Now that we see that Donald Trump is going to abandon the
platform on which he won his election, and return the Republican Party to its
establishmentarian—globalist, neo-conservative—ways, we are once again given
proof of the fundamental loss of citizenship in this nation.
The people, the supposed citizens—even those who vote—have no
real influence over the candidates they put in office. It is for certain
that they elected Trump with the idea that he would keep us out of foreign
wars, maybe even out of NATO and Japan, that he would get rid of
Obamacare (and no one said he had to fix it), that he would abolish the Ex-Im
Bank, that he would in short undo the longstanding establishmentarian
power that was so hated in the land. But now it seems he is dropping these
sorts of things that Steve Bannon was directing him to—and maybe Bannon
himself—and instead following the conventional dictates of the 3M’s—McMaster,
Mattis, and Mnuchin—and his Democrat son-in-law Jared Kushner. Take that,
voters!
And they always do. Obama was going to usher in a
post-racial America and instead provided us with more racial confrontation and
tension than any time since the 1960s. And he took countless actions for
which he had no mandate, acting on his own whim and egged on by the
left-liberal crowd he assembled around him. He continued our
futile, and expensive, involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan that the vast
majority of people wanted done with, and he got us into catastrophic wars in
Libya, Yemen, and Somalia all on his own without the required Congressional
acts of war. He eve took to sending drone strikes around the world,
without any authorization, even murdering by drone an American citizen never
accused or convicted of a crime–without seeking any authorization by us or our
representatives.
Robert Paul Wolff, a political philosopher most recently at the
University of Massachusetts, analyzed it this way a few years ago:
Since
World War II, governments have increasingly divorced themselves from anything
which could be called the will of the people. The complexity of the issues, the
necessity of technical knowledge, and most important, the secrecy of everything
having to do with national security, have conspired to attenuate the
representative function of elected officials until a point has been reached
which might be called political stewardship, or, after Plato, “elective
guardianship.” . . .
Men
cannot meaningfully be called free if their representatives vote independently
of their wishes, or when laws are passed concerning issues which they are not
able to understand. Nor can men be called free who are subject to secret decisions,
based on secret data, having unannounced consequences for their well-being and
their very lives.
The simple
fact is that in a system as large as ours it is essential that the
individual not have a regular voice in
political affairs. To allow each of 325 million people, or even the 235 million
over 18, to participate in politics in a serious way would simply be too
unwieldy, too chaotic; not even the wildest of technofix schemes of telephone
voting and computer tallying could solve the sheer logistical problems if every
person were to behave as, for example the Greek citizen of Periclean Athens,
demanding to know the issues of the day, judging them, debating them,
determining which were capable of being effected and when and how and by whom.
But not being able to participate has its terrible price. No
wonder we feel so apathetic about voting: we cannot much change the affairs of
the nation, so the meager act of voting hardly carries much weight. The
percentage of voters in the U.S. is the smallest in the industrial world,
only rarely above 50 per cent of eligible citizens and then only in
presidential elections. Since 1972 turnout has never been above 57 per cent in
presidential elections and averages about 53 per cent, and in off-year elections
never above 37 per cent and averages about 35.
The fact
is we do not understand ourselves publicly, as public
beings, as real citizens, nor could we be permitted to; we do not have public
duties and public rights and public responsibilities of any meaning; there is
nothing in our extended system that binds us as individuals to the public weal
as there is in truly democratic societies.
We have sacrificed our citizenship to bigness, slowly over the
decades—more rapidly in the last half-century but still slowly enough so that
we have hardly been aware that it is gone—so it is not surprising that we do
not have the interests, the attitudes, of citizens. Thus we do not pay
taxes voluntarily—individuals evade an estimated $500 billion and some $2
trillion income goes unreported (I.R.S. 2008 figures). We do not always support
our government in time of war, and in the most recent wars not for very many
years. We do not obey its laws by habit but by force, and a great many of the
most highly placed people both in government and business, including even our
Presidents and our representatives and the executives of the largest firms, are
regularly and increasingly seen to be disobeying these laws.
It is the loss of citizenship, a malaise that is poisoning our
society. I do not think that any nation has long survived under such
conditions.
There is
an alternative, of course. Scrap the nation and devolve power to the
states where, in the minds of the founding fathers, it was supposed to
be. Then we could be citizens again.
Kirkpatrick
Sale [send him mail]
is the author of 12 books of political and ecological themes, including Students for a Democratic Society (1972).
He lives in South Carolina.
Copyright © 2017 Kirkpatrick Sale
Previous
article by Kirkpatrick Sale: Bull in the China Shop
