Unlike my previous books, I wrote Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government with a coauthor, Kathryn Robyn. It is the last of a trilogy of political books, each of which stands on its own. Before I talk about why we are both excited about our current book, I’d like to tell you a little about the earlier books so you’ll get a better idea why I needed to write Political Straight Talk in the first place.
With the first book, The Impotent Giant: How to Reclaim the Moral High Ground of America’s Politics, I wanted to explore why I no longer felt as proud of my country as I felt growing up. In that process, I also learned how very “impotent” our country was in our efforts to protect our “vital interests,” whether it be oil or defending our homeland from foreign aggression. Since the turn of this century, with each passing year, our efforts to regain our sense of power and, in the process, our prestige around the world continues to diminish. In like fashion, my pride in what my country stood for continued to diminish from one year to the next.
I wrote my second political book, What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Today’s Leaders Have Lost Their Way, to dig deeper. I wasn’t satisfied with just scraping the surface of my discomfort, comparing how I felt now with how I remembered things as a child in the early FDR years and through World War II. To get a more comprehensive understanding of how our country had changed, I went back to the late Colonial period that preceded the writing of the Declaration of Independence and learned everything I could about that period through to the ratification of the Constitution after the Revolutionary War and George Washington’s initiating presidency.
I compared and contrasted the political climate of our forefathers and their fellow colonists with that of today’s political atmosphere. The contrast was stark and troublesome. What made today’s situation feel so grim and not even minimally acceptable was the way that the wholeness and unity, so central to our nation’s identity of virtue and moral excellence—our country’s integrity—seemed to have already reached its zenith by the end of Washington’s two terms. In his farewell address, President Washington spoke at length about the “baneful” or deadly effects of political parties. He already felt them to be extremely harmful to our political system and predicted that they could ultimately destroy our freedoms. As the parties developed, we see the deterioration that eventually leads to where we are today.
Political Straight Talk picks up where the other two books left off, digging even deeper into how we began and where we have ended up. It reflects my learning more about the seeds of our demise being planted early on: in those very Founding Fathers’ sense of wholeness and integrity leaving out huge parts of our population and acting without accountability against those whom they didn’t want to be counted as part of the whole. We show how that very compartmentalization, enhanced by the political parties, has brought us to the polarization that we see today. But Political Straight Talk also goes further; it offers definitive steps we can take to heal our broken system of government.
Today, the chasm that exists between our political parties is horrendous and at a dead end. As each year progressed since we became a “two-party system,” by tacit agreement but not by law, as our country moved from an agrarian to an industrial society, as it moved from an industrial society to a corporate one, the Republican and Democratic parties have become more clearly controlled by the moneyed interests. Over the last few decades, corporations have become more effective in gaining control over the political process, and our politicians have become more clearly subservient to their respective political parties and the corporate interests that support them. Lost in the gap are the American people they were elected to serve and defend.
The crowning blow in eliminating the emphasis the role democracy should play in the democratic process was when the one-person-one-vote rule was declared null and void with the Supreme Court 2010 decision known ironically as Citizens United, which established a legal basis for the idea that corporations are people. This decision completely changed the landscape of American elections, opening the door for billionaires and special interests to spend unlimited and untraceable amounts of money in America’s elections. Now there’s no accountability at all. And no transparency. It clearly provides billionaires and corporations the opportunity to tip the balance of political power in their favor. All of this self-serving behavior allows the rich and powerful to get richer and less numerous, the poor to get poorer and more numerous, and the middle class to shrink further in size and vigor.
No wonder Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are finding large crowds at their presidential primary rallies. They are both fed up with how the Washington DC establishment operates. Or so they say, and their enthusiastic followers agree.
When we think of the political establishment, we can’t help but think about the corporation as a person with an incredibly deep pocket or Super PACs as their anonymous mouthpieces, but we must turn our attention as well to the political parties themselves. For they are the funnel through which corporate donors, special interests like the National Rifle Association or the political arms of religious groups or trade associations, and their lobbyists keep the politicians well-nourished. The establishment might be said to be a system whereby the rich and powerful keep legislators happy, so that legislators pass laws that make the rich happy and kill laws that make the people happy.
Perhaps that is too cynical of a view. But certainly, it is the view that is fueling the primary campaigns. How much simpler, more honest, and more reliably in service to We the People it would be if one-person-one-vote, without money or historical status having any role at all, was the one and only rule in elections. How else will we put an end to all this rancor?
Our political moral fiber, our nation’s integrity, has continued to erode so much that today, in the middle of the primary election season for president of the United States, in the last Republican debate, which was the most civilized debate the Republicans have had to date, each of the three other candidates, were asked if they would support Donald Trump if he became the Republican choice to run against the Democratic candidate in the general election. Prior to this, Trump had been described in the vilest of terms, with two of the candidates, Senator Mark Rubio and Governor John Kasich, calling him “unfit to be president.” Nevertheless, they each said yes, they would support Trump in the general election, however reluctantly.
Kathryn and I wonder, if all of the Republican candidates think so pejoratively about Trump, how can they justify supporting him if he becomes the Republican presidential candidate in the general election? Perhaps unity is more highly valued than the negative assessment they claim to have. Or perhaps the condemnation itself is mere theater, a cover for their own more veiled but matching opinions, trumped up, as it were, to lure support to themselves. Whatever it really is for them, it is also one of many examples of the candidates’ willingness to betray their integrity with duplicity, saying one thing and doing another. It indicates that the interest of the party, if not simply self-interest, comes before that of the people.
While we are not big fans of the two-party system, we’re also not suggesting candidates should not unify behind their party’s nominee. We’re saying the level of discourse must consider the consequences. How different are these candidates from each other really? Certainly, vulgarity and lying is not acceptable in what should be civil discourse among citizens asking to serve the country. But if a line is drawn and then crossed, and no consequences result, then the social contract becomes meaningless.
On the other hand, purity of ideology does not work in a democracy; it kills compromise. That’s a lot of what our book is about. If a line is drawn too sharply—when words like never, unacceptable, unfit, criminal, crook, liar, and so on crop up in your argument, you are drawing a line—you might be backing your integrity into a corner. On the one hand, you violate your integrity if you say it but don’t really mean it; on the other, you put your integrity at risk if you’re going to need to work together down the road for the good of the whole country no matter how much you disagree on particulars. If the differences are more about style than substance, well, there’s no accounting for taste.
But most importantly, if these insidious and pernicious developments continue, we might predict that by the middle of the century, if not before, we will lose the democratic part of our republic, replaced by an oligarchy, with all the expansions of liberty engendered by the language written into the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, retracted. If, as some say, the white landowning elite who conceived of this nation were being duplicitous themselves when they wrote about We the People and equal justice for all, while giving only white, landowning men citizenship—or if, in contemporary terms, they actually intended a democratic union of the top 1% in wealth alone—then that’s what we’ll have. We do wonder if the Bill of Rights will survive. If they do, it would be in the strictest of terms and, again, only for designated citizens, specifically, white Christian married men with billions in assets … and possibly, with their permission, their white wives.
To guard against such a catastrophe, we’re offering four constitutional amendments to further protect the expansions of liberty and ensure justice for all, moving the evolution of the system more to the language expressed in those documents, if not their application:
- The Twenty-Eighth Amendment: Equal Application of the Law
- The Twenty-Ninth Amendment: Term Limits
- The Thirtieth Amendment: Campaign-Finance Requirements
- The Thirty-First Amendment: Restrictions on Corporate Definition as People
We would love you to read our book and then join our discussion on these pages.