Dump Trump! Then Reform the System that Made Him Possible

 

We must defeat Trump again. That is obvious. But that will not be enough to preserve America's Democracy. His supporters and enablers will remain. Unless the USA carries out major reforms of its political system, the danger from anti-democratic movements will remain high. 

In the last election, in 2020, if a few thousand votes had gone the other way in several states, Trump would have won the election, even though Biden got almost seven million more votes. How is this possible? Because democracy in the US is not firmly rooted, and never has been. 

The Trump regime built on anti-democratic policies and machinations dating back decades or more, some to the very beginnings of the country. Many of them exist at the state rather than federal level. A root and branch strategy is needed to eliminate these dangers. 

Many people will say the changes I suggest are impossible. And it will be a huge struggle to achieve any of them. But many people said that all men, and later all women, could never get the vote. Many people said slavery could never be eliminated. Britain was the greatest slave trading nation in history, but after massive grass roots campaigns, Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in the British colonies in 1833. The US required a bloody civil war to accomplish emancipation.

The Chartist Movement in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s took its name from "The People's Charter." Its goal was to establish a working democracy. The rulers of the day dismissed Chartism as utopian. But of its six demands ("The Peoples' Charter"), all but one is now law. Moreover, this was accomplished without a revolution, and only minor violence. (Image: photo of Chartist Demonstration, London, 1848)

The Chartists did not include women in their vision of democracy but that demand surfaced almost immediately, and women got the vote in two stages, in 1918 and 1928. 

I have drawn up a People's Charter for the USA: 

• 1.       Abolish the Electoral College, the anti-democratic gift that has empowered American reactionaries since slavery times. Replace it with the National Popular Vote. 
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• 2.       End gerrymandering in the states. Create an independent, non-partisan commission to draw up boundaries of congressional constituencies. This is done in the UK and other countries.
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• 3.       Overturn the obscene Citizens United decision of SCOTUS. It is responsible for hugely increasing the influence of big money in elections. Nothing like this exists in other democracies.
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• 4.       Prohibit political ads. They are virtually useless as information, misleading or untrue, insulting, and damned annoying. 
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• 5.       Introduce proportional representation or ranked voting to end the stranglehold of the two-party system. Some people will argue that this would make efficient government impossible. Ask yourself, is what have now efficient? 
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• 6.     Make the Senate representative of the country. It gives the less populated states collectively far more power than the most populated. California with 40 million people and Wyoming with only half a million have the same number of senators. This is both absurd and grossly undemocratic.
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• 7.       Make voting simple, safe, and convenient. Voting is an obligation. It should not be a survival test, torture, or a danger. Eliminate voter suppression of all kinds. 
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• 8.      Fund public education adequately and fairly. Public college and university education should be free or cheap, as it was when I went to college and university in the late 60s and early 70s. Why are we shortchanging our children and dumbing down our voters? 
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• 9.      Establish a national, affordable health care plan that covers everyone. The present for profit system is a disgrace and an international laughingstock. The system costs the US twice as much as in other developed nations, and the results are worse in terms of mortality and morbidity. Scores of millions are uncovered, or poorly covered. Health insurance must be separated from employment, which turns workers into virtual serfs.
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• 10.       Require the payment of a living (not minimum) wage for all adult workers. This should vary according to local living costs. It costs a lot more to live in California than in North Dakota.
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• 11.     Reduce the period between the election of the president and the inauguration to two weeks at most. This would have minimized Trump's ability to create havoc. In the UK and many countries, a new government generally takes over immediately after the election. This can be done because the parties have already selected the members of the cabinet and other ministers.
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• 12.     Reform the judiciary. Judges should be selected by professional bodies, not by politicians. This includes the Supreme Court, whose bias towards Trump is flagrant and dangerous. Justices of the SCOTUS and all judges should serve fixed terms, not for life. They should operate according to a code of ethics. The number of justices, currently nine, should be fixed in law.

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"Perception, 2" - nalan's paintings

"Perception, 2" - nalan's paintings

Island Sunset - nalan's paintings

Island Sunset - nalan's paintings

Spectrum - nalan's paintings

Spectrum - nalan's paintings

"Twisted" - nalan's paintings

"Twisted" - nalan's paintings

The Clown - nalan's paintings

The Clown - nalan's paintings

On the Confederacy, Civil Rights, and Donald Trump

As a boy growing up in Chicago, I fell in love with the Confederacy. It seems strange now. I was living in the state of Illinois, the "Land of Lincoln." The "Great Emancipator" was also one of my heroes. 

How could I venerate the Confederacy? I saw little lead Civil War soldiers in a toy shop. I bought boxes of Confederate ones because I liked their uniforms better than the Union ones. 

They were more colorful, more “romantic” than the dull dark blue Yankee uniforms. Ironically, toy soldiers of both sides in the war were made in the UK by a company called Britains. [Image: Confederate Soldiers by Britains.] My soldiers had red caps and a cannon. These look like plastic. Mine were lead, but lead is toxic, thus it isn't used any longer. Playing with lead toy soldiers may explain my brainless drivel.

I thought it was sad that such gallant men had lost the Civil War. The dashing General Robert E. Lee should have had the ultimate victory. He would have, I concluded, if those nasty Union Generals Grant and Sherman hadn't played dirty by outnumbering him. [Below: Lee with Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson.]

That is the level of thinking that still exists in too many parts of America today, though with less innocence than my thinking at the time. I was an ignorant little boy, with malice toward none except bullies. I knew nothing about the reality of slavery, the cancer of racism, or the true causes of the war.

Later I learned about those realities, and the viciously racist society that followed so-called emancipation. I learned that the greatest tragedy of the Civil War was not that the wrong side won, but that the victors did not go nearly far enough to ensure equality and justice. 

The attempted "Reconstruction" of the former Confederate states (1867-1876) was abandoned too early, leaving southern white elites in firm control. They passed and enforced rigid segregationist laws, violating the human rights of the emancipated. For decades, most people in other states looked the other way or were openly sympathetic. Many took part in bloody race riots, especially in the 1920s, in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Tulsa.

Between Reconstruction and the 1960s racist and racialist ideas flourished in the USA, with little if any check from government. Lynchings became common events, with the victims numbered in the thousands. 

Many films and stories, such as Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation, romanticized the “Old Plantation South,” glorified “The Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, and vilified or infantilized black people. The phrase "Moonlight and Magnolias" summed up this misplaced nostalgia. The reality featured the Ku Klux Klan, cross burnings, mob lynchings, and miscegenation laws.

Outside the South, de facto segregation was a fact of life. Instead of being written into law, it was enforced by isolating blacks in ghettoes through housing red lines, which ensured they would go to segregated schools by the "accident" of where they lived. 

In the 1940s, Americans of all racial and ethnic makeups fought a war against fascism and racism abroad, but nothing much changed at home, at least right away. 

Yet some minds were changing. Significant institutional and legal change, accompanied by many a tragedy, finally came with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Progress was uneven, but progress there was.

Unfortunately, much of that progress was rolled back during Donald Trump’s neo-fascist presidency, which brought violent racism once again out of the American closet. Under Trump, it began to seem as if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. 

Trump's defeat in 2020 seemed to herald the Confederacy's ultimate fall from grace. If Trump should win the current (2024) election, the ideology underlying the Confederacy may rise again worse than before, linked with fascism and authoritariamism. This election is that important.