This emerging vision of a social structure defined by love, which we’ve been exploring since the Women’s Marches on Washington, goes by many names: intersectional feminism, eco-social sustainability, social democracy (arguably), the indigenous model (very possibly). The difficulty in naming it as a vision or movement or party (yikes) might be because it is really just love and emotional maturity.

What we have in the current Republican regime couldn’t be further from the freedom possible within a structure of love. Rather, it is the apex of the archaic vision of license by a dominator, oppressor, or conqueror wrapped around a structure of power and wealth. As I write that, an image of the president’s family residence at Trump Towers comes to mind. A more licentious world of luxury could hardly be imagined than the sumptuous and lavish décor of his gold-plated home with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, along with his gold-plated jet. That is some replica of the social structure the Republicans are trying to complete, which is a white “Christian” patriarchy ruled by the top dozen or so families of wealth and power in the world. “America First” doesn’t mean anything like paying attention to our needs above others, which might be selfish enough; it means these corporate moguls will rule the world in the model of 41st president George H. W. Bush’s “new world order.” What we are seeing is that very world order gilded into place by the logical conclusion of the dominator mindset: a cabal of uninformed and uneducated, misogynistic, bigoted emotionally immature egotists with vainglorious appetites of gargantuan proportion.

During the campaign, the Republican candidate made it abundantly clear that he was not a politician but a very successful businessman. He bragged about how much he was worth. During the debates, his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton intimated that maybe he refused to release his tax returns because he hadn’t paid any taxes, to which he responded, “Because I’m smart.” I know, many wealthy Americans may agree with the Republican president that anyone rich who can avoid paying taxes is smart. But only if you see citizenship from a selfish, egocentric, and self-serving standpoint. From our point of view, it’s not only un-American and manipulative, it’s exploitative, particularly when you consider his affluence is so extravagant because he uses bankruptcy laws to avoid paying anybody. This actually puts his wealth at the expense of the government, honest taxpayers, and devastated businesses and material suppliers. Mind you, he also has a habit of simply refusing to pay for work completed, even without the benefit of bankruptcy laws, saying the work wasn’t up to his standards. He’s involved in a multitude of lawsuits because of this habit. It seems to us that the practice of not paying either working people or We the People is not the result of being smart, but rather, the practiced method of a con artist and a charlatan. He is enriching himself at our expense.

Still, he is mostly a distraction from a Republican Congress that seems bent on destroying the planet and bankrupting the people at our expense. This can only continue at the peril of life on earth. This is not hyperbole—it’s not just liberals and malcontents who are alarmed, it’s scientists.

We’ve talked a lot in these blogs about structural racism and sexism, but women and men weren’t only marching on January 21 and regularly since to elevate the lots of women and people of color. They were and are expressing anger toward the overall structural unfairness in our system as much as they were and are expressing a vision to rebuild that structure toward the good of all. The good of all—doesn’t that sound curiously similar to liberty and justice for all? That pledge to the flag and “the republic for which it stands” that schoolchildren and others recite every morning in this country, believing it? Well, yes, the Constitution purports to protect the good of all. It only doesn’t because those administering it cherish only power and wealth, which are based on scarcity—there only being enough for some—and for those few, there is never enough. But we need our administrators instead to value love, which is charged with making things right for everyone, just as nature does in the aggregate, when we don’t undermine it.

Here is an example of structural unfairness in our system. It’s clear that the tax code favors the very rich and the corporations: they pay lower percentages on their cached wealth and get more write-offs for their expenses. For example, the “very successful” Republican president reported a $916 million one-year business loss, which allowed him to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over the following 18-year period from 1996 to 2014. That meant he could still pay himself millions of dollars every year. According to tax experts, he could have easily reported $50 million in annual income every one of those 18 years and never paid a penny in federal tax. In stark contrast to what we really need, his administration urges tax reforms that give rich individuals and corporations even greater tax advantages than they already have, which if his tax break is any indication, bears no resemblance to the burden that every middle-class taxpayer carries. The fact that the cached wealth of the top 1 percent is more than the rest of us have altogether, should explain why costs are high, wages are low, and infrastructure is crumbling.

The tax code helps to keep that structure in place. But it’s our values that create the structure and the tax code. That structure is not going to change until we dismantle the value of the dominator mindset and replace it with the love of cooperative, collaborative partnership and a value of social and environmental sustainability and start administering that healthy, sustainable ecosystem, which by definition includes everything—people and government, economies and cultures, the planet and everything living upon it.

And that’s what the Women’s Movement is really about, has always been about. Because until all women have control over their own bodies, and the health of all women’s bodies is supported by government just as government supports the health of the white men that run it, there will be no value for taking care of the environment, no sense of cultural equality, no loving center that sees the value of all and a way forward that holds us all. Because this is where the mindset gets its seed: women as other, not-Man, possibly not human, while Man is human, God’s unique creation and the steward of but not part of Nature. This is perhaps the first fake news, the first alternative fact, the first lie ever believed.

Is it any wonder that women around the world are fed up? That they feel their needs as women continue to be ignored in favor of the needs of business, government, men, even children, but especially corporations and their wealthy white males’ wish for more and more power (money)? Will the Women’s Movement get its “legs” and be seen as standing for all people? Will people recognize that the basis of love and caring tends to be learned from the mother and not the father, not because of nature but because of choice? Or that all these centuries of romanticizing the role of the Father through the male gods and their sons have created an unbalanced system that veers treacherously close to disaster on every scale, political and environmental? And that the diminished role of the Mother as only caring for others and never standing up to say no more has contributed to that unbalanced system?

More practically, since the Republican alternative hasn’t worked in the past, keeping at least half if not three-quarters of the (mostly Brown) world in poverty and chaos, including most women worldwide, we need to understand that it will continue to not work in the future. We must begin to recognize that any good government begins and ends with parameters of love and kindness toward its own people and nations abroad. But bigger than that, the future of our very existence depends on a change in our values. It’s not just that hate and revenge are lousy standards by which to govern; we also must recognize that it’s not power and dominance that ultimately works for the good of all but cooperation and consensus that politicians and nonpoliticians alike should strive for in any communication. Only then will we save our planet from climate collapse and our nation from democracy collapse. This shouldn’t be such a huge leap, for we will just be responding to the Constitutional dictum that states the government was designed for all the people, not just for the rich and powerful few, whose acquisition of that wealth and power only continues by our agreement.

______________________________________________

Kathryn L. Robyn and H. John Lyke are the authors of Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government.