Divine will

Jesus was once challenged by a group of Pharisees who hoped to trap him in a conundrum. They asked him whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. If Jesus were to say no, he would be advocating rebellion against Rome, thereby endangering his fellow Jews. If he were to say yes, he would be acknowledging Roman dominion over lands that were promised by God to the people of Israel.

But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

(Matthew 22:18-21, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Jesus said that not only is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, but it is essential.

When Jesus was arrested, one of those present was the high priest, who brought with him his slave:

Suddenly one of those with Jesus put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear.

(Matthew 26:47, NRSVue)

Here we have evidence that there were Jews living in the time of Jesus who owned slaves. Rome itself was a slave state. Did Jesus ever advocate for the abolition of slavery? No, he did not. In fact he thought of slaves as an integral part of society:

“A disciple is not above the teacher nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher and the slave like the master.”

(Matthew 10:24, NRSVue)

The Old Testament has rules about how Israelites were expected to treat their slaves.

“If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free. And when you send a male slave out from you a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed. Provide for him liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your winepress, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the Lord your God has blessed you.

(Deuteronomy 15:12-14, NRSVue)

Slavery was perfectly legal, according to the law given by Yahweh to Moses, and Jesus did nothing whatsoever to free the the slaves. He didn’t even speak out against the practice.

Why was Jesus so accepting of the social conditions of his time? Consider this well known quotation:

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”

(Matthew 7:1-2, NRSVue)

If you can’t judge other people, then you can’t punish them for violations of the law.

Here’s another well known passage from the New Testament:

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

(Matthew 18:21-22, NRSVue)

(Note: Some translations render the seventy seven times as seventy times seven times, or 490.)

So Jesus expected his followers to forgive sins 77 times, and that appears to be per sin.

In fact, Jesus expected that his followers would be as perfect and as forgiving as Yahweh:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

(Matthew 5:48, NRSVue)

And just how forgiving is Yahweh?

Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

(Matthew 12:31-32, NRSVue)

Yahweh will forgive murder, rape, incest, sodomy, assault, battery, robbery, fraud, slander, libel, and every other sin– except the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. And Jesus expected his followers to do the same.

In one well known example, a group of Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. They said that the law of Moses required that she should be stoned to death. But instead of agreeing to see her punished, Jesus asked that they consider their own sins:

“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

(John 8:7, NRSVue)

(Note: The provenance of this passage is disputed.)

And as each of them had to admit to having sinned, each of them turned away and left the woman behind. And then Jesus forgave her:

Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

(John 8:11, NRSVue)

This story perfectly illustrates the type of behavior that Jesus advocated. Do not condemn other people– not even those who violate the law. Convince them to do the right thing by confronting them with their own sins– and then forgive them of those sins. Forgiveness, Jesus taught, is more powerful than punishment.

But is that really possible in a society of millions of people? It’s a heartwarming morality. If people really could be convinced to do the right thing simply by being forced to reflect on their own sins, society as a whole could readily ascend to ever higher levels of harmony and peace.

Unfortunately that’s just not how societies work. Yes, many people are susceptible to the kind of inner reflection that Jesus expected. But some are not. And it only takes an incorrigible few to disrupt entire communities.

Every society needs laws, judges to administer the laws, and law enforcement agencies to enforce the laws. Without these basic constructs society would quickly devolve into chaos, disorder, and a violent scramble for self preservation. Jesus was advocating a moral code that demanded forgiveness and perfection, but it just isn’t practical in any society or in any time.

Why didn’t Jesus speak out against slavery? Or gladiatorial combat? Why did he think that sins should be forgiven, rather than punished? Why didn’t he oppose the brutal treatment of the nations the Romans conquered?

In the following passage the disciples asked Jesus when the new age would arrive:

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

(Matthew 24:3, NRSVue)

Jesus answered the second part of the question first by listing a number of events that he says will happen before the return of the Son of Man:

“Immediately after the suffering of those days

the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from heaven,
and the powers of heaven will be shaken.

“Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven’ with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

(Matthew 24:29-31, NRSVue)

And then he provided an answer to the first part of the question:

Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

(Matthew 24:34, NRSVue)

(Note: This idea is repeated in Mark 13. There is a similar narrative in Luke 17:20 – 37 and Luke 21:20 – 32, though Luke’s version has several differences. There is no comparable passage in the book of John.)

Jesus expected that the new age would arrive before his own generation had died out. That’s why he wasn’t concerned about the state of the world. He believed that the world order would be overturned by Yahweh sometime around the end of the first century CE. There was no point in worrying about slaves, or the brutality of the empire, or lawbreakers. It would all be swept away in just a few years with the advent of the new era that Yahweh had ordained. Jesus wasn’t trying to make the world a better place in which to live. He was only interested in preparing his perfect followers for an eternity in paradise.

In one sense Jesus was right to avoid condemning slavery. Everyone who had rebelled against the Roman empire had been crushed: the Carthaginians, the Sabines, Spartacus and his rebelling gladiators, the Maccabees… No one could withstand the might of Rome. Jesus advised his followers to pay Caesar’s taxes and to avoid confronting the empire. If you try to combat Rome, you will be annihilated.

Later centuries have proved that resistance against powerful empires can work. Mahatma Gandhi led non-violent opposition to the British empire and succeeded in winning the end of British colonial rule. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s forced the United States government to enact the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, also through non-violent resistance. Jesus may have been right about the Roman empire, but he was wrong in the context of the broad sweep of history. Resistance is not always futile.

In Arabic the word Islam means “surrender,” or “submission.” Followers of Islam are called upon to surrender themselves to the will of Allah.

To surrender to the will of Allah, or of Yahweh, is to trust that God will guide the world toward righteousness. And it is further to absolve oneself of having to do anything about the brutality and corruption of the world. It is to accept the conditions of human society as they are, to believe that God directs the affairs of humans and that he will inevitably lead the world to peace and prosperity for all. But which God enabled the Mongol conquests, the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Russian Gulag, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, or the Vietnam War? To surrender to the terror and destruction of such events is to assume that there is nothing that humans can do to prevent them, or even to diminish their impact.

Resistance can work. But resistance requires human agency, human advocacy, human will. And human agency is at the heart of the very notion of democracy. It is predicated on the belief that not only can humans solve their own social problems, but that humans alone can solve them.

If you live under totalitarian rule, surrender to the divine will amounts to acceptance of that rule. It is an abdication of the human responsibility to work with others to resolve conflict and improve the conditions of life. Only through the exercise of human agency can the world truly become a better place in which to live.

Repeal and replace the 2nd

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has become irrelevant. It is time to update it.

First let’s consider the amendment as a piece of legislation. From that perspective it has three major flaws:

First, it is written in passive voice. The First Amendment begins with the words “Congress shall make no law…” So clearly Congress is the active party. But the Second Amendment says:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people
to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Question: Who is responsible to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed?

Answer: We don’t know, because the Amendment has no subject. Is it the U.S. Congress? Or State legislatures? Or municipalities? The amendment doesn’t say. We might assume that the U.S. Congress is the intended party, but it’s never a good idea to make assumptions about the meaning of a law. Passive voice isn’t just bad in fiction; it’s very bad in legislation.

Second, the Amendment has no exclusions for the persons who may own weapons. Should criminals be allowed to own weapons? Or terrorists? Or the mentally ill? Most American citizens would answer a resounding “NO!” to each. And not only does the Amendment not have any such exclusions, it doesn’t even grant to Congress the power to enact such restrictions. That’s just plain bad.

And third, the Amendment has no exclusions for the types of weapons that private citizens may own. Should private citizens be allowed to own tanks? Or howitzers? Or rocket launchers? Most citizens would say absolutely not. But the Amendment doesn’t have any such exceptions, and it doesn’t grant to Congress the power to set such limitations.

So the Second Amendment is just a very badly written piece of legislation.

Now let us ask why it was written. It was debated in the Congress of 1789 along with the other 9 amendments of what we now call the Bill of Rights. These amendments were ratified by the states in December 1791.

Elbridge Gerry, Madison’s adversary in both Philadelphia and New York, offered this defense of the proposed amendment: “What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.” Arming the citizens who belonged to state militias, Gerry argued, would deter Congress from establishing a federal army that might oppress or invade the states.

A People’s History of the Supreme Court, Peter Irons, pg. 75

And yet in the very next year Congress created the United States Army, thereby rendering Mr. Gerry’s reasoning moot.

In the early 1930s, the nation was being ravaged by violent gangs that used machine guns to impose their will on private citizens. And they were very successful. Congress felt it had to act. So in 1934 it passed the National Firearms Act (NFA) which outlawed the manufacture or sale of machine guns for private use. There was an immediate court challenge which alleged that the NFA violated the Second Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. It made its way to the Supreme Court which, in 1939, considered the case known as United States vs. Miller.

The actual case involved the transport of an unregistered sawed off shotgun that was less than 18 inches long. The court said:

In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a “shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length” at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.

United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939)

The court upheld the NFA but did not specifically rule on the question of machine guns. Certainly a machine gun could contribute to the efficiency of a well regulated militia. So it would seem that the court’s finding on sawed off shotguns can’t be reasonably be extended to other more lethal weapons. Since that time the court has declined to review cases in which lower courts have ruled that private citizens do not have a right to possess machine guns. So effectively a ban on private ownership of machine guns is the law of the land.

Ever since the passage of the National Firearms Act Congress has had the power, sanctioned by the Supreme Court, to regulate firearms– and in fact all weapons.

So what right exactly does the Second Amendment protect?

The answer would appear to be the right to own the types of weapons that were in use in 1789 by typical members of the state run militias:

The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. “A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline.” And further, that ordinarily, when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.

United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939)

And what kinds of weapons were in use at that time? Typically they were single shot muzzle loaded non-rifled muskets. Weapons of that type are decidedly not suitable for personal defense in modern society.

Hence the Second Amendment is irrelevant and it should be repealed and replaced with something more in tune with present day needs.

The right of citizens to own weapons for self defense, hunting, and competition should be enshrined as a protected right. So the Second Amendment should be replaced with a new amendment that:

Guarantees the right of citizens to own weapons for self defense, hunting, and competition, stating that the right may not be infringed by federal, state, or local governments;
Grants to Congress the power to license, register, and regulate the types of weapons that private citizens may own; and
Grants to Congress the power to prevent criminals, terrorists, and other classes of individuals from owning weapons, provided that those classes are not based on race, creed, or sex.

This would bring weapons legislation into the 21st century, while enshrining gun ownership as a protected civil right.

The Spirit of Democracy

Think back to the time of 6th century BCE Athens. The city controlled an empire of dozens of separate Greek states. It was the world center of philosophy, science, and art. And it was the world’s first society to govern itself by democracy.

Of course we must qualify that statement by noting that only landed Athenian males 21 years of age and older were allowed to participate in the forms and offices of government. But within those limitations it was a true participatory democracy. Every eligible citizen was a member of the primary governing body– the Assembly. That would have been about 40,000 men at the height of the Empire. A quorum of the Assembly was 6,000 citizens.

We call it the age of Pericles, but he was neither king nor president. He was one of ten elected generals, each of whom served a one year term. He was elected to that position multiple times, so clearly he must have had both charisma and leadership skills. But it was the Assembly that made all key decisions. And all decisions were made by simple majority vote. In that respect the Athenian democracy was a true democracy, unlike our representative federation. Decisions of state in our system are not made by we the people, but by those we elect to represent us.

The delegates of what we now call the Federal Convention did not invent democracy, and they did not invent the key features of our federal system: separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, a hierarchical court system, and the guarantee of rights for all citizens. All of those elements were incorporated into the constitutions of various of the states after they declared independence.

The Constitution was a remarkable document for its time, but it retains many anti-democratic elements. The Senate represents states, not the people. Nine U.S. states contain more than half of total U.S. population, and yet those states only have 18% representation in the Senate. That is extremely unfair to the residents of the most populous states.

In 1929 Congress passed the Permanent Apportionment Act, which capped the total number of Representatives in the House at 435. That constraint, coupled with the Constitution’s requirement that every state must have at least one Representative, has resulted in the over-representation of low population states. The House now has 114 fewer members than it should on the basis of population alone.

Neither the House nor the Senate truly represent the national character. The Senate represents the separate states and the House represents state defined localities. The president is the only nationally elected official who represents the nation as a whole. That is the primary reason why the president and Congress are so often at odds.

And since the Electoral College is based on the number of members of the House and Senate, it amplifies the misrepresentations of those two bodies.

There is work to do if we wish our government to be more democratic and more fairly representative. But we should ask: is democracy necessarily a good thing? Can the public really be expected to make sound decisions in a world of every greater complexity? Perhaps we should allow those who have the greatest understanding of government, economics, and society to make the nation’s most important decisions. Maybe we would be wise to establish a class of professionals who are specially trained to lead the country, as imperial China did.

Alexander Hamilton touched on this question in his defense of the Electoral College:

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.

(The Federalist #68, Alexander Hamilton, 1788)

The chief question Hamilton did not answer in his musings is just how, exactly, we are to recognize the persons who possess the requisite “information and discernment”? We have seen many examples recently of people who loudly proclaim their credentials and their wisdom who in fact know little or nothing about their areas of alleged expertise.

Should we expect the average citizen to be an expert on all matters relevant to the health and safety of the nation? No, absolutely not. But that doesn’t mean that the average citizen has no stake in national or international affairs. On the contrary, national issues have national impacts. The entire nation will almost certainly be adversely affected by foolish national policies.

The greatest risk to the nation is when our leaders lose touch with the people. The examples of the Vietnam and Iraq wars show that it makes no sense to engage in foreign wars if you do not have the full support of the people.

The divine right of kings was firmly entrenched in ancient Egypt by no later than 3000 BCE. The king, later called “Pharaoh,” was declared to be the son of Ra– literally the son of God. And yet the trappings of divinity could never disguise the fact that kings of the centuries since have had frailties and foibles, or that we all are subject to the indignities of our mortality.

There is no single class of people who are most qualified to lead. That simple truth is the central glory of democracy. Great leaders do not always have the greatest pedigrees. Trust the people.

Is economics complicated? Yes, as is immigration policy, trade policy, cybersecurity, and many other aspects of modern society. But those who seek our votes should be able to state their positions on the issues of the day in such a way that the average citizen can understand them. Those who sneeringly assume that the average citizen is too uninformed to make sound decisions do not deserve our votes.

The central principle of democracy, whether representative or participatory, is fairness. The idea that every citizen should have the right to vote and to expect that vote to count forces everyone to respect others. Other governmental systems do not necessitate such behavior. In fact many– especially autocracies– thrive on intolerance. That is why the spirit of democracy is the highest and the most basic– something every religion should call its own. Without tolerance people can easily fall into vindictiveness and aggression. Without respect for others they can become aloof and indifferent to human suffering. Democracy is the only governing principle that is predicated on tolerance for all.

Federal Deficits

There is much confusion about federal budget deficits. Many people, whether liberal or conservative, believe that the federal government will go bankrupt “soon” because of its habit of deficit spending. There are multiple US debt counters, both online and IRL, that put this notion in the starkest possible terms. Here’s one:

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

The attention the national debt has received is indicative of a deep sense of fear that pervades much contemporary thought about the role of the federal government. But is it warranted?

First a couple of basic facts:

Congress– and only Congress– has the power to issue currency, as stated in Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution. So the financial constraints on the federal government cannot be meaningfully compared to those of a family, or a business, or even a US state.
The federal government issues treasury bonds whenever it expects to spend more than it receives in revenue. But that’s just a policy that was established by Congress. It’s not a fiscal necessity.¹
The federal government will always have the ability to pay for any programs or policies adopted by Congress. So said Alan Greenspan before Congress when he was asked to testify before it by Paul Ryan in 2005.²
Congress has paid down more than 20% of the federal debt 7 times in the past– and every time the result was either a recession or a depression.³

Here’s an example that will serve to explain the impact of deficit spending on the US economy.

Suppose that Congress decides to spend $100 billion on infrastructure improvements without raising revenue. That would result in negative $100 billion on the government’s ledger. But every ledger has two sides. So there must be a positive $100 billion somewhere else. Where would that be?

To figure that out we need to understand what the government would do with its $100 billion of newly issued currency. To improve infrastructure it will need to go into the private sector to purchase infrastructure improvement services. That is, the government will be writing checks to individuals and companies that can provide the required services. (The government could opt to have the US Army Corps of Engineers perform many of these services, but let’s ignore that case.)

So the result would be a positive $100 billion deposit to business accounts in the private sector.

Now imagine that after a couple of years of infrastructure improvements the deficit hawks win out and Congress decides to balance the federal budget. Doing so would add a positive $100 billion to the government’s ledger, bringing its balance to zero. But that positive $100 billion would have to be offset by a negative $100 billion in the private sector.

What does that negative $100 billion represent? That is Uncle Sam reaching into the bank accounts of private citizens and businesses to extract $100 billion. Exactly who will pay that $100 billion would depend on other government policies, such as tax policy. But the net effect is that the private sector will see $100 billion in liquidity evaporate. That is the recipe for a recession.

What about inflation? Doesn’t government spending always result in inflation? Didn’t Milton Friedman win the Nobel Prize for that insight?

Let’s go back to our example of a $100 billion spend on infrastructure improvements, and let’s imagine that at that time the national economy is running at 100% capacity. Every business is fully booked, and there is 0% unemployment nationwide. Now Congress jumps in and requests bids for $100 billion of infrastructure improvement services. In this case it’s pretty likely that the bidding service providers will offer their services for a premium price– which means that prices for such services will generally tend to go up.

But would that affect the general consumer? For general consumer products such as home electronics and groceries– no, probably not. But the increased demand for infrastructure services would likely put upward pressure on the cost of building new housing, since most housing foundations require excavation, grading, and cement footings. So there would very likely be a modest side effect on the Consumer Price Index.

When Congress funds new weapons systems for the US military, such purchases are relatively unlikely to affect the CPI since consumers can’t purchase warplanes or submarines at their favorite retail outlets. But there may be side effects. Weapons systems may require the use of specialized materials, such as rare earths, that might also be used for some consumer products, and the government induced increase in demand could result in an increase in prices for some categories of consumer goods.

All of the above analysis would be different if the economy were not running at full capacity. In that case it might be that businesses that provide the required services are hungry for work and therefore wouldn’t bid their services at premium prices.

Now let’s consider a different case. Imagine that Congress decides to buy flat screen TVs for every classroom in America. Since the government doesn’t have flat screen TV manufacturing facilities in its tool set it would have to go to the private sector to purchase flat screen TVs– and the increased demand would almost certainly put upward pressure on the prices of consumer electronics. That would definitely affect the CPI.

The point is that the impact of government spending on the nation’s economy depends on the state of the economy at the time of the expense and on the specific sectors of the economy that would be impacted by the increase in demand generated by the government’s requirements.

The primary constraint on government spending is inflation. So long as we are keeping an eagle eye on inflation, so long as we don’t allow inflation to spin out of control, government spending is not in and of itself a crisis. The accumulated “debt” of the federal government is simply a record of the funds that Congress has allocated for the good of the nation and it will never need to be repaid.

I underwent a massive re-think of my understanding of the federal deficit when I read “The Deficit Myth” by Stephanie Kelton. Ms. Kelton is a world class economist whose book clearly articulates the true nature of the federal deficit. I heartily recommend her book for those interested in a deeper dive. Most of the above is based on her book.

_____________________________________________________________

Notes:

1 “The Deficit Myth” by Stephanie Kelton, Chapter 4

2. “The Deficit Myth”, pg. 180-181

3. “The Deficit Myth”, pg. 96

A More Perfect Union

In 1789 the US Constitution was innovative and daring. It established the United States as a representative federation with some democratic elements. It was a radical departure from the norms of the time in that most every other government was either a monarchy or an autocracy.

Other nations found the US Constitution inspiring. The soaring words of the Declaration of Independence promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all, while the Constitution guaranteed protection from the depredations of an oppressive ruling class. Other nations adopted the Constitution as a template for their own governing principles.

But many of the anti-democratic elements of the Constitution were eventually discarded by other countries. Although some included a variation of the Electoral College in their own constitutions, all of them discarded it as unfair. The United States is the only major country with democratic-like government that still retains an Electoral College. See Chapter 7, “America the Outlier” from Tyranny of the Minority by Levitsky and Ziblatt for a brief history of these changes.

There are many other anachronisms in the US Constitution. Because the US Constitution is so hard to amend it has become stagnant and rooted in the past. For example, the Senate was designed to represent states, not people. There was much debate during the Federal Convention about how the Senate should be structured. The debate got so testy that it was handed off to a committee for resolution. The two primary advocates of direct representation of the people rather than states (Wilson and Madison), were purposefully excluded from the committee. The decision to cave in to the demands of low population states had already been made.

To improve the democratic profile of the US Constitution I propose the following 7 principles:

The Constitution should be much easier to amend. The requirement that amendments be approved by three quarters of the states is particularly onerous.
The president and vice president should be elected by the people directly, that he/she may represent the people of the nation as a whole, not the states.
The method of the election of representatives in the House should ensure that representation is proportional to population across the entire country, rather than skewed to the advantage of low population states.
The method of the election of senators should represent the people of the nation, rather than states.
The sizes of the House of Representatives and of the Senate should remain permanently fixed, regardless of the size of the nation’s population or the number of states.
Representatives and senators should represent the national character, not the characters of state defined localities.
The members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate should be selected by different methods to ensure that they represent two different aspects of the American character.

These 7 principles would eliminate most of the anti-democratic barriers in the current US Constitution and its amendments. While several possible structures for the House and the Senate could be compatible with the above 6 principles, I propose the following:

Change the Constitution to require that amendments be approved by two thirds votes in both House and Senate, rather than by three quarters of the states.
Eliminate the Electoral College for both the president and vice president.
The numbers of persons in the House of Representatives and of the Senate should be based on the psychology of group decision making, rather than on the numbers of states, or the numbers of citizens.
We traditionally think of the Senate as the more measured and deliberative body; so we would probably want the number of senators to be smaller than the number of representatives.
Representatives should be elected from national groupings based on relative population density, as this is the greatest single contributor to differences of perspective across the nation.
Senators should be selected from national groupings that are based on something other than population density. I suggest that senators should be chosen from random national groupings. That would ensure that senators represent the nation as a whole, regardless of their geographical origins.
Voter registration should be nationalized by adding a new data element to the Social Security Administration’s database of every American citizen for the state in which the citizen is registered to vote. Then require every state to update that field whenever a citizen registers to vote in that state. This will eliminate registration ambiguity.
Amend Article I Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution to state that members of the House and Senate can only block a vote to move a process forward with a 40% vote of the members. Then those of the blocking minority would have a limited period of time– I recommend 72 hours– to persuade the other members of Congress to their view. After that time the legislation must be brought to the floor for a vote. Only one such blockage can be issued for any one piece of legislation.

These changes would permanently eliminate gerrymandering, would eliminate voter registration ambiguities, and would ensure that both House and Senate represent the people of the nation as a whole, rather than local within-state groups. And they would ensure that proposed measures could be blocked by minorities only through concerted effort by those minorities.

These principles can be extended to the individual states. Doing so would ensure that state legislatures are representative of the people of their respective states in the same manner as the national government represents the nation as a whole.

Book Review: Tyranny of the Minority

Earlier I reviewed How Democracies Die, published in 2018 by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Tyranny of the Minority was published in 2023 by the same two authors, both of them professors of Government at Harvard University.

This book isn’t a sequel to their earlier book. How Democracies Die is a sweeping study of democracies around the world. Tyranny is focused chiefly on the United States, though it burgeons with the lessons of democracies around the world.

Much of the book is a history lesson of how the United States evolved from being at the very forefront of the global experiment in democracy as a method of government to lagging far behind other democracies. Certainly the US Constitution is a marvel of political innovation. The three branches of government, each serving to check and balance the others; the bicameral legislature; a president elected (indirectly) by the people; the Bill of Rights; the power to amend the Constitution itself through a regular process– each of these was a major innovation. The US Constitution served as a model for the constitutions of many other countries, many of which are strong, healthy democracies today.

But most of the other countries that adopted some form of the US Constitution as their original template have radically revised their own constitutions to make them more suitable to contemporary social purposes and needs. The authors explain that many countries had some form of indirect voting for their legislatures or for their presidents, as was originally implemented in the US Constitution. (Article I Section 3 says that the members of the Senate would be elected by the state legislatures; the 17th Amendment changed that to support direct election by the people of each state. And the people elect electors to the Electoral College, which in turn elects the president.) But most of them got rid of it. Here’s what the authors have to say about it:

By the late nineteenth century, France and the Netherlands had eliminated the powerful local councils that had previously selected members of parliament; Norway, Prussia, and Sweden did the same in the early twentieth century. France experimented with an electoral college for a single presidential election in the late 1950s but then dropped it. Electoral colleges gradually disappeared across Latin America. Columbia eliminated its electoral college in 1964 under military rule but replaced it with direct presidential elections in 1988. Argentina, the last country in Latin America with indirect presidential elections, dropped its electoral college in 1994.
Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 205

Here in the US, there have been many proposals to eliminate the Electoral College– and they have all failed, usually in the Senate.

The US Constitution is encumbered with many counter-majoritarian components, several of which prevent the majority of the American people from getting what they want from their government. The counter-majoritarian elements are enumerated in Tyranny as follows:

The Bill of Rights
A Supreme Court with lifetime appointments and the power to declare legislation passed by Congress incompatible with the Constitution
Federalism, which grants many powers to the states
A bicameral legislature, requiring majorities in two different houses for the passage of any legislation
A radically skewed representation in the Senate
The filibuster, which requires a 60% majority in the Senate to end debate (and which can now be enacted with nothing more than an email)
The Electoral College
Radically restrictive rules for implementing constitutional change: 2/3 vote of each house in Congress and 3/4 ratification by the states

(Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 147 – 148)

The Bill of Rights grants many privileges to citizens that we certainly want to protect and defend, so that component is actually protective of democracy. Similarly we want the courts to ensure that our laws are consistent with our principles– so granting the Supreme Court the power of judicial review is reasonable, and potentially protective of democracy. But lifetime tenure on the court can serve as an obstruction to change and for that reason it is more likely to contribute to stagnation.

(I would have added the Apportionment Act of 1929 to the above list, as that legislation capped the number of members of the House at 435. That, coupled with the constraint that each state must get at least one representative, has resulted in a massive over-representation of low population states. For example, the state of California has about 26% less representation in the House than it should have on the basis of population alone.)

The authors show that the many counter-majoritarian elements of the US Constitution have produced the result that the US is a true laggard among modern democracies. Here is how the authors express it:

America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College, rather than directly by voters. Only in America can a president be “elected against the majority expressed at the polls.”

America is one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber that is severely malapportioned due to the “equal representation of unequal states” (only Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most important, it is the world’s only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities.

America is one of the few established democracies (along with Canada, India, Jamaica, and the U.K.) with first-past-the-post electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be manufactured into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that win fewer votes to win legislative majorities.

America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. All other established democracies have either term limits, a mandatory retirement age, or both.

Among democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change, for it requires supermajorities in two legislative chambers plus the approval of three-quarters of the states.
Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 217

Americans tend to think of the US Constitution as an ideal of completed perfection. It is not; and in fact the very extensive evidence the authors present shows that the US Constitution is greatly in need of reform. The US has become stagnant, relative to other democracies throughout the world, and it is time that the American people were alerted to that fact.

This book and its predecessor are absolutely essential to anyone who wants to understand the place of democracy in the world and in our country. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how best to preserve and extend our democracy.

Book Review: How Democracies Die

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, was published in 2018. It’s a broad overview of how democracies have died in countries around the world. The authors are professors of government at Harvard University.

The purpose of the book is to answer the question of whether the United States is in danger of losing its democracy. To that end, in Chapter One the authors list four indicators of authoritarian behavior. These are:

Rejection of democratic rules of the game
Denial of the legitimacy of one’s political opponents
Toleration of, or encouragement of, violence
Readiness to curtail the political liberties of opponents and of the media

They provide many specific examples of these behaviors from the historical record of democracies that died in Europe and in South America, including those of Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Poland, and Russia.

Some democracies have died in a palace coup, but over the last several decades the chief method of destroying a democracy has been to weaken in from within, as Hitler did. First, win power through normal democratic means: get elected to office. Then, weaken democratic institutions by:

Capturing referees: Buy off, threaten, or exile judges, internal investigators, monitors– anyone in a position to follow behind-the-scenes machinations, expose them to the public, or bring them to an end.

Sidelining key players: Bring anyone with economic power or political capital to heel, through any means available. Allow business interests to thrive– so long as they don’t interfere with politics. Demand loyalty from popular cultural figures and punish those who fail to comply. Pack the courts and government positions with loyalists to ensure that no one contradicts the goals of leadership.

Changing the rules: If the law limits a leader’s term of office, change the law. If appointments to cabinet positions require the consent of Congress, dissolve Congress. If the Constitution limits the power of the Executive, suspend the Constitution.

These stratagems have succeeded in many countries around the world. They together constitute a standard playbook for wannabe dictators the world over. Be patient and follow these simple rules over the course of several years and your victory is assured.

Is America under threat of losing its democracy? The authors show by example from the public record that Donald Trump exhibited all four of the autocratic behaviors they listed in Chapter One while he was running for office in 2016! The warning signs were available then, and they are even more evident now. If Trump were to return to office he has said that he will be a dictator on Day One– but only on Day One. Sorry, but that’s just not how true dictators roll. Toward the end of his first term of office he entertained Michael Flynn’s idea of declaring Martial Law and of seizing voting machines from around the country. He said that he wanted the US military to shoot protesters, and he wanted the Custom Border Patrol to shoot anyone who approaches the southern border. He even talked openly of suspending the Constitution. And of course ever since November 2020 he has yelled that the election was stolen from him. Trump very definitely exhibits all of the characteristics of a dictator. So YES, America could lose its democracy.

In fact there are many powerful interest groups that have openly declared their opposition to democracy. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is an agenda which they and their alliance of more than 80 conservative organizations expect that the next Republican president will enact. Chief among its objectives is the replacement of the “Deep State” with party loyalists. That is the very essence of the authoritarian principle of “Sidelining key players” described above.

The authors of How Democracies Die have released a book titled Tyranny of the Minority in September of 2023. When I’ve had a chance to read it I’ll post a separate review here.

Trusting Democracy

On many of the major issues of the day the American people can’t get what they actually want from the federal government. Here are some examples:

65% of Americans support keeping abortion legal in all or most cases

(https://www.prri.org/research/abortion-attitudes-in-a-post-roe-world-findings-from-the-50-state-2022-american-values-atlas/?cid=eml_firstread_20230224)

61% of Americans support a ban on sales of assault weapons

77% support a 30 day waiting period

80% support allowing police officers to take weapons away from those deemed to be a danger to themselves or others

80% support mental health background checks for gun purchases

81% support increasing the age for gun ownership to 21

81% support improving enforcement of existing gun laws

87% support requiring criminal background checks on all gun purchases

(https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/gun-policy-republicans-ignore-americans-consensus-views-rcna82220)

65% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on education

63% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on health care

62% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on social security

58% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on medicare

53% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on border security

(https://apnews.com/article/spending-budget-poll-biden-cd55f1c3859b62a861cdbdc0cd23bd79)

And yet getting changes to public policy at the national level on any of the above issues is nearly impossible. The federal government just isn’t listening to what Americans actually want.

Why is that? First let’s consider the House of Representatives. The Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of members of the House at 435 (with some very limited exceptions). The Constitution states (in Article I Section 2) that every state must have at least 1 representative. Those two constraints together have resulted in a situation in which states of low population are vastly overrepresented. It has gotten so bad that as of the 2020 Census the state of California has about 28% less representation in the House than it should on the basis of population alone. That is grossly unfair to the people of California, but the same problem affects the voters of every state with more than the average state population.

Then there’s the Senate. As of the 2020 Census there are 9 states that between them have more than 50% of total U.S. population. The residents of those 9 states therefore have only 18% representation in the Senate. The remaining 82% of the power in the Senate is held by states that together contain less than 50% of total population. That, too, is grossly unfair to the voters of the most populous states.

And finally we must discuss the Electoral College. The sole reason why the 2020 election devolved into strident claims of voter fraud is because of the existence of the Electoral College. Joe Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes. And yet Trump had only to flip 5,900 votes in Georgia, 10,400 votes in Wisconsin, and 5,300 votes in Arizona to produce an Electoral College tie, and that would have thrown the final decision into the House of Representatives where the Republican Party had a solid majority. Despite his 7 million vote majority in the popular vote Biden was less than 22,000 votes from losing the entire election to Donald Trump. That represents about 0.3% of Biden’s 7 million vote margin.

These disparities are the product of bad governmental design. Our Constitution is not serving us well and it is long past time for drastic reform. And what should that reform look like? I propose that we trust democracy– and the people. The only way to make the federal government more responsive to the needs and desires of the people is to make it more democratic, not less. In pursuit of that end I propose the following principles:

1. The President should be elected solely on the basis of the popular vote. The Electoral College must be abolished.

2. The House should represent all people across the nation equally in proportion to the national population.

3. The Senate should also represent the people, not states. The states have been guaranteed all the rights they require in Article IV of the Constitution. There is no need for states to have separate representation at the federal level.

4. The House and the Senate should have separate responsibilities, and therefore different characters and processes.

5. Both the Senate and House should be capped at a fixed number of members, regardless of the number of states in the union or the size of the nation’s population. This will ensure that neither body grows without bound as the nation grows.

6. The size of each body should be based on the optimal size for a body that must efficiently conduct the affairs of each as defined under Principle # 4 above.

7. The Senate and the House should represent different aspects of the national character, not the character of local within-state regions. This implies that different methods of selection should be used for the members of the two bodies.

8. The methods of selection employed in satisfaction of Principle #7 should be designed to correlate strongly with the separate characters of the two bodies as defined in Principle #4.

Only Principle #4 above is currently guaranteed in the Constitution. All of the remaining principles would require significant changes to the Constitution itself. And should you wonder if it is possible for any system to comply with Principles 1 through 8 above, I can assure you that the answer is Yes. I have a specific proposal for that, but I would be happy to consider any system that fully comports with all of these principles. Let me hear yours.

The Constitution has been amended 27 times thus far. The overall trend over the history of the country has been to expand suffrage to ever greater numbers of people, and to expand the rights of individuals to guarantee and protect their freedoms. If anything the above Principles would strengthen our nation by extending the democratic elements of our government and by turning more power over to the people themselves. Trust the people!

Get Woke!

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has declared war on “woke.” “Florida,” he said, “is the place where woke goes to die.” The DeSantis administration has defined woke as:

…the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.
DeSantis administration

So are there systemic injustices in America? Yes, absolutely there are. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer highlighted the fact that police officers have far too often been able to get away with reckless brutality and murder of persons in their custody. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery brought the injustice of a Civil War era law in the state of Georgia under such public scrutiny that the state legislature was forced to change the law and to implement Georgia’s first ever hate crimes law. On January 12th 2023 the Justice Department ordered City National Bank to pay $31 million for its refusal to underwrite mortgages in predominantly Black and Latino districts– a behavior that was outlawed in 1968. All of these examples show that there are indeed deep and pervasive injustices in American society. Perhaps those who use the term “woke” derisively just don’t think that any such injustices warrant a solution.

Why do such injustices persist in a nation that is supposed to stand for “liberty and justice for all”? At a national level it’s chiefly because we live under minority rule. Let’s begin with the House of Representatives. The U.S. Constitution (in Article I Section 2) says that every state must get at least one representative in the House. And the Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the total number of representatives at 435. Those two constraints together have conspired to over-represent states of low population. California, for example, has about 27% less representation in the House than it should have on the basis of population alone.

The Senate is designed to represent states, not the people, since each state gets two senators irrespective of population. There are 9 states that together have about 51% of total U.S. population. That gives those 9 states only 18% representation in the Senate. That means that less than half the people in the United States have control of 82% of the votes in the Senate. That is, the Senate massively over-represents states with low population. Do you want to know why the Senate is the place where legislation goes to die? That’s why.

And of course there is the Electoral College. In the first 23 years of this century we have already had two presidents who won their elections with a minority of the popular vote– because of the rules governing the Electoral College. And those rules give favor to states of low population.

So the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency are all under the control of a minority faction of the American public– a faction that predominantly favors rural perspectives. Rural America has been steadily diminishing over the past 233 years. In 1790 about 5% of total U.S. population was located in urban centers. Now the number is over 89%. The U.S. Constitution as currently amended over-represents a diminishing portion of American society. And that is an injustice that most definitely needs to be addressed.

Anonymity and social discord

Hyperbole has long been the political agitator’s weapon of choice. It costs nothing, and for those of the audience who are susceptible to fear it can be very effective. Now technology has given such antagonists an even greater reason to employ exaggeration. The tools of email, text messaging, and social media allow users to adopt aliases by which to disguise their true identities. This possibility means that the cost for employing hyperbole as a weapon is even lower. Whatever is said anonymously cannot be traced back to a person, so the author suffers no penalty for vile and deceitful rhetoric. The result to society has been a ratcheting up of exaggeration and lies. The shield of an alias makes it easier to use coarse language, to insult and demean those with whom one disagrees, and to cast even relatively small issues as evidence of our inexorable slide into the abyss.

There are certainly good reasons for social media platforms to support anonymity. Whistle blowers, for example, should be protected from retaliation, and the best way to allow them to present their evidence without fear is to give them a way to submit their testimonials anonymously. Witnesses to criminal behavior may need the shield of anonymity while those being charged are tried.

But anonymity is not necessary for most discourse. Anonymity is not likely to improve discussion of, say, public transportation policy. In fact, knowing the true identities of all parties to such a discussion is far more likely to result in respectful dialogue and an exchange of gainful ideas.

Spammers and scammers use fake identities to conceal their true purposes– fake names, fake email addresses, fake phone numbers from your own area code. Why do we allow this? What is the value to society to allowing people to use a fake phone number whose only purpose is to trick the person receiving the call into believing that the caller is someone nearby, someone he may know? I can think of no reason why a caller from Mumbai should be allowed to use a phone number that appears to have originated from your own neighborhood. But telecom companies no doubt make a lot of money by offering such “services.”

As for IP addresses, we could demand that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) disallow anonymous connections, that they ensure that every IP address points back to a real person at a real physical address, and that their directories of IP addresses and person names are available to the general public. That would enable any user of the ISP’s services to convert a user’s IP address to a real name, face, and physical address.

The problem with this option is that there are perfectly valid uses for anonymous connections. Users who work from home may need anonymous connections to defend against man-in-the-middle attacks. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) provides anonymous connections, and it ensures that the entire exchange of information between user and host is fully encrypted, end-to-end. VPN appliances are in common use by private citizens, corporations, and government for all of the reasons cited. So even though a VPN can enable the user to connect to servers in other countries to further disguise the true origin of the connection, it’s far too late to claw back those devices now.

Most ISPs provide some variation of a spam blocker, and a way to report spammers. That is certainly a good start, but each ISP has a different method for reporting spammers, and a different URL. Google, for example, has a special form for reporting spam. The Google form is available here: https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse. This form forces the user to parse the offending email into separate components: Source email address, Subject, Body, and Headers. But Comcast simply asks the user to forward suspect messages to abuse@comcast.net. These different methods are confusing to the user, and there is little evidence that they are coordinated. If you receive an email at your personal AOL email account that originated from a Hotmail user account, should you report it to AOL, or to Hotmail? In the present state of the market you should report it to Hotmail, since only Hotmail can remove that user from their subscriber database. But if the user forwards the message to AOL rather than Hotmail, will AOL in turn forward it to Hotmail? Answer: probably not.

It would be far easier for users of email clients if they could simply report all spam to one URL, and leave it up to the ISPs to monitor that URL, parse the suspect messages, and assign them to the correct responsible parties. Email clients should make it easy for users to block and report suspect messages, to flag specific email addresses as suspicious, and to whitelist addresses that the user knows are trustworthy. The email clients that are on the market today are by no means uniform in their handling of these use cases.

What about the problem of anonymity? As mentioned above there will always be a need for anonymous connections. But I would suggest that there is also a need for a system that allows users to consciously accept or block anonymous and fake users. When you log into such a system the default would be to block all anonymous and fake users, but you would have the ability to accept such users on a case by case basis. Such a system would put the user in control of the type of information he or she receives. And that is something that is sorely missing in the present market.