The missing but essential key to building a better America

Larry Kummer, Editor

12 years ago

Summary: Today we have an interruption in our series of posts about the project to reform America, to reflect on its goals and methods. Comments show many readers remain unclear about these things.

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom -— go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!”
— Samuel Adams’ speech to the Philadelphia State House on 1 August 1776

“The problem is choice.”
— Neo in The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Hundreds of posts on the FM website have documented the political crisis of the Second Republic (founded on the Constitution), a sliver of the work done on this great issue by others. The Republic burns, with a New America under construction right now on its ruins. Scores of posts discuss solutions. Goals, strategy, tactics. All in vain.

Our wealthy opponents have a simpler task, rebuilding the America of the Gilded Age. They seek power, order, and control. The ways and means of plutocracy have been polished over millenia. Their capstone tool is propaganda, scientifically perfected during the 20th century.

Against this we have fragments of ideas about reform, a powerful inheritance from the Founders, and centuries of political theory of proven effectiveness. Yet we cannot assemble these pieces together into an effective whole. I see these with the same feeling of despair as I had opening the box late Christmas evening and finding dozens of pieces, all of which must be assembled before dawn into a shiny toy — but no instructions. I know it can be done, but lack a vision of the process. With that perspective the task become possible, requiring only skill and effort.

Why has the Second Republic fallen so? What changed? How can we fix or replace it? We tell ourselves a thousand simple stories answering these questions, stories like those in Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902). “How the camel got his hump”. These represent a creative process, but one as yet without useful result.

“We can never see past the choices we don’t understand.”
— The Oracle in The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

I believe the cause of this lies how we see our condition. We live on the game board, and so do not see the game. Like ants wandering across the black and white squares, seeing the giant pieces looming over us, we cannot determine the nature of the game, its rules, or how we can win. If we can find the right perspective then the answers to the key questions will become obvious, and we can clearly explain both the problem and solution to our fellow Americans. That’s the goal of these posts. The comments show, correctly, that I have made little progress.

“{T}his was the object of the Declaration of Independence. not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we [were] compelled to take.”
— Letter by Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825

Of course, a clear course of action does not mean that victory will be cheap or easy.

“A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. … This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.”

— Ernest E. Evans (Commander, USN), captain of the destroyer USS Johnston, on 25 October 1944 at that victorious Battle off Samar, for which he was posthumously awarded the Metal of Honor