against their foreign oppressors; but that natural right cannot be codified. No constitution, even a customary one like England’s, provides for its own destruction. That means that the only justification for a rebellion must be found in natural law.

Congressman Raskin also failed to make a logical denial of the Jan. 6 rioters’ claim.  Of course, they violated the Constitution—that was their intention.  The appropriate accusation of the insurrectionists is treason.  In fact, no matter the punishment they receive from their court trials, they are lucky to emerge with their lives.

If Gngrich made the current Republican Party, did he model it on a football team?  Democrats use a college faculty model for their party. The GOP insists on ideological discipline; the Dems tolerate conflicting views. With luck, its narrower range of membership will penalize the Republicans when their opponents are energized by controversy and increase their voting turnout. The abortion issue may actually accomplish a winning women’s vote in 2024. Like tenure for college professors, over so fundamental a common concern, even an argumentative membership will coalesce.

Gingrich and Trump are false originators of fundamental political change. Instead, they simply recognized the underlying desertion of constitutional loyalty among Party members owing to their impatience with and resentment of their apparent exclusion from the exploitation of government benefits and programs by more advantaged individuals (or as Eugene Robinson has characterized it, they seek revenge).

Are resentment and ignorance in combination sufficient to hold a voting bloc together?  If so, that is what is known as the Republican Party today.  Its raison d’etre is nothing more than use of the democratic election process to produce careers for cynical professional politicians. You can call them right-wing; I call them unprincipled demagogues.

When democratic government operates well  i.e. is not “rigged,”   it offers perfect tools for manipulation by careerist political operatives.  A “liberal democracy” is one managed by elected representatives of a critical-thinking public.  Unfortunately, we are close to the disappearance of a critical- thinking public.  Owing to the growing predominance of electronic media on the thought patterns of nearly a majority of people in advanced societies, mastery of that technology is becoming more determinative of public opinion than convincing argument.  It is, therefore, not enough for assuring the common welfare to guard against autocratic rule; it is, more than ever necessary to motivate citizens to use their democratic tools (their votes) to attain the common good.

It has become dangerous to delegate responsibility for achieving that goal to elected surrogates.  The fading away of “civics” lessons from our primary education curricula is symbolic of the carelessness with which we have let decay our democratic form of government.  The citizens of a liberal democracy must be vigilant in order to prevent that their voting power from only inviting corruption of the government structure in service of special interests and personal ambition.  Political parties should not act like disciplined teams under a commanding manager; these different associations should each bring together equally orderly people with contrasting attitudes towards change.

Does Ron DeSantis have any other agenda than power, like Trump?  Does he think he knows what’s right for the country, or are he and the Donald the inevitable end of liberal democracy?

Two hundred fifty years may be beyond the limit for consensus on the value of non-discriminatory self-government.  We may have entered a historical cycle in which autocratic rule again regains willing majority compliance.  This ambivalence about control of and participation in self-government Is evidenced by the low voting percentages in recent decades despite improvements in communications technology, education, and accessibility. Furthermore, it has attracted careerists to the political profession who are more interested in advancing their personal livelihoods and esteem than in serving the best interests of their constituents.

A democratic representative or executive ideally should have a profession or source of income that is independent of their political career   He or she should certainly not leverage their government service to secure another means of living or wealth.  Theoretically, that qualification would allow them to prioritize the common welfare above any special interests.  Unfortunately, it would not prevent them from pandering to the parochial preferences of whatever group of constituents they seek to enlist as their supporters.

DeSantis seems to fall into the category of politicians most dependent on election by passive citizens whose desire is to leave the operation of government in the hands of a representative or executive who satisfies their uncritical concept of their own best interests, regardless of the community, at large.  Electronic social and entertainment media now dominate the public’s attention and have created a solid bloc of such passive citizens.  If concerned members of the national community do not exert their active engagement and powers of of persuasion, their celebrated system of participatory democracy will become merely a vehicle for authoritarian rule.

The wide availability of automatic guns has made it difficult for humanity to manage the anger of every individual.  Moreover, it appears that the increasing frequency of “active shooter” events at our schools and other locations is overtaxing the capability of our public safety agencies to deal with them. This only increases the urgency with which automatic weapons must be more effectively controlled. They unleash violence that civilization had previously been able to confine to manageable proportions.

Some human beings have limited self-control.  The maintenance of civic order while honoring equal protection under the law demands that certain dangers to public and personal safety, like opioids and automatic weapons, be subject to regulation.  Life takes precedence over freedom when civil society is at stake.  We all have to pay the price of civilization, 

In the OpEd by Thomas Edsall in the 9/8/22 NYT, the label “undemocratic” is placed by both leftists and right-wingers on any behavior that contravenes their concept of what’s right for them.  In fact this misuse of the term betrays the motivation of most voters in this country.

Although the American political system is based on an apparently equitable set of rules; Republican-controlled state legislatures have used gerrymandering to take advantage of the disparity between the voting behaviors of “haves” and “have-nots.” There is a simple reason the Constitution was drafted and ratified 250 years ago--it favored the interests of a relatively unified nation--the overwhelming majority of the population was convinced that their disadvantages were caused by one single enemy—the British.  Now the country is splintered into ideologically warring camps--“the enemy is us. “  

Voter turnout is more driven by protecting one’s wealth than by seeking a fairer share of the common wealth. Gerrymandering voting districts would not as easily skew election outcomes if the populations of the wealthier neighborhoods in the country turned out as poorly as voters in the less wealthy areas.  Therefore, a principal guideline of gerrymandering turns out to be to discount the nominal ideological balance of each district by its wealth-indexed voting propensity.

Two courses of action may be taken to correct this distortion of national election results:  the Supreme Court’s validation of gerrymandering could be overturned (Not likely with today’s Supreme Court majority.); and the Democrats have to concentrate their ample campaign funds on convincing their expected supporters diligently to exercise their right to vote.

The Constitution was drafted and adopted when women were not considered equal to men or deserving of independent control of their physical or moral personhood

The world has changed since then and the Constitution has been modified to reflect those changes—sometimes by amendment, other times by reinterpretation in a Supreme Court decision.  Stare decisis has made those adaptations equivalent.

If the Court is sufficiently intransigent, as it may be with regard to its decision in Dobbs, there may be no possible alternative for opponents but (a) pass a new law to force states to legalize the abortion of non-viable fetuses, or (b) create a public outcry that will force a constitutional amendment in their favor.  

The filibuster in the Senate could obviate option (a) and option (b) requires a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress in order to be proposed to the states.  Therefore, it is reasonable to resort to a national electoral campaign in order to change the makeup of the Congress into two-thirds pro-choice. 

This has essentially been done in the past with regard to other civil rights short sightings of the Constitution.  The Amendment process was instituted because the framers of the document did not intend it to be a straight-jacket impervious to unanticipated changes in technology, medical and other science, culture and other aspects of society.  They did make that process difficult in order to prevent whimsical changes.  However, when an ideological Supreme Court majority decides to impose a dogmatic stricture on the nation, those procedural obstacles will eventually be surmounted. 

The framers probably did not anticipate the concentration of wealth that exists in today’s world and the possibility of using that wealth to achieve important political goals.  Few other issues are likely to receive the advocacy funding that committed backers of Choice should be able to raise.

Can democracy be saved without resorting to military force?   How ironic.  The preservation of the American political system is not threatened by state secession; its stability is being weakened by the large number of disaffected citizens who sre asking, “What’s in it for me?”  

 They are frustrated n with political parties that have become engaged in a zero-sum game, in which the winner is whoever can block the other party from appeasing its special- interest supporters.

“Civil war” has been used to refer to violent rejection of the political system. The government is in danger of becoming nothing more than the arbiter of competing sectors of society. Their memberships vie with each other for financial gain or for self- esteem.  

Social media and other Internet communications channels, along with ready access to weapons of war, have empowered seditious opponents of Constitutional order in the U.S. and other Western liberal democracies   Moreover, even compliant citizens of those nations recognize that their common welfare is usually only the serendipitous outcome of government actions.

Perhaps that is the inevitable result of the professionalization of politics.  It takes bold and skillful leadership fairly to distribute the benefits of government order.  That goal cannot be achieved without democratic government; but that government must never lose sight of its constant dependence on civil order.