My reflections on the state of the American political system four months out from the November 2024 presidential elections. For those of you who don't follow U.S. politics, Biden's disastrous performance in a recent live, televised debate has led leading Democrats to call for his withdrawal from the race, which is a drastic measure this far into campaign season. This would almost certainly lead to Kamala Harris running with an as-yet-unknown VP candidate on the Democratic ticket. Despite his criminal cases, Trump, of course, is the Republican contender.
This isn't an essay about Trump vs. Biden or Trump vs. Harris, though. It's focused on longer-term, deeper problems with our political situation - you know, the ones that have led Americans and our friends and foes alike to begin speaking seriously about our fall as a superpower and even our potential disintegration. I discuss the climate of fear that took root post-9/11; how, as we approach the end of the Monopoly game, Big Oil, Big Banking, Big Tech, and Big Pharma have acquired far too much control over our political process; our loss of faith in our legal, medical, and military systems; and changes to our national morale and culture that have contributed to what is now an existential crisis.
In short, at a time when Americans describe themselves as unprecedentedly burnt out on our own politics and very few people are content with the current candidates, it's meant to answer the following question: Why can't our political system deliver the charismatic, younger candidates who we need to galvanize our country under a renewed conception of what it means to be an American?
In August 1969 at the legendary Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, Jimi Hendrix - widely regarded as one of the most talented electric guitarists of all time, who joined the Forever 27 Club along with Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse by fatally overdosing on barbiturate sleeping pills just a year later - offered an immortal rendition of the United States' "Star-Spangled Banner" national anthem. During his performance, he alternated strident, stirring sections that were performed in a traditional manner with experimental guitar techniques that mimicked the explosive, chaotic sounds of war. (Illustration by Joe Morse for the L.A. Times).
I love my country.
I've never been so worried for her.
I've been thinking of George Washington's Farewell Address - really just a letter announcing his retirement, which established the two-term limit for American presidents that has been respected ever since - a lot lately.
Washington emphasized the need for national unity based on the "common dangers, sufferings, and successes" of the early Republic. He warned against the triple threat of regionalism, partisanship, and foreign entanglements.
In particular, he cautioned against nurturing a "spirit of revenge" between the parties that would lead cunning, Machiavellian players to commandeer political power for personal advantage rather than the good of their country.
Given the current political climate, it's hard not to hear these words as prophecies for our time.
***
Every American who I've talked to about the state of our country has expressed some serious level of worry for its future.
The verbiage surrounding these concerns takes many forms.
One of the phrases that seems to come up quite a bit is "unprecedented polarity." And the divide between the parties, characterized by an almost complete lack of bipartisanship, as well as the divides within the two major parties, are, in fact, tremendous and historical.
But this in and of itself is not the problem; this polarity is by design.
As I remind my Chinese students who ask me about each week's political disaster as it unfolds, democracy is meant to be messy. We wear our scandals and our weaknesses on our sleeves.
Contrast this with a country like China, where a one-party system leads to a suppression of information that is downright chilling at times*, and the clamor and tumult of democracy don't seem so bad.
*I'm not so naive as to think that the American government is on the level with its own people about all of the information that we ought to know. In fact, my time in China has impressed upon me the extent to which many of the things that Westerners criticize the Chinese government for - bribery, corruption, subversion of the legal system for political reasons, secret projects and priorities, and so on - are present in American government and indeed in all countries and systems.
Under ideal conditions, the adversarial back-and-forth of the American political system produces an optimized, often centric outcome.
It's the bad-faith actors, the "spirit of revenge," and the lack of an overarching national identity and purpose that turn constructive disagreement into chaotic discord.
In such circumstances, our system can enter an extinction vortex of sorts, during which the parties move further apart, and the system of checks and balances designed to prevent any one of the three branches of power from achieving unfettered control breaks down.
***
Where did we begin to go wrong?
Many of the roots of our current woes trace back to changes in domestic operation and foreign policy related to the global ideological conflict of the Cold War, which I believe that the United States needed to take a leading role in, which persisted long after the threats of the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism died down.
In my own lifetime, I could say a lot about the climate of fear that developed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (perhaps "was cultivated" is better language than my passive "developed" here).
In the wake of that unprecedented moment of vulnerability - this wasn't Pearl Harbor in the middle of the Pacific Ocean under attack; this was New York City - many ultimately harmful political decisions were undertaken.
Every single lawyer who I have ever spoken with has agreed that the Patriot Act of 2001 is unconstitutional - flagrantly so. It allows the government to search your home while you are gone from it without ever notifying you that it has done so. It also gives federal agencies the power to listen in on all Americans' phone conversations, supposedly for keywords related to terrorism although in reality we have no way to monitor the nature and extent of the use of this surveillance power.
My respect for President Obama, who as a Senator warned against the insidious dangers posed by the Patriot Act but upon election to the presidency extended it as one of his first acts in office, was permanently diminished by his inability to turn down the expedient advantages that it presented him with in his new role.
The Patriot Act is merely one symptom of a wider disease of fear and of a treatment regimen of trying to secure safety through forceful geopolitical dominance. It is a treatment that, like chemotherapy, threatens to kill us before the disease that it proposes to treat.
Spending time in China, where my group of expat friends includes Russians, Iranians, Egyptians, and expats from other countries with whose citizens Americans rarely socialize, has given me a unique appreciation for the destruction that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wrought on our international image.
One of my first political actions was running around the small town that I grew up in tucking pamphlets about civilian casualties in Iraq under windshield wipers.
At least 250,000 Iraqi civilians - and probably twice that or more - were killed by direct violence during the war there.
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after more than 20 years of military involvement there, the Taliban, a radical theocratic organization that takes hatred of the U.S. as a primary pillar of its belief system, is once again in power.
These wars did nothing to protect Americans from terrorism. Instead, they bred a new generation of terrorists with even hotter, more justified hatred for our country.
The "global police power" role that the U.S. government and military have taken on has been economically and politically disastrous.
Our defense spending defies all reason and proportion (indeed, almost all conception). We have often come out of these wars and smaller conflicts looking like the bully - because we have often allowed ourselves to become the bully.
Our allies in Europe and elsewhere are, of course, all too glad for us to absorb the brunt of the fiscal costs and the hatred associated with protecting international agreements crucial to the existing, Western-led world order.
I no longer think of the U.S. as the chiseled, charismatic quarterback of the Western democratic team; sometimes, we seem more like the promising younger player who just made it through Varsity tryouts, who the older, established team members goad into increasingly thuggish bullying of geeks and Goths.
We have achieved more during our short time on the map than almost any nation in the history of civilization, but we have done so because we have assumed much greater risks and liabilities than any other player has been willing to. American exceptionalism cuts both ways.
My Chinese friends often argue that China would only ever want to be ranked second in global precedence because no wise government would want to assume first place due to the responsibility, resentment, and costs inherent to that position.
I'm not sure that this is true under the current leadership of the CCP, but it's a worthwhile concept to consider.
No country is too big too fail.
No empire stands forever.
***
As Americans' attention was focused on the wider world post-9/11, both parties aligned themselves with powerful, globalized corporate interests that gained dangerous influence over our political system.
During the past 30 years, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banking, and the lobbies and Political Action Committees under which they operate have worked quietly and efficiently to ensure that the only political candidates with enough money to present themselves to the American public are those who are already beholden to them.
Our country has never recovered from the recession of the late 2000s, which crippled my generation.*
*As I have noted previously, economists have shown that graduating into a recession has a lifelong impact on earnings. Interestingly, the fact that Millennials are the first generation since the Americans of the Great Depression to be poorer than the one that came before them seems to be tempering the red-tide shift from liberal to conservative that has occurred for previous generations as they aged.
In my opinion, the banking fiasco that triggered the recession never really had the wider political and cultural impact that it should have. There were limited, token prosecutions of Wall Street players; there were Op-Ed callouts; and a few politicians from rural constituencies called for systemic reform. But the full, alarming failure of the SEC and other relevant regulatory agencies never really generated the furor that I initially expected it to.
Instead of a moment of reckoning and recalibration, we had a bailout.
Likewise with the FDA and the OxyContin epidemic that caused the heroin epidemic that has hobbled an entire generation, which I've written about elsewhere.
The FDA is a demonstrably, heinously corrupt organization whose leaders walk through a revolving door with top positions in the Big Pharma sector.
This is not tinfoil hat theory; this is widely acknowledged truth.
Since 1999, more than 560,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses.
Despite the fact that they knowingly marketed a defective "extended-release" formulation of a massive dose of an opioid as potent as heroin and continued to do so for years as evidence of mass addiction and overdose abounded, the Sackler family that owns Purdue has avoided criminal prosecution entirely and walked away with billions of dollars in profits.
Our financial and medical systems have been compromised by entrenched, controlling influences largely outside of the reach of regulators.
Between Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal and the revelations regarding Russian disinformation campaigns during recent U.S. election cycles, Big Tech, too, no longer seems like the future-realizing, democratizing influence that many technophiles hoped that it would be.
Even our Supreme Court has refused to hold itself to an ethical code - despite the fact that all lower judges are bound by such codes and recent evidence that has indicated that Clarence Thomas and perhaps other justices have been less than transparent when it comes to their financial disclosures and divulgence of other potential conflicts of interest.
And it's not just the Supreme Court whose legitimacy has been called into question.
William Esty at Stanford has characterized the overexpansion of the U.S. legal system as "the rule of lawyers rather than the rule of law," which he cites as a key factor driving U.S. decline.
Ironically, our legal system became so concerned with the nuances of right and wrong that it became overgrown, so dense and unnavigable that passage through it is guaranteed only to the very wealthy.
Even the Constitutional right to speedy trial is no longer guaranteed under the present system. In fact, if all current criminal defendants refused to settle by plea bargaining - a process that did not exist prior to the mass prosecutions of alcohol Prohibition under the 18th Amendment - our system would grind to a halt; it could not sustain the present volume of cases.
We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country save perhaps North Korea. Poor people, the mentally disabled, and racial minorities are disproportionately likely to be affected by unfair legal outcomes up to and including execution.
Our liberty has been impinged upon, and justice is a bad joke; which of our founding ideals hasn't fallen flat?
***
There have been broad, gradual ulcerations of local community and American national culture that have endangered us, as well.
In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam traces the post-1950s decline of social capital in the United States, including bowling leagues and almost all other forms of in-person socialization necessary to the strong civic engagement that made America great and that robust democracies require.
In my grandparents' generation, virtually 100% of ordinary citizens participated in volunteer, religious, local political, educational, and other community organizations.
In the years since Bowling Alone was published in 2000, social media specifically and technology in general have only further eroded in-person socialization and local community.
Today, a minority of Millennials and Boomers make time for such activities.
It is a widely acknowledged problem with few easy solutions, and it has serious, dangerous political implications, as well.
Democracy has become a once-every-two-years affair. Without the amplifying power of social and political capital that is granted by civic organizations, how much is our one vote worth? Especially when we can't hold our elected officials to account because they have become a separate class whose members often bear no true connections to the communities that they represent?
As I have written about elsewhere, I believe that the decline of organized religion has played a key role in the wider problems experienced by American society.
Churches and other religious organizations were imperfect solutions to the problems that they helped to address, but perhaps Western democracies required Christianity and other religions to help balance out the vehemence and partisanship of our politics - to remind us that we are all flawed, all human, and all ultimately in this together as Americans.
Whereas Eastern countries like China have the benefit of very strong family responsibilities and airtight community solidarity, the Western emphasis on individualism threatens to destabilize toward hedonism and navel-gazing self-preoccupation without a balancing influence.
If you ask nearly any Westerner to draw a diagram of the individuals in their lives, they will place themselves at its center; do the same with your average Chinese citizen, and the perceived head of their family, usually a parent and almost never the person drawing the map, will be in the center.
National pride, too, has suffered.
At the public school where I teach, I am one of only a few teachers who make a point to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
I teach many first-generation immigrants from Syria, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, and these students typically show much more respect for the American flag and American ideals than the disadvantaged students who I teach whose families have been here for several generations.
When did it become acceptable, even cool, to denigrate our nation?
Don't people realize that we still have it better here than almost anywhere else at any other time?
***
As I often discuss with my students, everyday decision-making hasn't necessarily been improved in the Age of Information, which could just as accurately be termed the Era of Disinformation.
Algorithms present us with only that information that tends to confirm our existing biases.
The nature of online spaces has created echo chambers in which individuals with similar ideas and preferences engage in comfortable groupthink.
The decline of quality reporting due in large part to the death of paper publications, especially those operating at the local level, has played a significant role in this problem, as well.
Whereas once the Sunday paper would examine a certain political or social issue in-depth, with considerable weight given to both sides of an issue, people now develop their political views based on one-sided pieces in specialized publications geared to people like them.
We often make our political decisions based on social media-disseminated strawmen and stereotypes. When it comes to issues of the moment such as transgender rights, most people are voting for or against the relevant propositions without ever having spoken with or even having met someone in the affected class.
This isn't necessarily a new problem, but it is one that has been greatly exacerbated by many of the shifts discussed above.
***
Let's return for a moment to the subject of American drug use, which is, after all, a primary part of the raison d'être of this blog.
As I've written about elsewhere, the U.S.-led War on Drugs is one of the most catastrophic policy failures in world history. And, contrary to the understanding of many Americans, particularly many Democrats and other liberally-oriented individuals, it is a failure that was created and kept energized by leaders from both parties.
Americans have been enthusiastic consumers of mind-altering substances for most of our history, and the prohibition of certain drugs has been even more of an epic failure than alcohol prohibition was.
In terms of our use of such substances, in 2017, after opioid prescription had already been cracked down on hard for several years, there were still enough opioids prescribed to keep every American man, woman, and child under the influence of the substances round-the-clock for one month out of the year.
As of 2022, the United States made up 4.4% of the world's population, but it consumed over 80% of the world's opioids. The US consumed approximately 99% percent of the world's hydrocodone, which, like oxycodone, is no more and no less than prescription heroin.
More than one million Americans have died of drug overdoses since 1999. This is more than all of the American soldiers who have died in battle during all of the wars we've fought since the end of the Revolutionary War.
And, as awful as the opioid epidemic has been, American consumption of other legal, prescription, and illegal mind-altering substances tends to be just as extraordinary (again, American exceptionalism cuts both ways).
Multiple medical journals that I follow have commented on the recent diagnosis of end-stage alcoholic liver disease, which is classified as a death of despair, in young people in their early 20s, which is all but unprecedented in this country.
From the Roman Empire to the Third Riech, superpowers on the verge of collapse have first submitted to wild, intoxicated decadence.
Why are we so ill at ease with mental and emotional clarity?
***
Now, after many hops, skips, and jumps - and, fittingly, a couple of periods of convenient amnesia - we come to our present election cycle.
Whatever you think of Trump's politics and policies, what he did at the end of his term revealed a total disregard for the peaceful transition of power upon which all democracies depend.
Trump damaged our reputation among our allies, as well as foreign perceptions of everyday Americans.*
*While I was abroad, the Pew surveys that measure how foreign populations think about ordinary American citizens showed historically unfavorable results for most of the surveyed countries. My God, did I witness this firsthand in China.
But it is no surprise that Trump got elected, and anyone who says that the nearly half of Americans who voted for him were simply "crazy" is missing the point.
Trump spoke to people who have been ignored for too long - especially white, working- and middle-class people such as those of my home city, who have been taking L's across the board for so long now that something drastic was bound to happen.
Biden restored a measure of "business as usual," but the reality is that - as the recent debate showed - he is too old to govern.
When Americans were asked about this election during the past eight months, they overwhelmingly indicated that they didn't really care for either candidate particularly much. They used words and phrases like "tired, "burnt out," and "distrustful" to describe their feelings about the United States' current politics and leaders.
The U.S. political system hasn't produced a charismatic, younger leader who could bring our country out of its morale slump for a long time. Given what I've discussed above, this is hardly a surprise, but it is a profound and dangerous failure.
In many ways, in fact, I view Trump and Biden as more similar than dissimilar.
Both parties have gone awry. The left has lost itself in identity politics that have sown discord rather than galvanized unity; it has lost sight of what I consider its primary function, which is to protect the interests of the lower and middle classes against the formation of an entrenched, wealthy, governing elite - a phenomenon that has overtaken both parties.
The right, on the other hand, has lost its function as a sort of helpful brake pedal for society, a way to make sure that things don't change too quickly or dramatically. Instead, it has peddled an equally destructive politics of minority-blaming.
Both parties now blame the other half of American leadership and society for the problems that our country is mired in rather than acknowledging the fact that we all play for the same team, and that it is a key component of their duties to reach across the aisle to achieve workable solutions.
Under the current systemic failures, the candidates who are running - even for an office as important as the Presidency of the United States - are a very small part of the political picture that matters. Until we address systemic reform, we won't get the leaders we need, and the leaders who we elect won't be able or willing to change things.
From AP U.S. History onward, it was always impressed upon me that not voting for one of the two major parties in the U.S. is giving up half of one's political agency because you can't vote in the primary election that chooses the candidates on a party's ticket unless you are registered as Democrat or Republican.
It's also often pointed out that voting for a third-party candidate in the general election threatens to split the vote, which spells disaster for whichever of the two major parties is more affected.
I'm at a point where I don't care anymore. From political hyperpolarization to climate change to entanglement with foreign governments to selling out to powerful, globalized corporate interests, our democracy is facing unprecedented challenges, and I'm not convinced that our two-party system can adequately deal with these threats any longer.
Business as usual threatens to lead to closing up shop.
The time to heed the words of President Washington's Farewell Address is now.
The fate of our beautiful, brilliant, world-changing country depends upon it.
Let's return for a moment to the subject of drugs and addiction, which are, after all, central to this blog. (mention Blitzed)
that's how we've gotten to this final stage, where Trump and Biden are two sides of the sa
e coin (both the left and right have lost sight of their true functions)
It shouldn't take a war to galvanize us behind our leaders.
Let's return for a moment to the subject of drugs and addiction, which are, after all, central to this blog.
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