Trump and the Upcoming Election

 There simply is no doubt that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a campaign not only to contest the mid-term elections next November but to take active measures to overturn enough election results to keep the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. We can't know exactly what he plans to do, but we cannot rule out the possibility that he will attempt to use the US military to seize ballots and voting equipment in states where his candidates have lost. If he does that, and if he gets away with it, American democracy will be dead. But then, that's exactly what Trump wants, the death of American democracy. I wish I knew of a surefire way to stop him, but I don't. Democracy always depends on the will of the people. If enough people have lost their faith in democracy in this country, our democracy will die. We must all do whatever we can to keep that from happening, for only in a democratic society can individual freedom truly be maintained.

No, I Am Not a Patriot

 No, I Am Not a Patriot

July 5, 2026

I’m supposed to love the United States of America, and I have lived in a place that was much worse than the United States of America, namely the Soviet Union, where I did one year of dissertation research in the mid-1970s. I was glad to get out of there. In fact, as I was leaving Moscow for the first time, with a group of students from Indiana University in August, 1968, shortly after the USSR had invaded Czechoslovakia, we sang the hit song of the time with the lyric: “We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.” I remember driving home to Eugene from the Portland airport a short time later and seeing a business flying a truly enormous American flag near the freeway. I thought: Well, that’s not my style, but at least someone’s doing that because they want to not because they have to. So yes, this country does have certain virtues.

But. And the buts control here. We are and essentially always have been the most imperialistic nation on earth. Every square inch of the United States is land we stole from other people. And not only that. We did everything we could to wipe those people off the face of the earth. Hitler thought we couldn’t object to his planned genocide of the Jews because he had committed genocide against the American Indians, as indeed we had. We took much of what is now the United States from Mexico through imperialistic war, the War of 1848. We expanded our empire militaristically in 1898 too. We are and always have been an imperialistic country, and I reject all imperialism outright.

We maintain what is by far the world’s largest military. We lie and say that we have it to defend our freedom. We call all its members heroes whether they’ve ever done anything heroic or not. We glorify military service as noble and honorable when in fact the true purpose of any military, ours included, is to kill and be killed. In fact, we have our massive military only for imperialistic purposes. We have it to project and protect American economic and political power around the world, and that is a purely illegitimate reason for having it. There is nothing noble or honorable about it at all. Yet we tie patriotism to the military. The military participates in all sorts of American activities solely for the purpose of making people feel good about the military and the country that creates, maintains, and glorifies it. Why else to fighter jets fly over football stadiums? Why else to the Blue Angels perform (yes, perform brilliantly) at hydroplane races like they do every year in Seattle? I see people online being impressed by military hardware, but every piece of military hardware is nothing but part of a massive killing machine. I will not celebrate the American military, and I will not be patriotic with regard to a country that maintains and celebrates the American military.

Our most recent use of our military is particularly unjustifiable and shameful. Donald Trump ordered it to attack Iran though there was absolutely no reason for us to attack Iran. Trump couldn’t even give a coherent reason for attacking Iran. When we did, we sent a smart weapon into a girl’s school and killed over 100 children. Yes, the military said it was “a mistake,” but why do we even deploy forces capable of making such a mistake to a part of the world in which we have no significant interest and where there is no reason for military action whatsoever?

This country was founded in racism, and it remains rotten with racism to its core yet today. We had made some not insignificant progress toward eradicating racism until Donald Trump became president. Now avowed white nationalists parade openly in our country’s capital just as the Ku Klux Klan did in the 1920s (though in considerably smaller numbers). We imprison more people than any other nation in the world, and a grossly disproportionate parentage of our prisoners are people of color. Our president is an overt racist, and he panders to the underlying racism of American society to get and keep himself in power. I will not be patriotic toward a nation as racist as mine is.

Then there is the shame of our health insurance system. Every other industrialized nation on earth has a system of universal health care supported by taxes. We don't. The power of the wealthy keeps us from creating one because creating one would nearly abolish the enormous health insurance industry. The Republican Party has been making it impossible for more and more people to obtain health insurance, something that makes not a lick of sense even from a Republican or Trumpist fascist perspective. For-profit insurance companies, in business only to make money, make decisions about people's health care that belong only to practicing physicians and their patients. I will not be patriotic toward a nation that refuses to make health care available to all of its people the way this one refuses to do.

The American economy is capitalistic. It is regulated a little bit but not nearly enough. Our economy is dominated by enormous corporations in nearly every sphere of economic activity. American law says that the duty of corporate leadership is to increase the financial return for the corporation's investors and is nothing else beyond that other than comply with whatever laws there are that control what the corporation must or must not do--and there aren't anywhere near enough of those. Capitalism works for the wealthy. It does not work for anyone else. The United States government has regulated capitalism enough that it has survived, but today the income disparity between the wealthy 1% and everyone else is so great that there may be some hope that a democratic socialist system will eventually regulate it enough so that it works for everyone.

So, no I am not an American patriot. I wish no harm for the people of the country, but I then I wish no harm for anyone anywhere. I do not value American people over other people. I wish no harm for my country, but I don't wish it anything better than I wish for any country. I want my country to become the country of justice and freedom that it has always claimed to be but has never been, but I know that won't happen in my lifetime. I wish peace for my country just as I wish peace for all people everywhere. I want my country to stop being as militaristic and imperialistic as it has always been and remains today, but I know that won't happen in my lifetime either. The forces against peace and justice in this country are just too strong for any systemic change to happen except over very long periods of time if they happen at all. 

Are you an American patriot? You certainly have the right to be one. We do have at least that much freedom in this country (though it is much less socially acceptable not to be one). But if you are, let me ask you this: Have you thought about this country seriously and open-mindedly? Have you set aside the myths about this country and seen her as she actually is and always has been? If not, I beg you to do so to the greatest extent that you can. This country could be a whole lot better than it is, but it will never be better as long as most Americans buy our national myths over our national reality. Some will say that what I just said makes me a patriot. I do not believe that it does, for I do not value my country over any other. I am indeed not a American patriot.

I Will Not Celebrate Today

 I Will Not Celebrate Today

July 4, 2026

I, of course, see all kinds of things online about today being the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States of America. Today it is, indeed, 250 years since the so-called founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. I don't quite see how that event got to be considered the founding of the nation. It was a step toward independence, but it took five years of war to establish independence. Yet, of course, there's no point in making that argument. July 4 marking the founding of the nation is part of our national myth, and that's not going to change.

Today is supposed to be a big deal, but I will not celebrate today. Our national myth says that we are "the land of the free," and that claim is and always has been nothing but a lie. When Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he owned enslaved human beings. He meant only that landed white men are created equal. He did not say, he did not mean, and he did not believe that all people are created equal. When we read "all people" rather than "all men" into Jefferson's words, we make him say something he just didn't say, mean, or believe.

Nonetheless, the equality of all people became a foundational part of our idolatrous national myth. That claim is mythic in the technical sense, but it is not and never has been part of our national reality. It wasn't part of our reality in 1776, and it is not part of our reality today. Yes, we have made some not insignificant progress toward making it part of our reality, but we still have a very long way to go before it truly reflects who we are as a nation. There are all sorts of statistics one can cite to prove that point; but, for now, just consider this. Donald Trump said there were "fine" people among a mob of violent, anti-Jewish thugs. He told armed militias to "stand back and stand by," clearly indicating his willingness to use them extralegally and violently to achieve his ends. And we made him president not once but twice. No country that truly believed that all people are created equal would ever elect him to anything once much less elect him president twice. Land of the free? In myth yes, in reality, no. Today and throughout our history we are and have been free only for some. We parrot back Jefferson's words "and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But we have allowed that noble claim to be reality only for some Americans, never for all of them, and certainly not for people here who are not technically Americans but are noncitizen immigrants whether here "legally" or not.

So no, today I will not be a hypocrite. I will not celebrate a myth that is not and never has been a reality. I don't expect this country ever to stop celebrating July 4 as the nation's birthday. After all, nations tend to have some sort of national day on which they celebrate themselves. For Canada, it's July 1. For France it is July 14. For the Soviet Union it was November 7. For us it's always been July 4, and it will stay July 4. Which doesn't mean that our celebration is anything other than either self-delusion or hypocrisy. Our reality is not and never has been what we have always claimed that it is. So, celebrate if you want. I will not join you.

What is Christian Socialism?

 

What Is Christian Socialism?

July 2, 2026

I am a Christian Socialist. It is, I guess, only in my later years that I have come to call myself that, but now, in my senior years, I know that that is what I am and that it is what I have always been moving toward. And, of course, calling myself a Christian Socialist raises an unavoidable question: Just what does the phrase Christian socialist mean? It, quite obviously, contains two terms, Christian and socialist. To understand what I mean when I call myself a Christian socialist, you have to understand what both of those terms mean in general and, more importantly, what they mean to me personally. I will attempt here to answer that important question.

First: What does the word “socialist” mean.” I’ve written about the history of that term elsewhere on this blog, and I won’t repeat here everything I said there.[1] I don’t mean by “socialist” what the Russian communists meant when they called their country the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Far from it. Though in Marxist theory they are not the same thing, people tend to equate socialism with Soviet-style communism. Soviet-style communism was a horror, a crime against both humanity and divinity. Throughout its seventy-four years long history it was a violent, brutal, oppressive, and radically unjust political and economic system. It was worse under Stalin than it was both before and after him, but it was never good. I lived under it for a year. I experienced how depressive and drab it was in the 1960s and 1970s. I learned something of what it did to its people, especially intelligent, curious people whose spirits it attempted, with some success, to crush. Russia is still an oppressive, unjust, and violent place, but, nonetheless, the world is better off without the Soviet communists.

Rather, by “socialist” I mean the kind of political, economic, and social system that has proven its value throughout western Europe since the end of World War II, especially in the Scandinavian countries. Those countries consider themselves to be democratically socialist. Their socialist political parties may have Marxist roots, but they are not Marxist in any meaningful sense today. Rather, they have created countries that have capitalist economies, though heavily regulated ones. They have high taxes, and they use that tax money to create social safety nets with real meaning and value for all of their people.

Communism oppresses its people either both politically and economically as in the Soviet Union or at least just politically as in the People’s Republic of China. Democratic socialism isn’t about oppressing anyone at all. It encourages free economic enterprise as long as the enterprises truly work for the benefit of the people and not primarily for the benefit of wealthy owners at the expense of the people the way big corporations mostly work in the United States today. Democratic socialism, whether Christian or not, cherishes individual rights and will always work to protect them. Democratic socialism is democratic. It comes about when the people want it, and it can end if the people don’t want it.

A democratic socialist society works to assure, to the greatest extent possible, that everyone has the necessities of life regardless of their station in life or the conditions of their life. This means, among other things, that democratic socialist societies have universal, free health care paid for by tax dollars, with the wealthy paying a good portion of their incomes to the state in taxes. Democratic socialist societies do everything they can to make sure everyone has a safe place to live. They ensure that everyone has free or reduced cost access to education from preschool to graduate school. They make childcare free or at least affordable so that everyone who has to work or who wants to work can work and have a family at the same time. They make sure no one has to go hungry.

While they are doing all that and more, democratic socialist societies respect individual choice. They make all of these things available to everyone. They don’t compel anyone to participate in them except by complying with the tax law. In a democratic socialist society, paying taxes is mandatory. Very little else is.

The world’s democratic socialist nations today do maintain military establishments. I suppose they consider doing so to be a necessity in this world of conflict and violence. They do not, however, spend anywhere near the percentage of their gross national product on the military that the United States does. Keeping the size of their military reasonable rather than grossly bloated the way the American military is helps to make the social programs that are the foundation of the society possible.

So that, in a nutshell, is democratic socialism. But I call myself a Christian Socialist not just a democratic socialist. So we have to consider: What does Christianity have to do with it? Isn’t Christianity radically inconsistent with socialism? What, if anything, in Christianity would lead one to being a socialist? I am convinced that the only way a Christian can be anything other than a socialist is by misunderstanding Christianity in a foundational way. I will now attempt to explain that conviction.

What is it to be Christian? Most Christians, indeed most people, would probably answer that question: To be Christian is to take Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Now, it’s not that I deny that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, though I almost certainly mean something different by “Savior” what most Christians today mean by it. Except (maybe) in the Gospel of John, which is in no way historically accurate (though it is in some ways spiritually accurate), Jesus never called us to “believe” in him. Rather, he called us to “follow” him. See, for example, Matthew 16:24. There is within Christianity a minority tradition that has always understood that that’s what he calls us to do. That tradition stresses the “imitatio Christi,” the “imitation of Christ,” as being what the Christian faith is all about. That is indeed what Christianity is all about when it is being as true to Jesus the Christ as it is possible for it to be. To be Christian is to follow Christ.

OK, but what does that mean? What actually is following Christ and what is not? It is not hard to understand what it is to follow Christ if we look at the three gospels in which he tells us what it means to do so. Those are Mark and especially Matthew and Luke. In John, Jesus never really tells how to live following him, so I’ll set John aside here. It seems undeniably clear to me that to follow Christ the way we learn of him in those three gospels is to live lives of compassion for all of God’s creation. Beyond that, it is especially to support, care for, lift up, and include those the world suppresses, oppresses, excludes, or just ignores. Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor.” Luke 6:20. He said “Blessed are the meek.” Matthew 5:5. He said “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Matthew 5:9. He said: “Love your enemies.” Matthew 5:44. He made a hated, excluded, despised Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous parables. Luke 10:25-37. He had the prodigal son’s father welcome him home with open arms before the father knew anything about what the son had done or why he was coming home. Luke 15:11-32. If you want to imitate Christ, take these sayings of his to heart and structure your life according to them as much as you are able to do. Jesus turned the values of his world upside down. Christ calls us Christians to do the same thing, nonviolently, in our world.

What, if anything, does living in imitatio Christi mean with regard to socialism? Most American Christians would react emotionally and in an uninformed way to that question by shouting: Socialism is utterly incompatible with Christianity! No Christian can possibly be a socialist! I’m sure they would react that way because their Christian nationalist preachers have told them that socialism is evil, indeed, that it is atheistic and works in direct opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The problem, however, is that those preachers are just flat wrong about both Christianity and socialism. Here’s why they are.

First, one need not be a Christian to be a socialist, but socialism is not necessarily atheistic. Marxist ideology is radically atheistic in the way many late-Enlightenment thinkers were, but modern democratic socialism has left Marxism, including its atheism, in the dustbin of history where it so deservedly belongs. The democratic socialist governments of western Europe, for the most part, practice separation of church and state though the German government supports both the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches with tax money. Many American socialists, like your humble author, are Christians; and many Christians, like your humble author, are socialists.

How is that possible? Well, it’s possible because the values of socialism and of true Christianity are essentially identical. Socialism is all about social, political, legal, and economic justice for all of a nation’s people. True Christianity is about the same thing. Indeed, socialist values are essentially Christian values without necessarily including the spiritual parts of that faith. Indeed, Marx’s vision of the ideal world, which he called communism, comes directly from the New Testament. The first Christians were essentially communists without being atheists. See Acts 4:32-35. Socialism doesn’t advocate that kind of radical social structure, but it does advocate the sharing of national wealth, mostly through taxes, for the benefit of all of the people.

Christian socialism is quite strongly anti-capitalist. It’s not that in the sense of requiring state ownership of the means of production. But capitalism is grounded in people being selfish. It is grounded in an ethic that says everyone gets not what they need but what they have earned. Unless it is far more tightly regulated than it is in the United States, it leads to gross income inequality. It leads to a very small class of ultra-wealthy individuals while an enormous percentage of the population struggles just to make a decent living. Its law says a corporation’s purpose, and indeed its only purpose, is to increase the financial return to the corporation’s investors. That standard leads to environmental degradation, unsafe workplaces, wages below the poverty level, the unavailability of health insurance, unaffordable higher education, and politicians purchased by the wealthy so that the government will regulate the economy even less that it already does. Surely true Christians can support none of those things, and Christian socialists do not.

A great many Americans will shout that socialism, democratic or Christian or otherwise, is un-American. About that they are essentially wrong. President Franklin Roosevelt was a democratic socialist in effect if not in name. For example, he introduced Social Security, a governmental system intended to reduce poverty among the elderly (and that reduces poverty for your humble author today). That is a socialist system. This country created the Medicare and Medicaid system in 1965. That system is intended to, and does, make affordable healthcare available to retired persons and others unable to provide for themselves, You humble author’s badly disabled twin brother would probably be dead without Medicaid, and your humble author would have no access to medical care without Medicare, which might well mean that he would also be dead. This too is a socialist system.

Democratic socialists, Christian or otherwise, advocate expanding the socialist systems our country already has in place while adding others to meet unmet societal needs. We advocate, for example, Medicare for all, something that would give us a universal, tax-based healthcare system at least a little bit like the ones every other industrialized country in the world has.[2] We advocate a radical restructuring of the country’s tax system so that the wealthy actually pay a meaningful share of their income in taxes so that the government has the money it needs to address problems like homelessness, mental health, the opioid crisis, the environmental crisis, the unaffordability of health insurance and higher education, and other social ills in a meaningful way. The higher taxes we advocate, by the way, are not unprecedented in American history. The marginal income tax rates in the 1950s, under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, were as high as 91%, while today they do not exceed 37%.[3]

Democratic socialists, whether Christian or not, advocate tackling our culture’s underlying faults in meaningful ways. At the top of the list for those faults sits racism. Our country was founded in slavery and racism, and racism permeates our culture to this day. Look, for example, at the disparity in incarceration rates between white and Black convicts or at the efforts in Florida and elsewhere to stop the public schools from teaching the truth about American slavery. I have no magic cure for American racism. Racism is rooted very, very deep in this land. I do know that ignoring it or denying that it is still a problem will never rid us of it. Socialists do not deny it or ignore it the way American fascists do today.

So, I am a Christian socialist. I believe that being Christian means to live as much as one can in the imitation of Christ. I believe that living in the imitation of Christ unavoidably leads one to the values of democratic socialism. As democratic socialists, Christian socialists will be allied with many other socialists who are also Christians, who are followers of other faith traditions, or who are not adherents of any religious faith. That’s not a problem. What matters is common values not common spiritual beliefs, as important as those beliefs must be to the individual believer of any faith.

Democratic socialism, Christian or otherwise, is the only way out of the myriad social, political, and economic problems our country faces today. It is the way for us to overcome the MAGA fascism that rules our federal government and several state governments today. The United States will never become truly democratic socialist as long as money controls our political system, for the wealthy will never let it happen. That’s why we need a mass, nationwide democratic socialist movement. We need a nonviolent democratic socialist revolution. Christians can and, indeed must, be part of that movement if they are to be true to the one they (we) call Lord and Savior. May it be so.

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[1] See my post On Democratic Socialism, posted on this blog on June 1, 2026.

[2] It is your humble author’s opinion that our country’s failure to have such a system of universal health insurance is one of its most appalling disgraces today.

[3] “Marginal tax rate” doesn’t mean a person’s entire income is taxed at that rate. It means that income over curtained specified amount is taxed at that rate. Because the marginal rate applies to only some of a person’s income, and then only if that income is high enough, a tax payer’s actual rate will be lower than the marginal rate.

Throw the Bums Out!

 

The more I think about the Supreme Court’s decision upholding birthright citizenship, the more concerned I become. Yes, the court upheld it, but it did so only by a 6-3 majority. Three justices said that the Constitution does not say what it so obviously says and/or doesn’t mean what it so obviously says. Those three justices violated their oath of office when they voted to reject birthright citizenship. They should all be thrown out of office immediately, but, of course, they won’t be. Normally I wouldn’t support impeaching any judge because of his the judge decided a case, but I’ve never before considered what to do if a judge of Supreme Court justice violated their oath of office by so clearly ruling against the Constitution as these three justices did. Now I say: Throw them out!

The United States Is Not a Democracy

 

The United States is Not a Democracy

June 27, 2026

I’ve been told my whole life that my country, the United States of America, is a democracy. We’ve claimed to be democracy’s defender all over the world. It’s obvious, of course, that we have been no such thing; but we’ve still claimed to be that abroad, and  we have always claimed to be truly democratic at home. The undeniable truth, however, is that the United States of America is not a democracy and never has been. The list of reasons why it is not and never has been is long. Here are the reasons I’ve thought of so far.

In addressing this issue, we have first to consider what a democracy is. The word comes from Greek roots that mean “rule by the people.” A true democracy is a political system in which the people who are the subjects of the system actually rule themselves. Ideally, they do so quite directly. The old New England town meeting was democratic. There, the people of a town met together and together made decisions about their life together. The United States has never been ruled that way.

Nonetheless, most Americans think that the United States Constitution creates a democracy. It doesn’t. Instead, it creates a “representative republic.” The people do not vote on laws, at least at the federal level they don’t.[1] Instead, they elect people to national offices who, in theory, represent them and their interests. At the national level, these representatives are the president, the vice president, the members of the Senate, and the members of the House of Representatives. These are the people who enact and, in theory at least, enforce the nation’s laws. The United States is a republic because it is not a dictatorship (though Trump would like it to be with him as dictator), and the people elect the people who make the laws. Those characteristics, however, do not make the country a democracy. They just make it a republic.

Next, I would say that the country is too big to be a true democracy. The United States is geographically enormous. It stretches from Alaska and Hawaii to Maine and Florida. Although India and China have orders of magnitude more people than the US does, we are still the third most populous country in the world. We are also an extremely diverse country. We sometimes seem to be so diverse that it doesn’t make much sense for us to be one country at all. I live on the “left coast,” in the Pacific Northwest of the country. And I live west of a mountainous divide that even seems to make my state really two states.

I find the politics of much of the rest of the nation to be not just wrong but to be reprehensible. Yet we are all one country, and I and people who think like I do have to live with the consequences of millions of other Americans thinking very differently and very destructively. Sometimes it seems that my state of Washington has so little in common with, say, Mississippi that it truly doesn’t make any sense for us to be all part of the same nation. Washington and Mississippi nearly always vote for candidates of different parties with different priorities and agendas. Why are we in the same nation? Why do Mississippians have a say in laws that affect Washingtonians? I can explain it through history. I can’t make it make political sense.

There is another more or less geographical problem that makes the United States not a democracy. It is the way senators are apportioned. Our states are immensely diverse in size. California has a population approaching 40 million. The population of Wyoming is only slightly over 500,000. Yet all states have the same number of senators. That means that the vote of a Wyoming voter for a senator carries far more weight than does the vote of a California voter for a senator. That result is, of course, radically undemocratic.

The same is true of the way we elect the president and vice president. They are not elected solely on the basis of popular vote. Rather, they are chosen by the “electoral college.” Each state has the number of electors in the electoral college that corresponds to their total number of federal representatives and senators. Perhaps with very rare exceptions, the electors vote for the candidates who won the popular vote in their state. Because every state has two senators regardless of its population, this arrangement gives small population states far more say per capita in the election of the president and vice president than do large population states. This arrangement not infrequently results in a candidate who did not receive the majority of the national popular vote winning the election, an undemocratic result if ever there were one.

Then there is the question of what the Republican Party is trying to do to our elections these days. President Trump and his acolytes are engaged in a concerted campaign to deprive as many voters of the vote as they can. They strive in particular to reduce the number of women and people of color who actually cast votes. They want the federal government not the states to control state elections, never mind what the US Constitution says about the matter. They keep insisting that there is a massive problem with voter fraud when there isn’t; and when they lose an election, they claim the vote was rigged when it wasn’t. The Republican Party is no longer a small d democratic party. It is no longer committed to democracy, and, at the moment, it controls our federal government. Republican politicians seem to care about only two things—passing laws that benefit the very wealthy at the expense of the people and holding onto power so the federal government can’t pass laws they don’t like. True democracy advocates neither of those things, so the Republican Party has become truly un-democratic.

Then there is the matter that is primary factor in determining that the United States is not a democracy. It is the power of money in our politics and a Supreme Court ruling that gives the ultra-wealthy the ability to infuse limitless amounts of money in political campaigns. In a case called Citizens United, decided in 2010, the US Supreme Court held that donating money to political campaigns is free speech protected by the First Amendment and that, therefore, the government cannot restrict corporations or labor unions from contributing as much money to political campaigns as they want. Big corporations and the wealthy people who control the benefit from them, of course, have far more money than labor unions do. Therefore, since Citizens United, even more than before that decision, money is deciding the outcome of our elections. The result is that Republican politicians, who actually represent only a minority of American voters, buy their way into office and run the country for their own benefit not the benefit of either the middle class or of people truly in need.[2]

So no, the United States of America is not a democracy. Two possible changes in the law would go a long way toward curing that fault in our body politic. We could, and should, amend the Constitution to eliminate the electoral college and provide for the election of the president and vice president by a popular majority of the votes case nationwide. We would then never again have a president who received less than a majority of the popular vote as we have had far too often. There would still be disproportionate representation in the Senate. I don’t expect that we can ever eliminate the electoral college because the small population states that benefit from it would never vote to ratify an amendment that eliminated it. It is even less likely that we will ever deal with the disproportionate representation of the people in the Senate. We are, I fear, stuck with this undemocratic character of governmental structure.

We must, somehow, do the other thing that would bring us closer to being a democracy, namely, get money out of our politics. Because Citizens United is grounded in an interpretation of the US Constitution, it would take a constitutional amendment to overturn it unless, that is, the Supreme Court overturned it itself.[3] The current Supreme Court, with its majority of ultra-conservative justices, who certainly appear to be in the pockets of the wealthy, white population and were appointed by Republican presidents, will never do that. So we’re stuck with the unlikely prospect of amending the constitution to overturn Citizens United. That, I fear, will never happen because the monied classes will never let it happen. They don’t want the country to be democratic. They want it to be an authoritarian oligarchy with Republicans in control.

Those of us who value true democracy cannot give up the fight. The stakes are too high. The politicians money puts in power have been ruling against the people and for the wealthy far, far too often (and once is too often). Our country needs a peaceful, nonviolent democratic socialist revolution, not that I truly expect one to happen except perhaps in some of the progressive “blue” states. Unless it does happen, we’ll remain stuck with an undemocratic country far too often controlled by the wealthy. Would that it were otherwise, but it isn’t.

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[1] Some states have initiative and referendum systems in which the people do occasionally vote directly on some laws or proposed laws. These systems are nowhere near pervasive enough to turn even one state into a true democracy much less the entire country.

[2] Money wouldn’t have the power in our elections that it does if more American voters were not persuaded by television advertising and did not buy the lies of the MAGA Republicans, but I sure don’t expect that to happen.

[3] I hear of Democratic politicians say they will overturn Citizens United through legislation. They can’t. The Constitution always trumps mere legislation, and Supreme Court says the Constitution, not a mere federal statute, requires its decision in that case.

Thoughts on Russia and the West

 

Thoughts on Russia and the West

June 20, 2026

Something, I’m not sure what, has started me thinking about Russia again. I have a PhD in Russian history. I traveled to the Soviet Union twice and spent most if not quite all my time there in Russia.[1] I lived in the USSR for an entire academic year doing dissertation research, mostly in Moscow but also some in what was then Leningrad. I never got the chance to use my PhD much, but I still have it; and I still know more about Russia than most Americans do by far.

And I’ve been wondering a couple of things. The first is: What do Americans need to know about Russia? I think that mostly what they need to know is how different Russia really is from the West. Russia has no meaningful democratic traditions whatsoever. Russians, or at least their rulers, do not value human life nearly as much as most of us in the West do. Vladimir Putin may well have cost the lives of one million or more of his own people with his insane invasion of Ukraine, and that tragic fact seems to bother him not at all. That’s not surprising. Russian military tactics have long consisted of throwing wave after wave of soldiers at an enemy, losing many if not most of them, and simply overwhelming the enemy with numbers. That’s a big part of the explanation of how the Soviets were able to defeat the Nazis.

Putin has also reinstituted an authoritarian if not totalitarian government in Russia after the collapse of Russian communism. Civil liberties we take for granted (or at least did until Trump came along) simply don’t exist in Russia and never have. Russians were freer under the tsars than they were under the Soviets or are under Putin, but the Russian autocracy was an authoritarian, thoroughly un-democratic form of government too.

Which raises the second question: What historical developments account for the differences between Russia and the West? The first answer to that question that comes to my mind today is that Russia became Orthodox Christian not Roman Christian. Russia became Orthodox Christian in 988 CE when Grand Prince Volodymyr (better known in the West by his Russian name Vladimir) converted to Orthodox Christianity under the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church headquartered in Constantinople. He could have converted to Roman Catholic Christianity, but his economic ties to Constantinople made it quite likely that he would eventually convert to Orthodox Christianity, which, of course, he did.

When Volodymyr converted to Orthodox Christianity, the eastern and western Christian churches were still in full communion with each other, but there were already sharp distinctions between them. The eastern church was thoroughly Greek. The western church was thoroughly Latin. The Greek Christians traced their church’s lineage back to Constantine more directly than the Latin Christians did. The Greek Orthodox Church was grounded in Greek culture and history, the Roman Catholic Church was grounded in Latin culture and history. It was, I believe, inevitable that they would go their separate ways. In 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome, that is, the Pope, excommunicated each other. This so-called Great Schism cemented the separation of eastern and western Christianity that had begun with cultural and linguistic differences (the east spoke Greek and the west spoke Latin) and, by the eleventh century CE, had developed into theological differences as well. Most significantly, the eastern Orthodox Christians never accepted the claims of the Pope to supremacy over the other Christian patriarchs, including the Patriarch of Constantinople.

By the time Volodymyr of Kiev converted to Orthodox Christianity, a major difference between the histories of the eastern and western Christian churches had already become apparent. In 800 CE, the Pope crowned Charlemagne, a secular ruler of territory now part of Germany and France, as a secular king. We see here the beginnings of something that became a major part of west European history but not east European history, namely, the conflict between the church and the state over secular primacy. Various princes and kings of western Europe fought the Papacy for their own independence for centuries. A well-known, if substantially later, example is Henry VIII of England breaking with Rome, nominally at least over the question of his divorce from his first wife.

No such conflict between the church and secular rulers ever occurred in the Orthodox countries, including Russia. Instead, in the Orthodox countries the church became a bulwark of the state. With the rather odd and ultimately not that meaningful schism of the Old Believers from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century, the Old Believers not being affiliated directly with the Russian state, no significant schism ever occurred in the Russian Orthodox Church. Instead, the Patriarch of Moscow was always a staunch supporter of the monarchy., perhaps even more so after Peter the Great abolished the Moscow Patriarchate in 1721 and replaced it with a synod consisting mostly of bishops. The Russian Orthodox Church was tied directly to and never opposed the Russian autocracy about anything. It doesn’t oppose Putin about anything either.

Perhaps many westerners dismiss the importance of churches in history, but the way the Russian Orthodox Church always supported and never opposed the Russian state had immense consequences in Russian history. In the west, secular states became a power base separate from the church in effect if not in law. The church always remained a source of authority and independence separate from the authority of the state. Opposition to both the church and the state thus became a staple of western European history and culture. No such source of authority and independence separate from the authority of the state ever developed in Russia. There was never an institutional basis for opposition to the state the way there was in the West.

Another stark difference between the West and Russia developed beginning in about the fourteenth century CE. It was the Renaissance, first in Italy, then across western Europe. Most of the significant figures of the Renaissance remained Roman Catholic or, later, Protestant; but the Renaissance introduced something into western culture that has always been lacking in Russia. The artists of the Renaissance celebrated the human form. Many of them were, in effect, Christian humanists. They focused on individuals in a way Russian artists of the time never did. They painted nude women and sculpted nude men. No artists in Russia did any such thing at least until the nineteenth century. The value of the individual human being grew in western Europe during and after the Renaissance in a way it never did in Russia.

Then comes the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It comes in the West that is, not in Russia. Protestant Christianity, which became the dominant Christianity in the northern regions of western Europe, stressed the individual in a way the Russian Orthodox Church never did. Beginning with Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformers stressed the personal relationship of each believer with God apart from the church. That’s why they translated the Bible into their local languages, so that their people could read what they called the word of God themselves rather than learn of it only from the church. No such development ever occurred in Russia.

Then we come to the Enlightenment. In 1637, French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes wrote “I think, therefore I am,” and the world has not been the same since. It’s not that western culture was completely unacquainted with human reason. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, for example is strictly rational. But before the Enlightenment, reason was not the ultimate standard of human knowledge or wisdom. Essentially everyone in the West accepted divine revelation, in the Bible and otherwise, as that ultimate standard. Anselm of Canterbury’s book Cur Deus Homo, which established the classical theory of atonement, is very rationalistic, but it Is not exclusively so. It accepts the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation without trying to reason its way to that doctrine.

In getting to his conclusion “I think therefore I am,” Rene Descartes did the radically new thing of using only his personal reason to answer the question he was asking. He set out to doubt everything he could doubt. He put nothing beyond his power of doubt. He found that he could doubt everything except that he was there doing the doubting. Hence, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes’ process and his conclusion were rationalistic in ways western thought had not been before him.

Over the course of the next two centuries, human reason became the standard of knowledge, truth, and wisdom throughout western culture. The founders of the United States of America, for example, were children of the Enlightenment. Their thought was rationalistic not religious in any meaningful way. Jefferson’s famous statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a thoroughly rationalistic statement. It relies not on divine revelation for its truth but only on human reason. By the middle of the nineteenth century, western thought was primarily rationalistic and scientific.

No such development ever took place in Russia. It is true that some of the tsars and tsarinas of the eighteenth century were attracted to and dabbled in western culture. Peter I, known as Peter the Great (ruled 168-1725), tried to westernize (though in no way to democratize) the Russian government with some limited success. Tsarina Ekaterina II, known to us as Catherine the Great (ruled 1762-1796) corresponded with French Enlightenment thinkers but then, she was German not Russian. And, like Peter, she did nothing to make Russia in any way more democratic. Enlightenment thinking made little or no impact on Russian culture generally. Russian science did appear in the eighteenth century and made some significant contributions to world knowledge. Moscow State University is named after the eighteenth century Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. The Scientific Revolution was part of the Enlightenment, but neither rationalistic thinking nor science made any significant impact on Russian culture at least until the nineteenth century.

Russia has no meaningful democratic tradition whatsoever. The earlier Russian rulers were Grand Princes like Volodymyr of Kiev. They were essentially autocratic rulers. When Volodymyr converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE, the entire Russian populace became Orthodox Christian. That conversion may have been nominal at first, but Russian Orthodoxy came to permeate Russian life and culture from top to bottom, and it began in Russia when an absolute monarch converted. The control of the country by the Grand Princes generally and the Grand Princes of Moscow in particular just deepened over the centuries. When Russian autocracy finally collapsed (at least in its tsarist form) in 1917, it was still true that, by and large, the Russian people remained at least superficially committed to both Orthodoxy and autocracy.

There is yet another aspect of Russian history that explains a good deal about Russian thought and the actions of the Russian government. Russia’s history is one of foreign invasion after foreign invasion. Russia has no naturally defensibly land borders. Moscow rose to prominence among the Russian states in the thirteenth century because in 1240 the Tartars, coming from the east, conquered what today is Ukraine, including the former Grand Principality of Kyiv. The Russian Grand Princes and tsars fought land wars at least with Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the French. Finally, the Soviets fought a horrifically devastating war against the German Nazis. National security from foreign invasion is a concern for the Russian people and their leaders in a way we Americans can hardly understand.

That’s why Putin can’t stand the thought of Ukraine joining NATO. That’s why, in my opinion, it was wrong for NATO to admit states some of which had been part of the USSR and others of which had been members of the Warsaw Pact. It was perfectly predictable that NATO doing so would provoke a reaction from Russia that may strike us as paranoid but that is perfectly reasonable in the Russian context. Putin may well not have invaded Ukraine had NATO not admitted Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, and other states formerly under Soviet domination.

Russia has no history of meaningful democracy or concern for human rights, but there are a couple of things worth looking at. The first Russian revolution of the twentieth century took place not in 1917 but in 1905. Public unrest, rioting actually, and the revolt of much of the Russian military (especially the Navy, which had just suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Japanese) forced Tsar Nicholas II to adopt governmental reforms that had a democratic appearance. There was a national legislature called the Duma that was more or less freely elected. It debated and passed legislation like a western legislature, but there was a significant difference between it and, say, the British Parliament. The tsar didn’t have to obey any law the Duma passed. The reforms of 1905 changed Russian autocracy in name only.

Nicholas II abdicated in February (March new style) 1917, and Russian autocracy came to an end at least in its tsarist form. The first government that replaced the tsardom is known as the “Provisional Government.” It was nominally democratic, and there was no longer a tsar who could disregard its enactments. It was, however, utterly ineffective as a Russian government. It refused to pull Russia out of World War I though the country was falling apart because of the war. It refused to enact foundational laws because it said it had to wait for a “Constituent Assembly” to draft a new Russian constitution, something that never happened. And, of course, the Provisional Government lasted only from February to October (March to November new style), 1917. It had no meaningful impact on Russian thought or culture.

Comes October 25 (old style, November 7 new style), 1917. On that date, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks staged a coup d’etat against the Provisional Government. The Soviet Communists came to call this coup “The Great October Revolution,” but it was nothing of the sort at the time. It did, however, lead to a civil war in Russia that lasted until 1922, from which the Soviet Communists, under Lenin, emerged victorious. Lenin and, most particularly his successor Stalin, created one of the most totalitarian, brutally violent, and brutally oppressive political systems the world has ever seen. It was only 74 years from the Bolshevik coup in 1917 to the end of the Communist regime in Russia at the end of 1991, but in those 74 years the Soviet Communists suppressed all opposition, often with long prison terms under murderous conditions or with bullets in the back of the head. More than they ever had before, the Russian people came both to fear their government and to understand that they had no say in what their government did. The Soviet Communists held elections, but they were fake elections. No one opposed to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was allowed to run, and the Communists always won by 95% or more. Soviet democracy was a pure sham.

When the Soviet Union ended on December 25, 1991, Russia adopted the most democratic constitution it had ever had. There were meaningful elections at all levels of government. The Russian presidency was powerful, but there were, and are, legislative bodies with real legislative authority. Yet even before Vladimir Putin became president on Jan. 1, 2000, Russian democracy was far from perfect. The way the government divested itself of the state-owned industries from the Soviet era created both a culture of mafia rule and the power of so-called “oligarchs,” immensely rich men who controlled all of the major industries including mining and oil and gas production. There were elections, but the national government was completely in the pockets of the oligarchs.

Whereupon Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin enters the picture. Putin had been a low-level KGB officer in East Germany when the Berlin wall came down. He’d had to deal with anti-Communist rioters in Dresden. President Boris Yeltsin first made him head of the Russian successor to the KGB and then named him Prime Minister. Yeltsin resigned at the end of 1999, and, as Prime Minister, Putin became president pro tem. He won his first election as president a short time later. He has essentially ruled Russia ever since.

Putin is in many ways an unreformed Russian communist. He no longer spouts Marxist-Leninist ideology, but he has created an authoritarian state that is about as close to Soviet totalitarianism as he can get. He has nationalized the public media and strictly controls the Internet. He has had his most prominent critics exiled or killed, sometimes both. He has suppressed opposition nearly as effectively as the Soviet Communists had done. Russia remains nominally democratic, but its democracy is for show only. It is, for example, illegal to criticize Putin’s immoral and illegal invasion of Ukraine. Note that the Patriarch of Moscow fully supports that invasion despite its undeniably sinful nature.

Let me share three experiences from my two times in the Soviet Union that may well demonstrate some of the differences between Russia and the West. I was first in Russia in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study tour through Indiana University. One day, in what was then Leningrad, our group met a Russian man and chatted with him. He said to us: “You Americans always talk about what’s bad about our country and our government. But how would you like it if people went around saying bad things about your government?” This was at the height of the 1968 presidential election. Most of the people in our group had “Clean for Gene” stickers on their luggage, expressing support for the strongly anti-Vietnam War candidate Gene McCarthy. We thought: Hell. We say negative things about our government every day! That’s the American way!” Well, it definitely is not the Russian way.

Then, once again in Leningrad but this time at a dorm of Leningrad State University in 1976, the Soviet Defense Minister had just died. He had been a prominent figure in the Soviet government for a long time. I said something about it to some Russian students. They just shrugged and said: “That’s his business.” They not only didn’t care, they weren’t the least bit interested in the fact that a prominent Soviet leader had died. The specifics of that incident are probably understandable, but I think these students’ reaction tells us something important. The Russian people just didn’t care about what was going on in their government because they had absolutely no say in what it did.

Finally, the Berdyaev incident. When I resided at Moscow State University for the 1975-76 academic year, I got to know to know a Russian student at the University. He assured me that he was an atheist and that he didn’t understand how so many Americans could say they believe in God. Nonetheless, as I was about to leave Moscow for the last time, I gave him a book by the great Orthodox Russian theologian and philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. My friend nearly began to weep. He said: “You cannot know what you have done for me.”

Perhaps not, but I think I have a pretty good idea what I might well have done for him. He knew full well that the communist regime under which he lived and studied had stolen his people’s history. They had bastardized it to fit a Marxist ideology. Historians wrote and spoke mostly not to discover and disclose the truth about the past but to prop up the Soviet system. The Soviet regime had also attempted to steal people’s nationality from them. Soviet citizens were supposed to be “the new communist woman” and “the new communist man” and not actually be Russians or any other of the numerous nationalities within the USSR. Berdyaev may have been a Russian Orthodox theologian, but that meant that he was profoundly Russian. He had left Russia to avoid the communists. Some Russian young people at the time were being attracted back to the Russian Orthodox Church not because it was Christian but because it is so quintessentially Russian.

My friend had probably heard of Berdyaev. Berdyaev had been a member of what’s called the Vekhi Group. That was a group of former Marxists who left Marxism behind and returned to the Russian Orthodox faith. The Soviet communists despised them. They called them class traitors. I’m sure the Soviets saw them as evidence of the way bourgeois society steals people away from the Marxist truth and gets them to accept a faith that, for the communists, served only to perpetuate that bourgeois society. I had given my friend an opening into something profoundly Russian that he thought he would never have.

Russians like my friend knew that they lived under a regime that bastardized and stole their people’s history. They expected, and today I’m sure expect, nothing better from their government. Until some MAGA fascists in Florida and elsewhere started to prohibit public schools from teaching the truth about American history, this is something none of us have ever had to deal with. It is, however, and long has been, part of what the Russian people live with.

It should be obvious from this brief overview of Russian history and my few personal stories that Russia is a very different place from the West, including from the United States. When the USSR ceased to exist, many people in the West thought Russia would become a functioning parliamentary democracy. That thought was unrealistic if not outright naïve. Few Americans understand the power of history, but a people’s history really does matter. Russia’s history and present lived experience are radically different from those of the United States and the rest of the West. Russia has no meaningful history of democracy of any kind. Human life does not mean in Russia what it means to us. Russia has no meaningful history of centers of power in the country other than the government together with either the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Communist Party, or both. Russia has a history of opposition to the state being brutally suppressive. That happened to some extent under the tsars. It happened vociferously under the communists, and it happens that way today under Putin. Russians see national security from a perspective of having been invaded over and over again. They have a memory of having been a world power and of having an extensive, geographically contiguous empire. They lost both of those things when the Soviet Union dissolved, and they aren’t happy about it.

We cannot expect Russia to function or behave like a western representative democracy. It may be such a democracy on paper today, but then it was such a democracy on paper under the Soviets too. We must not be led by superficial appearances and propagandistic claims. We must not project western ways and values onto Russia. Russia is far more Asian than are any of the countries of the West, especially in her politics. The Russias are a great people. They have achieved spectacular successes in science, beating the US into space. They have produced worldclass literature, visual arts, and music. The Russian people are quite cold and unfriendly in public, but in private they are among the most friendly and welcoming people you will meet anywhere.

I want very much to like Russia and the Russians, but today I cannot do it. I am so mad at Putin over his invasion of Ukraine that sometimes I fee like I’m going to burst. There isn’t a shred of justification for it anywhere. It has inflicted immense harm on both the Ukrainian and the Russian people. It has made Russia more of a pariah nation than she even was before the invasion. I admire Russian culture. I respect the Russian people. I despise their government, what it has done to its people, and what it has done on the international stage. Still, Russia has an important presence in the world, and we must do more than most Americans ever do to understand her. Perhaps my little effort will help my country in that regard.

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[1] In the summer of 1968 I spent a few days in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Kyiv, Ukraine. Otherwise my time in the USSR was all in Russia.