It's clear that Republicans in many states are changing electoral laws to let them gain partisan control of election results. It seems that their attempted coup in Jan. 6 was merely a rehearsal. The two-party system is finished, but Democrats seem at a loss over what to do in this new reality. They are hampered by their own BIG LIE, their pretense that their party still wants a democracy worth fighting for.

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I believe that, for as long as I live, I will remember 2021 as a year of dread. It may be succeeded by slowly unfolding or even sudden catastrophe, or we may stumble through to a marginally better future than we deserve, but the dread will be unforgettable. Against a background of global warming and pandemic, the dread began on November 3 when 74 million Americans voted to re-elect a malignant psychopath after experiencing four years of his presidency. Although Trump lost the 2020 election, he received 11 million more votes than in his 2016 'victory.'

The 2020 Trump vote total was a shock to people who imagined there was an underlying moral consensus or contract enabling us to trust each other and be a community despite ideological differences. Instead, a dangerously large number of Americans had accepted and even admired lying, cheating, violent speech, disrespectful behavior, and a manipulative approach to human relationships. Trump has made the Republican Party into an image of his overblown self. As his loud acolyte Marjorie Taylor Green boasted to Steve Bannon, "We are not the fringe. We are the base of the party." Now Trump is girding his considerable loins for a run in 2024.

It is a tribute to the stunning incompetence of the Democratic Party that, after four years of Trump, they emerged from their 2020 'win' with a reduced, thin majority in the House, and a 50-50 tie in the Senate. That left them at the mercy of two shameless DINO senators, Manchin and Sinema, whose support of the filibuster dooms the Biden agenda, thus making the GOP likely to capture the House in 2022.

1. Trump's Big Lie

Between his election loss on Nov. 3 and final certification of electoral ballots on Jan.6, Trump and his allies made several attempts to overturn the results, culminating in a violent coup attempt. They filed 63 lawsuits, losing all but one which was in Pennsylvania where the number of votes at stake was not enough to change the outcome. The presiding judges in these cases were both Democratic- and Republican-appointed, even including some appointed by Trump. He also tried to get GOP secretaries of state and legislatures in states that went for Biden to reject or invalidate the vote counts.

On July 27 at a nationally televised congressional hearing, four police officers described the savage beating they endured from MAGA insurgents who had invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6 at Trump's urging. The mob had hunted loudly for the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. Pence and Pelosi were ushered to safety in the nick of time by the Secret Service and police. The second and third-ranking persons in the U.S. government might have been murdered. Members of Congress and their staffs were hiding in fear.

Trump's sending an armed mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and disrupt the counting of the electoral votes was an act of treason as defined by the Constitution (Art. III, Sec. 3.1). It is striking that, after almost a year, Trump has still not been indicted. Instead, we have a traitor on the loose, cementing his hold on the GOP in preparation for a presidential campaign in 2024.

According to a Nov. 15 Monmouth University poll, "About one-third (32%) of the American public [including 73% of Republicans] continues to believe that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election only due to voter fraud - a number that has not budged across five polls in which Monmouth asked this question during the past year." To prevent this fictitious fraud from happening again, Republicans at the state level are working to change election laws and procedures. As Barton Gellman explains in a brilliant essay in The Atlantic, preparations for Trump's second coup are well under way. GOP operatives in states such as Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan,

"have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters."

They are also suppressing likely Democratic votes by devices such as reduced voting hours, increased use of poll watchers, purging voter rolls and limiting mail ballots.

Trump's Big Lie, his anarchic presidency and rejection of moral norms have turned the Republican Party into an anti-democratic insurgency. We no longer have a two-party systemone of the two 'parties' rejects the system, and Democrats haven't figured out how to function in this new reality. Do they have the will or the means for a counter-insurgency? What would that be like?

The Democratic establishment, its media allies, and prominent anti-Trump ex-Republicans are rightly disturbed and exasperated by the increasingly violent anger of the Trump base. Gellman reports that in a June poll by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, 8% of respondents agreed that "the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency." That would correspond to 21 million American adults.

2. Democracy--the Democrats' Big Lie

So where are the champions of democracy? If it is so sacred and fundamental to our nation, why doesn't it inspire a more passionate defense? Why isn't there a mighty resistance in the streets and in Congress, with Joe Biden leading a militant campaign to defend our voting rights? What is it about our political system that enabled Trump to persuade tens of millions of Americans to turn against it?

As he lamented the enormous casualties of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln hoped "that these dead shall not have died in vain- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." What we have in 2021 is a mockery of Lincoln's hope: a government of, by and for mega-corporations and the small cohort of their very wealthy investor-owners. Calling our society a democracy is a bigger lie than Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election.

For the sake of honesty and transparency, members of Congress, when being sworn in or casting votes, should imitate NASCAR drivers by wearing the logos of their corporate donors, or patches with the names of the individuals or organizations that have contributed above a certain amount to their campaigns. Very large donations should require large patches or logos.

One of the charter documents for U.S. capitalist plutocracy is Milton Friedman's 1970 NYT essay, "The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." Friedman argued that the only "social responsibility" of corporate executives, as employees of investor-owners, is "to conduct the business in accordance with [the owners'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom."

Of course, Friedman knew that corporations are run by humans who may be tempted to make money in ways that harm society (such as polluting waterways or making unsafe products). He blithely assured us that even huge corporations such as GE or Exxon Mobile (with revenues larger than those of many nations) can be held in check by law and "ethical custom." This foolish argument ignores the increasing role of corporate financing in electing the legislators who make laws. It also assumes that the same people whose "only social responsibility" is investor profits will nevertheless have a strong enough moral code to accept the constraints of "ethical custom." Friedman's argument was a striking proof that having a Nobel Prize in Economics is no guarantee of wisdom.

In the 50 years since Friedman's essay, corporate-funded legislators have greatly reduced tax rates on upper-income individuals and on corporations, on capital gains, dividends and inherited wealth. As Bloomberg reported in October, after years of decline, America's middle class (the middle 60% of U.S. households by income) now for the first time in history holds a smaller share of U.S. wealth than the top 1%. Even in 2019, before the enormous profits billionaires gained during the pandemic, 3 billionaires in the U.S. - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined. Money is power. The dominance of the investor class has never been greater.

On January 10, 2010, the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission further consolidated our capitalist plutocracy by ruling that corporations can now spend unlimited funds on campaign advertising if they are not (wink wink) formally "coordinating" with a candidate or political party. The investor class has the loudest, most pervasive voice in our society, lulling us into assenting to their rule and voting for their politicians.

As an illustration of the absurdity of letting capitalists run our society, consider our broken healthcare system. At his website Systemic Disorder, Pete Dolack argues that "The United States spends more than $1.4 trillion per year than it would otherwise if it had a single-payer system." He arrives at this figure by starting with two numbers: (1) $4,392, the average per capita cost of healthcare in Britain, Canada, France and Germany for the years 2011 to 2016 and (2) $8,924, the average for the U.S. during the same period. The difference between these two numbers is $4532, which he multiplies by the U.S. population to get the $1.4 trillion. The argument by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden that Medicare for All is too costly is a cruel lie that contributes to needless death and suffering in the U.S.

On Aug. 4 of this year, The Commonwealth Fund published a report ranking the healthcare systems of 11 high-income nations. It concluded that the U.S. (after 10 years of Obamacare) ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes. In fact, the authors say that the U.S. did so poorly that they left it out in calculating average performance in the 4 domains. In the other countries, government closely regulates and administers the funding and delivery of healthcare, making sure there no cost barriers to universal access, bargaining with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, and avoiding the administrative burden that providers in the U.S. have in dealing with multiple competing for-profit insurance corporations.

Organizing basic social services around profit-making creates absurdities everywhere. We have health insurance companies that profit by rejecting as many claims as possible, and creating preferred-provider networks that often block patients from seeing the specialist they need. Private for-profit prisons and migrant detention centers try to cut cost costs by feeding prisoners low quality food and providing inadequate climate control and insufficient medical staff. For-profit schools spiketheir profits by paying too little to get good instructors and squeezing out special-needs students.

American capitalism is indifferent to the well-being of its workers. As Pete Dolack reports in Counterpunch+, "Among the 42 countries that are members of the OECD and/or the European Union, there is only one country with zero paid days of vacation or holiday under the law: the United States. Among those countries, only two, Turkey and the United States, have no holidays with mandatory pay." The U.S. is the only country with no mandatory paid vacation days. The next worst, Turkey, has 12. American workers have no mandatory paid maternity leave. Other nations offer at least 14 weeks. Only the U.S., Papua New Guinea and a few tiny island nations offer none.

Establishment Democrats and their media allies praise Biden for his job creation. They point out that the unemployment rate has declined from 6.3% in January to 4.2% in November. As MSNBC political commentator Steve Benen put it last month, "By any fair measure, that's a success story Americans can and should feel good about." Why doesn't Biden get credit for this?

But the unemployment rate, like the GDP, is an abstraction that leaves out much of what American workers experience. The official unemployment rate of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts people as employed even if they are unwillingly employed only part-time. The Ludwig Institute's website has developed what it calls the True Rate of Unemployment. Using data compiled by the BLS, it

"tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes."

A decent society should not count wage slaves as "employed." For 2021 the Institute calculates the True Unemployment Rate at 23.6%, 5.6 times greater than the official BLS rate of 4.2%.

To call something an "end" is to say that it is desirable for its own sake. Justice, peace and the general welfare are the ends of society, goals with intrinsic value. Money and wealth have no intrinsic value; they are purely means, only as good as the ends they are used for. GDP growth, however great, is still a means, not an end. Unlimited economic growth in an era of global warming is insane. Social progress comes from improving the economy, which is very different from growing it.

Capitalism is a lie because it subordinates ends to means, inherent value to derivative value. To subordinate the function and goals of law-making (i.e. government) to the capitalist goal of making "as much money as possible" is irrational and has bent society out of shape.

Authors Bio:

I'm a retired philosophy professor at Centre College. My last book was Posthumanity-Thinking Philosophically about the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). I am an anti-capitalist.