MORE INTELLIGENCE, LESS STUPIDITY. It's astonishing to watch, sometimes, the degree to which we as a society prize 'regular guy' lack of intelligence in our leadership. George W. Bush was famously (s)elected, in part, because he was more of the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with than that smarty-pants elitist, Al Gore. How massively insecure do you have to be in order to make a choice so detrimental, just so you can feel more comfortable about your own inadequacies over the coming four years? For all the talk in this country about excellence, it's astonishing the degree to which we don't actually practice it, especially in our politics. Isn't the idea of the best and the brightest refreshing? It takes judgement, too, but intelligence in leadership should be, er, a no-brainer!
MORE EDUCATION, LESS IGNORANCE. Likewise, trying to run a democracy on the foundation of an ill-informed or misinformed voting public is a doomed idea from the start. Unless, of course, democracy is just an inconvenience on the way toward kleptocracy - or better yet, a clever mask. It's amazing how little people know about politics and government in this country, and even more amazing the lies they believe that are fed to them by the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh. Regressives know they lose whenever ignorance is defeated. We need to help them in that process by valuing political participation more, and by producing more thoughtful and informed participants, literally as a goal of national policy.
MORE THOUGHTFULNESS, LESS FEAR. Part of the reason this society can be so ignorant and so stupid is because fear works so well at liberating us from our reasoning capacities. You might have noticed that the right has noticed this. Just a bit, eh? But, as on playgrounds everywhere, the most bellicose are typically the most fearful, just below the surface. Raising our self-esteem, raising our confidence, diminishing our fears and false arrogance - all of these would markedly improve the quality of our society and literally save millions of lives abroad.
MORE COURAGE, LESS RELIGION. And if we could really find some courage within ourselves, we might have a chance to diminish the role of religion in the society. Religion in politics is always a disaster and needs to be eliminated entirely. But its effects are far more pervasive than that, and extend throughout the psycho-societal landscape. A society that assuages its existential fears through the rigid and tenacious adherence to ludicrous fairytales will also be one that is fundamentally ripe for other such nonsense stories in the political sphere, and one that lacks the mental infrastructure, developed and sustained by habitual use, necessary for employing the right algorithms in decision-making. In plain English, meeting our deepest fears with soothing fictions encourages doing the same in politics.
MORE LAW, LESS POWER. The Founders were surely onto something when they argued for the concept of the rule of law, not of men. Too bad we've done such a lousy job of living up to their standards. In our legislative process, monied interests have now stopped yelling to get heard, or even speaking quietly, because they don't have to anymore. They just write the bills themselves. In our judicial process the role of money and power is so pervasive we hardly notice it anymore. While everyone was getting all agitated about race in the OJ Simpson trial a decade ago, the real story was that of class. Imagine if Simpson had been a poor man, with a public defender representing him. It's no accident that there are no wealthy people on death row. Entirely removing privilege, power, money and influence from our political and legal systems is not possible, of course. But we can do a lot better. And we would, if we were remotely serious about it.
MORE HUMILITY, LESS SUPERIORITY. Like all empires, America has a nasty habit of thinking it is superior to the rest of the world in every respect. And, unlike some others, this empire is even more driven in that direction by notions of religious authority and authorization. We pillage and plunder in the name of god. The unfortunate truth is that too often we Americans are like teenage science prodigies. We have the capacity to build devices capable of wholesale destruction, but those technical skills are unhappily combined with the lack of wisdom to know better than to actually do it. Everyone would be better off - this country and the nearly 200 other ones in the world - if we stopped thinking of ourselves as quite so exceptional.
MORE PROGRESSIVISM, LESS REGRESSIVISM. Things were NOT better in the thirteenth century, or the nineteenth, or even the 1950s. Although it is true that they were better, in many ways, in the 1960s, before the right started turning the clock backwards. In any case, some traditional notions are valuable. Others - like militarism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, monarchism, dogmatism or elitism - are not. We'd be far better served if we can stamp out this compulsion of ours to move backwards, instead focusing on how to move forward, carrying with us the best inventions of prior generations, and discarding the worst.
MORE JEFFERSON, LESS ROVE. Finally, there's this. Yes, I know that ol' Thomas was pretty imperfect, and that he knew how to play a rough game of politics that would actually often shock our sensibilities today. But he also had a noble side, and he could and did inspire an aspiration for that quality within succeeding generations. Karl Rove, on the other hand, never met a noble tendency he wasn't determined to drag into the gutter. He is the progeny of Joseph McCarthy and (his literal mentor) Lee Atwater. He is the personification of our politics for three decades now. He embodies, embraces and encourages our meanest (in both senses of the word) tendencies. No society is ever likely to be rid of the Karl Roves within its midst. But it is a sign of the most malignant sickness when they inhabit the White House, and worse yet, when they do so through presidency after presidency. It's time to start listening to our better angels again.
And, speaking of which, Abraham Lincoln once called this country "the last best hope of Earth". Whether it ever was that or not, clearly in the decades from which we now emerge, America has been, in too many ways, the best scourge of Earth, and quite possibly its last. We spend more on our military than all the other countries of the planet, combined. We use that military with a sickening frequency that no one matches, and few wish to. We are not content to simply ignore catastrophic environmental disaster, but smugly go so far as to exacerbate it, and to block others in their efforts to save our common and only home. We support and sometimes create the ugliest of repressive regimes on every continent of the planet.
It hasn't been pretty, and progressives have been right these last decades to scream bloody murder about what has been, quite literally, bloody murder.
Now it feels as though a new chapter is being written - not just the turn of a page to another new presidency - and an opportunity exists to recraft our polity, and to some extent the world.
However vague and platitudinous and Pollyannaish many of these suggestions may be, an America that moved in the directions outlined above would be a far better place than the sad and morally vacated one we are now leaving behind, hopefully forever.
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