The American Cheerleader

The midterm elections will be here in a few days. When the results are in, everyone will be gratified by some of them and disappointed by others, but in any case most of us will share a tingle of pride—we did it again! The greatest democracy on earth will have again made some leadership changes and course corrections and the ship of state will sail peacefully on. All our rights and freedoms, set out in the Constitution and affirmed by our courts and traditions, will be intact. Our country will be as it always has been—the best place in the world to live. No American with his head on straight could conclude otherwise.

Wait… time out! That’s not my voice. That’s the voice of the American Cheerleader. Most likely we heard it first from our parents. It then got reinforced in every American history class from elementary school to middle school to high school. When we became adults, we heard it from friends and acquaintances, and certainly from politicians. It possessed some of us. As in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it snatched our minds. Many of us are quite comfortable being snatched. If that describes you, you should stop reading now. But if it makes you uneasy, if you think that rah-rah voice is messing with your objectivity, I can help you to exorcize it. The process I use involves a hard look at some of our favorite cheers. Read on…

We are entitled to certain rights that no person or government agency can ever take away. These are our so-called “unalienable” rights. The Declaration of Independence tells us these include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I think by “life” and “liberty,” Jefferson meant that we each have the right to proceed with our life as we choose and not have it hijacked by an authority—Mother England, for example—for arbitrary or unjust reasons. It appears that, on the whole, we do enjoy these rights today—that is, if we’re white. But if we’re a person of color, not so much. We have only to look at the way the police enforce the law when detaining black people. If there’s any resistance, the current police procedure seems to be “fire your gun until death is certain.” Or we can look at the percentage of Americans who are incarcerated. Our incarceration rate is 7 in every 1,000. Only the Seychelles and Singapore have higher rates. That means we’re worse than the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran, and Syria. How, then, in light of these data, is it even conceivable that life and liberty are being respected?

There’s yet another way to look at these rights. Jefferson was thinking only about government actions that limit our unalienable rights. What about government inactions? For example, when the government fails to regulate the ownership of firearms, might that not affect life and the pursuit of happiness? When government fails to regulate the schemes of bankers and financiers that crash the economy, what happens to the 99% who are innocently pursuing happiness? And when government fails to create work projects for people who have been jobless for a year or more, doesn’t that also show contempt for life and happiness? Such callousness is no accident. One of our political parties—the one predicted to control both houses of Congress next year—believes that only two government actions are justified: defending the country and abetting Social Darwinism.

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law that abridges freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Does this mean that we can say anything or publish anything we like? No, not anything—nothing that is slanderous, libelous, or endangers public safety, and most of us agree that these are small and necessary exceptions. What’s critical to our democracy is what I call “enabling speech.” This is speech (and writing) that gives us the information we need to discuss social and political issues knowledgeably. The other kind of speech is “diverting speech.” It deals with pop culture (including sports), crime, and man-bites-dog topics. It really doesn’t need Constitutional protection. At bottom, then, there are two critical questions: does our media provide us with a continual stream of enabling speech, and does our government do anything to impede its flow?

To the first question I’d say yes, but it isn’t really a stream; it’s a trickle. The business of television, Internet, and print news outlets is mainly to excite and entertain. For example, the preponderance of speech on the ABC, NBC, and CBS news programs is of the diverting kind. ABC is the worst, with at least 80% of its news content dedicated to diversion. CNN’s specialty is sensationalism. Fox News poisons its trickle with editorial bias. The upshot is that the enabling speech has no depth. You get only a veneer of the ideas and events that are shaping the world. If you want depth, you have to diligently seek out the TV shows, Internet sites, newspapers, and magazines where dedicated journalists do their work. (I have some suggestions on my Links page.)

To the second question I’d say yes, the government tries to impede enabling speech when journalists expose its dishonesty, stupidity, or incompetence. Take the case of the “Pentagon Papers,” a history of our engagement in Vietnam that records the lies and deceptions practiced by four administrations on Congress and the public. The document was surreptitiously given to the New York Times and Washington Post, which began publishing installments. The Nixon Administration obtained a federal court injunction and succeeded in stopping publication until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers. Or take the recent case of James Risen, an investigative journalist who has twice won a Pulitzer Prize for writing critically about government agencies, most recently about the CIA. To do their jobs, journalists like Risen rely on leakers, or what they call “anonymous sources.” Such a person revealed to Risen that the CIA had recruited a Russian scientist to pass erroneous nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. The scientist then told the Iranians that the blueprints were flawed. Risen wrote about it, and now the government is pressing him to reveal his source. Risen has refused and will likely be sent to jail. The message to potential leakers is clear: If you talk to journalists, they will out you or they will go to jail. This is how our government fends off embarrassment and public scrutiny.

The First Amendment also prohibits Congress from making any law that establishes a national religion. However, the absence of such a law is irrelevant—we have a de facto national religion! It’s a hyphenated religion: Judao-Christianity. (The “Judao” part is only a reluctant acknowledgment by Christians that the Old Testament is a necessary prologue to the New Testament.)

The evidence that our government endorses Judao-Christianity is right in front of us every day:

• We put “In God We Trust” on our money. Is there another democracy in the world whose money asserts such a thing? No, not even Israel.
• Both houses of Congress have a chaplain who opens every day’s business with a prayer, and who provides spiritual counsel to the members. Only Christians have been chaplains.
• Our Pledge of Allegiance affirms that we are a nation “under God.” These words were added by an act of Congress in 1954. (How was this constitutional??) President Eisenhower proclaimed that “in this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future.” I don’t know about you, but religious faith isn’t transcendent in my life.
• Every president in my memory has concluded speeches to the nation with “and may God bess America.” The tone of the final sentences is prayerful by design, and the call to respond with an “amen” is compelling. Presidents must perform this ritual and testify to their faith in many other ways; otherwise, there’s no possibility of being re-elected. In fact, all candidates for federal office or even a high state office must make a show of religion, whether sincere or not, to have any hope of getting elected. American politics is no place for avowed atheists and agnostics; the leadership they might provide is lost to us.

At this point in the exorcism, I imagine hearing objections. You’re saying, “No country is perfect, but our democracy is an instrument of continuous improvement. We’ll solve the problems you cite as a consensus for solutions emerges over time.” Fair enough. I would never say that we’re shackled with a given problem for all time, but I would like to make three points in rebuttal.

First, some of our problems are actually getting worse. The idea of putting gun ownership beyond any possibility of regulation is no more than 50 years old. It’s the child of an NRA propaganda campaign and has gotten so out of control that state after state is passing “open carry” laws. The Wild West of the Nineteenth Century is taking over the whole of America in the Twenty-First Century. The problem of race relations is also getting worse, and no one is proposing the one action that can bring about an improvement: a national code of police conduct that dramatically reduces the use of force, especially deadly force. Right now, every police overreaction is seen as a local problem that needs a local remedy. Governmental intimidation of journalists is yet another worsening problem. The trend is fed by the growth of data collection and covert activities, which in turn makes investigative journalists more vigilant, and rightly so. Does anyone believe that the security mania in our country will subside anytime soon?

Second, a large percentage of the American electorate is disaffected and has been for generations. Fewer than 60% of eligible voters turn out for presidential elections and under 40% turn out for midterm elections. I believe it’s the disaffected voters who are the key to correcting America’s most vexing problems, but as these problems worsen, the cynicism deepens, and the likelihood of these voters turning out becomes even more improbable. This is our country’s Catch-22. 

Last, our Constitution has given us a democracy in which the will of the people is often frustrated. For example:

• The drawing of state congressional districts is left to the states, and whatever party is in power in the state legislature is free to gerrymander the districts. A typical gerrymandering strategy is “packing,” which means drawing a district’s boundaries so that it contains as many members of the opposition party as possible. This concedes an overwhelming victory to the opposition in that district but weakens the representation of the opposition in many other districts. In this way the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” is subverted. There are democratic countries in which this tactic is ineffective. In New Zealand and Germany, for example, if the proportion of votes cast for a party is greater than the proportion of seats it won, the party is awarded more seats, which it fills from a list of supplemental candidates. So these countries can never suffer the kind of travesty that occurred in our 2012 House elections. Democratic candidates received 54,301,095 votes, Republican candidates 53,822,442 votes; yet the Republicans won 233 seats to the Democrats 199 seats!
• When the Constitution was being drafted, the states with small populations were concerned about being outgunned by states with large populations, so they conceded less representation in the House if every state would have two senators, irrespective of population. This patently undemocratic request was granted to ensure that the Constitution was ratified. So today a resident of Wyoming, population 582,658, has the same representation in the Senate as a resident of California, population 37,253,956. What is particularly galling is that we don’t even need a Senate, and we wouldn’t have one if the Founding Fathers hadn’t insisted on copying the houses of the the British parliament. I’d be happy to trust to the judgment of the House if only their members were chosen fairly.
• The Senate, like the House, is free to make its own rules, even if those rules are undemocratic. Perhaps the most notorious Senate rule is the one that tells them how to proceed after a presidential nominee or piece of legislation has been debated. If it’s a nominee other than a Supreme Court nominee, they take an up or down vote—not on whether to confirm the nominee but on whether to table the matter or move on to a confirmation vote. Sound crazy? Well, the process is even crazier when it concerns legislation or a Supreme Court nominee. In that case, they again vote to table or go forward, but it takes a supermajority of 60 votes to move on to a final vote! So if your party has 59 Senate seats, don’t get cocky. The legislative mandate you think you have doesn’t mean a thing if the opposition can line up just 41 votes against you.

To complete the exorcism, only one thing more need be said: the Congress we elect doesn’t even work for us! Though on the federal payroll, they’re actually in the employ of the business interests who lobby them and contribute to their re-election campaigns. I know this coup de grace is likely to leave you feeling a bit hollow. I’d like very much to end on a positive note of some kind, so I’ll quote a political pundit I saw on the Internet a few days ago. After discussing a number of issues that were besetting the country, he added, “The American Dream is alive and well—in Scandinavia!”