Someone, somewhere really ought to take the road less traveled, go against the grain and be a divergent thinker.
So here goes.
It may not be obvious to most, but Democrats and the Democratic Party make a major mistake, giving ground and forfeiting future potential for America on a broad scale. Reluctantly, and slowly, after forty years of paying dues by being involved in many local campaigns in several states, I reach this conclusion after much effort to think deeply, contemplate and depart from orthodoxy to seek clarity. It has come to really bother me, this issue, now that I am a Baby Boomer with a recent stent procedure approaching 70. Time to be honest.
GOTV (database driven phone calling and door to door contacting to get out the vote) has been basically the same since the seventies, when computerized databases began to be used to automate the old precinct captain system of notecards in a shoebox, which arose with the telephone in FDR’s era. Now this system has come to emphasize centralization of organizational structure, resources and status. It takes focus and concentration away from thinking outside the box and reconsidering basic assumptions. The entire world is narrowed down to what is statistically relevant. Other concerns are over the horizon. This is true for most of us most of the time. In the modern era, we really do not have time to think. We are too busy.
With the Republican Party suffering a collective emotional meltdown into mass insanity, however, it should be alarming to consider that the intellectual challenge of understanding the world and its future realities should be in the hands of only one political party. Not only that, but politics itself as a field of intellectual concern about the state of the world, is necessarily narrow. Problems that can be considered have to be, as a practical matter, defined by consensus and laws have to be applied or written. The world at large is not taken into consideration.
Up until now that framework was certainly good enough. But now, I fear that too much comfort with this status quo is becoming really very dangerous.
What is this sector of PR, Misinformation, Propaganda and Lying that has arisen, fueled by special interest money that has captured the GOP working towards?
We could ask, why really large spending has been requiring more and more emphasis on fundraising throughout the system? Why do we need so much money in order to compete? This is not just a lot of money! This much money as power and influence is completely unprecedented in the history of the world.
The engine that pulls the whole train of American politics, and what powers it, is that millions are spent in seeking a return on investment. It is not altruistic. Overall, the money spent over the past fifty years on public persuasion and influence has been in the billions - perhaps trillions. The effect in the end: perhaps a type of oligarchy in which many voters are locked out, partly by legal maneuvers that subvert the Constitution and partly through persuasion that a super elite should have the power over society’s decisions through an authoritarian government.
That persuasion could work - and we should not be too confident that it cannot - because there is no counter coming from the Democratic Party on the local level as a competitive nationwide system. By default, the array of special interest funded voices that are mostly non-local are getting to be dominant because they are persistent 24/7.
We work to push out an additional percent or two during election season, while the manipulators with money work to tilt the entire political landscape and alter American culture — as they have been doing for nearly half a century.
I do not think it is too late to avert an oligarchy or fascism scenario. I do not believe we should give up. But I do think it is necessary to rethink what is going on and try and find ways to reach out and find those people, regardless of party, who want to see America continue and to figure out how to work with those who disagree on lesser things. I admit that I am not all that eager to meet with people who might be like some of my neighbors. But the problem we face has taken a very long time to arise. We have become like the frog in the gradually heated pot. We are reluctant to change. However, every year no paradigmatic change occurs is a year lost to a future we could regret not preventing.
Ironically, we may not be able to look to leaders. People in positions of leadership have taken on lots of obligations which might distract from deeper thinking. We need to become citizens in an old fashioned, pre-computer age sense. How this can be done probably needs lots of brainstorming. From what I personally feel I have observed - about forty years’ worth of brainstorming. How can we reconnect with our neighbors who are being lost to the misinformation movement, who are not in the databases? How can the America of the future be assured? How can we keep faith with Franklin who said, in 1776, that we are “a republic if you can keep it” ? That is a profound question. It should be asked and pursued with the deepest contemplation that becomes a constant and not another tossed off line.