Summary: We’re losing to the 1%, and articles like this show why. Reformers dream of changes to the system (like the amendments proposed here) while the 1% builds the machinery to make changes happen. They’ve invested the time, effort and money; now they reap their reward. It need not be this way. {1st of 2 posts today.}
“The throne is never vacant.”
— Russian aphorism. If we choose not to govern, then others will.
“It’s Not Too Late: Save Democracy By Amending the Constitution“
By John Nichols, The Nation, 6 April 2015
“Corporations are not people, money is not speech,
and votes must matter more than billionaires’ dollars.”
Nothing locks in inequality and dysfunction like a constitution so imprecise that it allows right-wing judicial activists to make buying elections easy and voting in them hard. But don’t just blame “constitutional conservatives” for turning our founding document into an outline for oligarchy. Fret about liberal constitutionalists who imagine we’re just one thrilling presidential appointment away from making our democratic vistas real. Like Democrats dreaming of another FDR, liberals waiting for another Earl Warren miss the point. Our democratic destiny is not something to wait for — it’s something we have to make happen. Dissident Americans have been bending the arc of history by rewriting the US Constitution since amendments were added with quill pens. Today’s dissenters should be about the business of doing so once more.
… The real friends of the Constitution today champion a “move to amend” that would declare that corporations are not people, that money is not speech, and that votes must matter more than billionaires’ dollars. Sixteen states and some 600 communities have recently demanded that Congress initiate a constitutional response to the judicial activism that has allowed elites to commodify our politics and corporatize our governance. At the same time, activists are taking up a proposal by Congressmen Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison to end the crude assault on voting rights with an amendment that establishes, finally and unequivocally, a right to vote and to have every vote counted. These are good starting points, but they are not an end to anything.
The Constitution should be clarified so that it sustains rather than throttles democracy. Do away with the Electoral College. Ban the practice of gerrymandering. Close the loophole that allows governors to appoint cronies to vacant Senate seats. And then get serious: ask, as Congressman Victor Berger did more than a century ago, why America maintains a House of Lords–like Senate where, today, the vote of a member elected by 121,000 Wyomingites can cancel out the vote of a member elected by 7.8 million Californians.
… Opening up a big debate requires faith in humanity. And even those who harbor such faith will ask: How can we, the people, ever beat the billionaires and media moguls of a digital age? As if it was easy to beat the robber barons and press lords of the new twentieth century on behalf of amendments to elect senators, impose taxes and enfranchise women. Yes, going to the root of the matter is daunting. But the alternative is a strategy of managing democratic decline. And that is no strategy for a left that seeks a transformative politics. …
This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, are here.
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This is what passes for political insight today. The 1% have gained economic and political power from our apathy and passivity. They dominate both major political parties. There are no substantial alternative mechanisms for political activity by the outer party and proles now that the unions have been largely neutered. In the absence of these, any amendments to the Constitution will benefit the 1%.
Dreaming about wonderful changes is the equivalent of asking in song “Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?” rely on blind “faith in humanity” is a dangerous course, as history teaches us. I suggest to put our faith instead in hard work, because our problem is not a lack of nifty ideas about goals, but discussion about means — the connecting link between information as entertainment and dreams of great deeds. How do we recruit, train, and motivate people to organize for political reform, and begin the long, difficult, and probably high-risk trek to a New America? That’s the subject that few discuss.
When organizations exist to harness the energies of a people committed to reform, then will be he time for big dreams. Eventually we’ll have enough strength to challenge the 1% directly with Constitutional amendments.
Meanwhile we dream while we lose, getting weak with the passage of every day.
For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For tales of the New America arising around us on the ruins of the see the new GOP budget, judges burning the Constitution, and ever-bolder police militarization and brutality. You might enjoy other posts about the Constitution. Especially see these about the peril of our situation:
- Watch as plutocrats mold us into a New America, a nation more pleasing to their sight.
- The bad news about reforming America: time is our enemy.
If you would like to action after reading this see Reforming America: steps to new politics. Also see these about amending the Constitution:
- Is it time to take the drastic step of calling a Constitutional Convention?
- Was the 1787 Constitutional Convention a runaway, in effect a second revolution?
- Could a new Constitutional Convention help reform America? Is it worth the risk?
