Over the past three years I’ve crisscrossed the eastern United States, from Chicago to Atlanta, Baltimore, Manchester, Charlotte, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Columbus, Madison, New York, DC, Peoria, and most recently Detroit. During the day, you can see forests and farms, cities and towns. But at night, you begin to see a different picture.
Last week I flew from Detroit to Chicago to Indianapolis. Flying in to Chicago from the east, you get a spectacular view of the city, with the city lights stretching out to the horizon. This is the promise of an urban future, millions of people living and working together in pursuit of both their own individual goals, and the betterment of society as a whole. Sure, there are elements of every society that disdain the latter, but their numbers are small, and easily outweighed by everyone else.
Flying from Chicago to Indianapolis, however, you see a different picture. It’s only a 39 minute flight, but seeing it from the air is startling. As you leave O’Hare, the lights grow dimmer the further south you go. Tracing the path of I-65 as it winds its way through hundreds of miles of farmland, the lights go out altogether, and all that’s left are the dark places between cities and towns. This is a view of my home state that I had never seen before; I had always driven it and never really noticed just how little there was out there.
When the Founding Fathers gathered to write the Constitution, they were faced with a choice: do we as a nation allow slavery in the interests of forming a more perfect Union, or do we take a moral stand against it that would almost assuredly tear the still-young country apart? Ultimately the die was cast, and the United States was born: half slave, half free. The slaveowners knew even then that their days were numbered, and as a result extracted from the young nation a pair of compromises – the Electoral College, a means of ensuring that the urban and populous North would not be able to run roughshod over the rural South. With it also came the Three-Fifths Compromise, where slaves would could as 3/5ths of a person for the purposes of determining electors in this college.
There is no small amount of irony that less than a hundred years later, when the abolitionist movement gained sufficient steam to finally begin to erode the power of the slaveowning South, the South elected to leave the Union by force, so threatened were they by the forces of progress.
In conjunction with the creation of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers also wrote the Federalist Papers, to sell the idea of the Constitution to a voting populace that was wary of a strong central government, having so recently escaped the yolk of the British crown. In it, Alexander Hamilton framed the Electoral College as a safeguard against the rise of tyrants and demagogues that might inflame the passions of the people to such a degree that they elected a man unfit for highest office, so as to protect the fragile nation.
The United States once again sits at a crossroads. A fraction of the populace elected a man unfit for public office to the highest public office in the land, by virtue of living in the right places. Three million votes in California are worth less than a hundred thousand votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. The Electoral College, faced with the greatest test that it has ever been provided with, failed utterly and miserably. This should not come as a surprise to anyone – the idea of mass uprising of “Hamilton Electors” went out the window right after political parties were formed and nominated their most dedicated activists to the positions.
Our institutions have failed us. Democracy as constructed in the United States is not equipped to deal with a man like Donald Trump or the Republican Party. While experts disagree on what fascism is or looks like, surely unrestrained corruption, the silencing of the free press, attacking free speech and free assembly, and the total abdication of political responsibility would make the majority of the lists for a fascist regime. Given the power of the Presidency, his party’s control of both houses of Congress, and 30-plus statehouses, the Republican Party is now ascendant. Through the power of the gerrymander and unconstitutional power grabs, many of these politicians are immune from challenge from all but the most extreme rightward flank. Truth itself is under attack, as we now debate the notion of what constitutes “fake news”.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” While our limited lifespans preclude us from viewing the full scope of history, time has proven Rev. King correct. Even in my own lifetime, I can say with conviction that I live in a more just society today than I did the day I was born. I cannot say with certainty that it will stay that way, because that arc is not a straight path toward justice. There are dips and jumps, where we take two steps forward and one step back. The irony is that conservatism, in contrast to liberalism, standing athwart history and yelling “Stop!”, only delays the inevitable. Conservatism may win battles, but liberalism always wins the war. On every issue, conservatism loses in the long term. I’ve seen it with my own eyes – thirty years ago being gay was practically illegal. Today we celebrate the gay community, their contributions to our culture and economy, acknowledge their right to have the same rights as everyone else, and protect them from discrimination. While there is still much work to be done before all of us have true equality, we will inexorably get there and look back through history at another defeat for conservatism.
The reality of our situation is that a large portion of the country feels left behind by the rapid pace of change over the last thirty years. Globalism, automation, gender and racial equality, religious tolerance, etc. all require a degree of critical thinking to understand that much of the population either lacks or has allowed to atrophy at the altar of entertainment. The path forward out of the dark places that we now find ourselves in is not through the dark places of this country. These people are lost, and wish to remain lost, because facing the truth of a changing world is more than they choose to bear. Many of those pinpoints of light that break up the darkness must be left to their own devices, to whither and die of natural causes. The factory towns of the industrial Midwest whose reason for existence long since moved elsewhere must fail. States like West Virginia must find a new economic model that doesn’t rely on pulling coal out of the ground, because our need as a nation for such a service has greatly diminished. Focusing exclusively on the white working class that predominantly populates these places is a mistake, because the majority of these people will never change. They have been brainwashed into an economic death cult, and it is only through the destruction of their way of life that our nation may once again be made free.
Our future, from the days of the Founding Fathers to the far reaches of science fiction, has always been urban. Our cities stand as beacons of hope in the darkness. When man first came out of the caves and made fire, others came for it’s light and warmth and protection. Our urban centers today are no different. We congregate together for cultural and economic opportunity, and it is that same community out of which America will be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes.
The Democratic Party can no longer inhabit the squishy middle of American politics. The American people have shown, loudly and decisively, that to inhabit the middle is to inhabit no place at all. Let there be daylight between Democrats and Republicans once more. If there is a positive out of the Trump Campaign, it’s that he demonstrated that a candidate no longer needs to be shackled to Wall Street for funding or Fifth Avenue for media coverage. Our candidates must leverage the power of social media to bring their message directly to the people, and expose Donald Trump and the Republican Party for the traitors and hucksters they are.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it can be bent through action. To earn a better future for ourselves and our descendants, we must take up rhetorical arms. We must fight bigotry and hatred wherever it shows it’s ugly face. We must give of ourselves, our time, and our money, to elect candidates that speak for the people. We must take back labels like liberal and progressive, for them to mean something other than a conservative slur. We cannot stand idly by as our future is stolen by ignorance. We must stand. We must fight.
