State of the Republic
In revolt against the other, but not against the rules
In the space age, the village idiot rules, on TV, for all to see
In the last decades, republican failure manifests itself in atrophy to the point of rigor mortis for the modern political party. It is not just an American, but a global affliction. The modern political party was a direct consequence of modern republicanism. None other than slave-holding Thomas Jefferson first understood the newly created American republic required something new to politics, a party. Jefferson helped form the Democratic party, the oldest existing political party, such that you can claim at this point it exits at all.
The party evolved as an invaluable part of the political infrastructure, a necessity for any healthy functioning representative constitutional republic. Modern republican constitutions, instituting the structures of government, were all largely silent on the underlying political organization and processes necessary for the system to effectively function.
From inception, the Democratic party was fundamentally structured from the county level up. Nationally, it was a conglomeration of hundreds and then thousands of county level organizations. Over the course of two centuries, the Democratic party, like the republic itself, moved away from the more distributed county order to ever more concentrated, increasingly unaccountable, centralized power. Starting with the telegraph and railroads, continuing all the way to the internet, technology played an essential role in this political centralization. The most lethal blow delivered by the three corporations controlled broadcast media of the mid-20th century. The parties played essential roles in the organization of the electoral processes, though were gradually removed from these processes, becoming hollowed out formalities. Today, the parties mainly exist as codified shells representing ballot designations.
The Democrats' present dilemma is endlessly amusing. For decades, the top has strived to crush the party’s democratic processes, allowing the television rule of an idiotic few. Presently, it leaves them with a physically and mentally addled presidential nominee in waiting. In the words of Tom Paine, “The Crisis” nakedly reveals the long running charade of now empty party structures. The NYT, WSJ, and the Amazon Post are filled with panicked cries of Democratic “donors,” as if the party was nothing more than a charitable concern of wealth. With the subhead "Donor Frustration,” the WSJ writes, “Contributors have for months privately raised concerns about Biden’s lack of spontaneity in settings with his biggest supporters.”
By contributors, they aren't talking about the sad sack $10, $20, $50, or $100 givers, they're talking about the few pockets of big money entirely controlling the process. Ironic or not, over the last fifty years, as business completely took over politics in America, the system became ever more unpopular, corrupt, and dysfunctional, a connection never made by the corporate media or the Donors' various elected officials and campaign professionals functionaries.
Most ironic, the same moneyed and incumbent interests leading the push to oust old Joe, are the very people who worked for four decades to make the Democratic Convention functionally useless, nothing more than a hollow, scripted, reality-TV show. Historically, the whole purpose of the convention was for the county organizations, basically no longer existing, to come together from across the republic to nominate a presidential candidate. However, the Democratic leadership came to believe this rough and tumble exercise of person to person democratic decision making was not good television and resulted in poor quality candidates. Now, in a clear case this process is precisely what's needed, they are in a quandary. Certainly, the Donors have no intention of allowing the delegates elected through their phony primary process to choose a nominee. Stay tuned!
Besides providing essential organizational components for election processes, one important function of the modern party, at its best, was as a forum for the creation and debating of ideas. This is not well appreciated. Such a role was never quite well enough understood. With the rise of industrialization and the rapid innovation of ever new technologies, the creation of new political ideas became political necessity. Unfortunately, such processes were never well developed, resulting in the parties’ and republic’s unhindered spiral of decline.
It was the Populists, the agrarian revolt of the last decades of the 19th century, who sought to reform the republic in the face of industrialization, that best understood this party function. In his seminal history of American democracy, Democratic Promise, Lawrence Goodwyn succinctly sums up the Populists creating a new party as personifying “one of the central ideological tensions at the heart of the agrarian revolt―the power of an idea versus the power of inherited cultural loyalties.” Ever more rapid and powerful technological change made the unchanged institutions and traditions of the agrarian republic democratically impotent.
In the mid-20th century, one of history's greatest thinkers on democracy, Hannah Arendt, astutely noted the decline of modern republicanism. Understanding democracy's roots in classical Greek and Roman society, she explained in The Human Condition the classical value of the vita activa — “its original meaning: a life devoted to public-political matters.” With modernity, specifically with industrialization, human life, thus politics, overwhelmingly became defined by mechanized labor, “where production consists primarily in preparation for consumption.” Politics lost the ability to think, to conceive new political ideas, just as ever newer technologies necessitated creative political thinking as never before.
Arendt concludes The Human Condition with an understanding any ability to revitalize politics, requires a revival of the vita activa, starting with thought, the idea:
“Thought, finally—which we, following the premodern as well as the modern tradition, omitted from our reconsideration of the vita activa—is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately, and contrary to what is currently assumed about the proverbial ivory tower independence of thinkers, no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think. As a living experience, thought has always been assumed, perhaps wrongly, to be known only to the few. It may not be presumptuous to believe that these few have not become fewer in our time. This may be irrelevant, or of restricted relevance, for the future of the world; it is not irrelevant for the future of man. For if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity were to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa, it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all. Whoever has any experience in this matter will know how right Cato was when he said: Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum agent, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset— 'Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.'”
Looking at the decline of democracy under the total domination of the corporate state, Arendt perfectly summed up the present political dilemma that “it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”
The first sentence of Goodwyn's 1976 Democratic Promise is, “This book is about the decline of freedom in America, and that thought, culturally out of step as it is, presents a problem.” The Populists' failure to evolve the agrarian republic in the face of industrialization against the quickly growing unhindered power of the industrial corporation, initiated a decline of democracy in America that continues today. First and foremost, we have lost the processes, structures, and means to both create and value political ideas – the foundation of the vita activa. As the Greeks and Romans well understood, without the vita activa there was no democracy, no republic.
As Always,
Up the Revolution, Down the British
July 4th, 2024