The 'Democracy Doomsday Clock' is Past-Midnight in America

Our “American Overlords”: Musk, Bezos, Ellison, Murdoch, and Koch

(The End of Representative Democracy in the United States)

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Any form of democracy requires a well-educated, well-informed, and engaged society. Every member of society should have an equal vote to help guide and prioritize societal objectives, budget allocations to meet prioritized objectives, and an approach.?

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Any meaningful form of democracy requires effort on behalf of every citizen, even a representative form of democracy called a republic. The responsibility extends beyond (attempting to) voting every two or four years. Does the person I’m voting for possess the integrity to lead? Do they have the necessary experience to lead? Can they successfully collaborate with others to achieve the goals and objectives we establish as a local district, a city, a county, a State, or a Nation? Will they represent the best interests of their constituency -or will they be beholden to large donors and political action committees to vote for Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Pharma and against the interests of society? (Many examples of why society cannot simultaneously support democracy and an extreme concentration of wealth exist throughout modern U.S. history).

Before a vote is cast, American goals and objectives must be established. Yet they have been drowned out by the sociopathic political circus now at the forefront of U.S. leadership. The former Jerry Springer Show has been replaced by putting a camera and microphone in front of Members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, George Santos, and the perpetually weak Kevin McCarthy. Senators like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Ron Johnson, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Marsha Blackburn are no better. And don’t even get me started on Governors like DeSantis, Abbott, Noem, Lee, and others.?

The country has lost its way and is now painfully locked in mindless parroting of misinformation and propaganda intended to keep people distracted while wealth (and thus power) is further concentrated into the hands of a few -to perpetuate wealthy white, patriarchal minority control of the United States. In the meantime, any attempt to help the average working American -capping the cost of insulin, for example, is met with cries of “socialist” -without a basic understanding of what the word means. Similarly, people are manipulated through propaganda to cry, “Government out of my healthcare!” -while then presumably happy to invite insurance executives, investment bankers, and Wall Street analysts to make life-or-death medical decisions for themselves and their families (instead of experts in medicine and public health administration).

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America is now easily divided on issues such as gun rights, abortion, taxation, climate, education, and religion. Any attempt to work across so-called ideologies is drowned out with useless slogans. All this has continued to unfold while the “democracy doomsday clock” is near midnight in America. As more wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few, and as the courts have been stacked with judges eager to equate money with speech (post ‘Citizens United’), the odds of returning the United States toward a truly representative democracy grows impossibly longer, or it may already be past midnight.

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A prerequisite to voting Democratic or Republican, Red or Blue, is first to understand what kind of America we want for ourselves, our families, our communities, and future generations of Americans. We also know we can’t use magical thinking to instantly produce the United States any of us would want, although that would certainly provide important insight into our overarching objectives. Since we could not accomplish everything at once, establishing priorities and the way we would allocate effort and tax revenues (and comprehensively remediating the tax code to eliminate loopholes) to achieve our goals would be next.

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For example, in 2021, the United States had a federal budget of $7 trillion (courtesy of the Office of Management & Budget and nationalpriorities.org).?6.21% was spent on education, 3.2% on housing, approximately 11% on the military, and 0.54% on scientific research. In the 2023 budget, military spending is increased from $773 billion to $858 billion. While this may be in response to Putin’s war on Ukraine and rising threats elsewhere in the world -the shift toward the military budget requires either cutting elsewhere (often vital social programs), adding to the federal debt, or raising tax revenues. And it should be noted that while the GOP now raises issues about the debt ceiling and federal budget, after the Trump/GOP-led tax cuts of 2017 (which mostly benefitted corporations and the wealthiest Americans), the national debt grew from $21 trillion to $28 trillion.

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Resource allocation and appropriations are vital when discussing realistic prioritized goals and objectives and how to pay for them.

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Fundamentally, any meaningful democracy requires a well-educated, well-informed, and engaged society. For the U.S. form of representative democracy, this means that every person should have unfettered access to vote on races and issues, should be educated such that the impact of the votes cast is well understood, and that there is sufficient access to accurate information about the candidates and issues, so the votes are predicated upon factual data and not propaganda, campaign slogans, hats, or yard signs.

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Thus, prioritized funding for public education (K-12, higher education, and trade schools), independent journalism, public media, and enshrining consistent voting rights (eliminating voter suppression and gerrymandering) should be fundamental in any society aspiring toward a healthy, thriving democracy.

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Other budget objectives and decisions must be established, accounting for mandatory obligations. For example, our obligation for interest on the national debt must be budgeted to prevent an economic collapse. Social Security obligations have been funded through taxes paid by individuals and their employers and must be fully funded and paid. Medicare expenditures, Veterans’ benefits, and obligations to other vital programs must be met. We are then left with decisions about prioritizing (or rejecting) healthcare for all, affordable higher education, improving the quality of K-12 education, transportation and transportation infrastructure, scientific research and development, military and defense, housing, agriculture, and other priority goals and objectives we may have.

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Instead of crying “socialism”, “don’t take our guns”, “Ban the books”, “Government out of healthcare”, and “don’t say gay”, there must be a national dialogue about what the concept of America is and should be. Until we can have serious, respectful dialogue about liberty, freedom, justice, individual responsibility, and societal responsibility, we will be forever divided and conquered while Elon Musk, Charles Koch, and Donald Trump laugh all the way to their investment bankers.