​Biden’s farewell address warned Americans of a coming oligarchy.

A pro-fossil fuel, anti-regulatory administration takes office January 20. 

How can environmental citizens be effective in resisting the dismantling?  If people are reminded of the basic principles of democracy and the value of the structures of government that have been developed for us, will they return to caring about real democracy?  James Madison said men are not angels and worked to come up with something that would balance interests.  Could we get enough people to care again about what he was trying to do? 
​
H.W. Brands in the recent Founding Partisans describes Madison’s choice of principles, with “the great object…to combat the evil” (of parties).  (Paraphrasing), we could:
1. Establish “a political equality among all”
2. Withhold “unnecessary opportunities from a few to increase the inequality of property by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.”
3. Reduce “extreme wealth” (without violating the rights of property, by the “silent operation of laws”) and Raise “extreme indigence towards a state of comfort”.
4.  Abstain “from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expense of another.
5.  Make “one party a check on the other, so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented nor their views accommodated”.  (Quotations are from Brands, not the original).

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Bill, 1964, as Martin Luther King Jr. looks on.  (Image provided at PickPik).  America turned then and now too many want it to turn back, on this and many other achievements.

​If Trump wins, the presidency will no longer be the “Bully Pulpit” envisioned by Theodore Roosevelt, but the pulpit for a bully.  Like the American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden the Trump campaign echoed, disdain for others that powers the feeling of superiority is on shameful display. Everyone knows it masks insecurity.  The concept of equality in the evolution of human history, which can reduce the friction and drag of competitive existence, has apparently not yet been effectively embedded. 

In democracy and ecological thinking, life is a network and not a pyramid.  When mutual respect is discarded as the Republican party has done, casting opponents as evil, disparaging whole countries and categories of people, it ironically reveals a lack of self-respect.  If you see that, the desire to admire the powerful dissipates.  But you have to see past the bluster with bullies, and it seems that the old primitive impulses, the impatience that convinces people they should empower an individual over the rest of us together, the fears that make people want to see only people like them, may be more powerful than the considerations of mature adults who are not frightened by clownish aggression.

If you are the owner of a major newspaper like the Washington Post, or the leader of a major financial power like JP Morgan, and you are withholding criticism because you want to be able to work with the administration if Trump is elected,[i] you do not see that your gambling has already caused huge and irreparable losses.  This is the shortsightedness that happens when you believe that the business of America is business, not people: the evolution of humanity, essential to saving democracy and the environment, is badly hobbled.  To take a line from Barack Obama: Don’t boo these businessmen – vote – vote against the candidates they are helping so they can continue to work their deals in a dictatorship – and if you have shares in their companies vote them out – and vote with your dollars.  But most importantly, do so much more than just vote.  Voting alone cannot carry the weight of all that needs to be done.  Some people are voting against Harris because she doesn’t meet their expectations, and they want to use their vote to express their dissatisfaction.  That is too much to expect of the vote right now, because any vote not for Harris will help the man who will undo American democracy.  Speak out and volunteer and care about having an America that rejects the cold money dominance[ii] and invests in us and our future instead.

The fate of the concept of working together constructively is at stake.  This was a great step forward in human social organization, the only thing that can deliver us from the downward spiral of competition not subsumed under cooperation, to a world that can survive and have the chance to learn how to thrive.  What can an environmental citizen do, here, at the potential ending of the effort to govern ourselves with respectful democratic deliberation, if we still have faith in it?

​If you have faith in democracy, then you know that even if its processes are slow, they are the only way to determine how society should act so that it is most mindful of everyone.  If you don’t see this and don’t vote for democracy, then you are allowing the conflicts to continue in which some people are trying to gain without sufficient consideration of others.  You side with allowing the selfish interests to dominate.  This creates destructive tendencies, towards our planet and its life forms, and towards other people, when in the pursuit of human potential one damages others and takes no or too little notice.

Law for Sustainability, Purpose and Context

When, before, did we feel that some people were not just voting for a different approach to living together in a democratic republic, but for the ending of that system of cooperative self-government?  When, before, did we hear fellow Americans speaking of Civil War?  Before the Civil War.

For those who work or even just wish for environmental salvation, ensuring we don’t elect a man who would end the independence of the agencies created to enhance justice, environmental and public health, fair working conditions, basic rights, etc., is a task requiring putting everything else aside.

But how do we act?  Deep confusion reigns: we are fighting a new kind of battle – on the field of meaning.  It seems that some sentences are heard in very different ways by different people. For example, any sentence containing the words “immigrants” or “Democrat” can trigger anger, fear or anxiety on the part of those not sure these things aren’t immediate and serious threats.  Then there is everyone else who lives in the real world and wishes to grapple sensibly with the problems that face us all directly, here and now.  These require working together, a clear view of the world, faith that most other people are generally good even if some are a serious problem, and respect for individuals that forbids prejudging them by association.

This presents a new level of difficulty for environmental citizens to master, and there is not much time. But we can still work to increase the chances that the world will evolve responsibility, rather than continue to become brittle and fragile, as Our Thing – the self-governing mechanism bequeathed to us by a magnificently unfolding societal maturation, an enlightenment growing towards justice – is taken over.

When FEMA can’t have a meeting about to help victims of Hurricane Helene without people thinking it’s about stealing their land for lithium we see how good the devilish propagandists have gotten, how quickly they can poison the well.  The music played at Trump’s rallies hypnotically backs up his trance-like musings.  The listeners look dazed.  How do we break the spell? 

A learned friend recently lent me a translation[i] of The Sandman, by E.T.A Hoffman, published in 1817.  In it, advice is provided concerning how not to yield to a “dark and hostile power which traitorously fixes a thread in our hearts” to draw us “by means of it along a dangerous road to ruin”.

“So long as we have sufficient firmness, fortified by cheerfulness, to always acknowledge foreign influences for what they really are, whilst we quietly pursue the path pointed out to us by both inclination and calling, then this mysterious power perishes in its futile struggles to attain the form which is to be the reflected image of ourselves.”

Although many – like Joe Biden - would like the country to choose its leaders based on the likelihood that they will carry out the right policies for us, it seems that often we choose them because of who they are or seem to be.  Some like Trump because of his old tv show or his book about making deals, or because he says things they’ve been keeping to themselves.  Some said they’d rather have a beer with George Bush than Al Gore.  Some voted against Michael Dukakis because he looked silly in a tank.  That Al Gore did in fact deserve much credit for us having the internet now, and Dukakis was considered the best governor in the country at the time, didn’t matter as much as the stories about who they were that got through to enough people.  We are in a war of stories.  A professional in that field, producer Armando Iannucci, hounded by the press for comment on the similarity of true events to his series “Veep”, warned in the New York Times today that “The stuff happening out there is madder than “Veep” and deadly serious.”  We need to restore the primacy of reality.  

We (environmental citizens, everyone) absolutely need leaders who have a grip on reality – Mother Earth is whacking us upside the head to make us pay attention, wars are breaking out that need discouraging and prevention, threats to democracy, privacy, our money, AI, viruses, etc. But in an age in which fantasy plays such a large role so quickly we also need people who can reach those people who don’t search out the facts, but who choose between narratives that they hear, and we need to support the development of that energy by asking for it and appreciating it when we get it.

Right now Kamala Harris is injecting something akin to Truman’s Happy Warrior, JFK’s vim and vigor, Obama’s electricity and her own great laugh.  She rides into town like the new sheriff on a real horse of experience, ready to face problems.  When Massachusetts governor Maura Healy introduced Harris to “a friend’s young daughter, who had been at basketball camp, Harris said,

"Tell me about basketball camp, and what’s your favorite position?’…And the little girl says to her, ‘Anything but defense’.  And the V.P. just burst out laughing and said, ‘Me too. I like offense.’”
 (New York Times today).

Today, as we try to process such things as Joe Biden’s inability to swat aside Donald Trump’s lies, continuing Middle East horrors, and how the Supreme Court won’t protect women, among other calamities, (to mention just two - Darfur, and the success of the right in French elections), we have now as well the Loper Bright, Jarkesy and Corner Post cases,[i] which make it much easier for corporate polluters and fraudsters to sue and stymie the agencies Congress created to protect us from them. Meanwhile in Trump v US the conservative majority on our highest court gave the former president the benefit of the doubt concerning whether he can be sued.[ii]

I yearn for the sophistication that enables everyone instantly to see tortured reasoning, and the sophistication that gets us past deploring how bad things are to the actions we can take.  It seems rather simplistic to jump to urging Biden step aside because he isn’t the savior we desire.  Whether an internal struggle in the Democratic party will give us a better candidate is a complicated question deserving careful consideration.[iii]  But we should not just ask for good leaders if we want a better future.  We need to also come together effectively – thoughtfully – as united citizens, if we are to mitigate impending environmental calamities, protect health, rights, community.  A sophisticated approach recognizes that it’s up to us.

​There are ways forward, even though they may seem indistinct.  We will benefit from reasserting principles of civic virtue and practicing real democracy.  Agencies now need defending. We can stop being resentful of our bureaucracies and appreciating them for what they do right. Our administrative state has its bureaucratic problems, but it has largely been built through consensus and reason. It is not evil. Quite often, it is competent.  Occasionally, it is magnificent.  It is ours if we use it and it works well when we value it.