Our System is Failing

Our System is Failing

The American political system is failing. The American empire is in decline. There is lots of evidence of those facts. More than ever money determines outcomes. Our two-party system has deteriorated into tribalism. The two parties rarely cooperate to accomplish anything. Millions upon millions of people vote against their own self-interest. The agencies of the federal government work to destroy the environment rather than protect and restore it. The federal government, through tax laws and other means, works for the benefit of the country’s richest individuals and largest corporations rather than for the benefit of the people. We use fascist tactics on our southern border because we don’t like brown people coming into our country. Yet perhaps the most convincing and alarming evidence of the failure of our political system is the certainty that the United States Senate will not vote to remove President Donald J. Trump from office when it votes on the articles of impeachment that the House of Representatives are certain to approve and present to it. That our political system has a mechanism for removing Trump from office but will not do it is unconscionable. It is incomprehensible except as a symptom of the fact that our entire system is utterly failing to function the way it was intended to function.

Impeachment is not an American version of the British vote of no confidence. It is not intended to be used over policy disagreements (although when a policy becomes criminal its use is of course mandated). But consider these undeniable facts about Donald Trump:

·       He has sex with a porn star to whom he is not married, then is named in federal court papers as the person who instigated a scheme to pay her to keep quiet while he’s running for president, in effect naming him as an unindicted coconspirator. He and his campaign then violate federal campaign finance law when they fail to disclose that payment as a campaign expense.

·       He benefits from his office financially in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

·       He solicits and accepts Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

·       He then obstructs justice by doing everything he can to impede or even halt the federal investigation into that Russian interference. See Vol. 2 of the Mueller Report.

·       He withholds military aid to Ukraine that the Congress has passed and refuses to schedule a White House visit for the president of Ukraine, demanding that that president publicly announce an investigation into debunked claims against former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter and into the thoroughly specious claim that it was the Ukrainians not the Russians who interfered in the 2016 election He makes the Ukrainian president announcing such an investigation a condition for the release of the military aid he has illegally withheld and for the scheduling of a White House visit for the Ukrainian president. In these acts he put his personal political interest before the law and the national security interests of the country he was elected to lead.

·       He then obstructs the Congressional investigation into those acts of extortion and campaign law violation by directing everyone involved over whom he has any power not to testify before Congress and by refusing to turn over a single document to Congressional investigators.

If this litany of moral and political sins doesn’t justify removing Donald Trump from office the impeachment provision of the US Constitution has lost all of its meaning and might as well be repealed.

Congress, however, will not remove Trump from office. That failure of our Constitutional system is nearly enough to make me give up on it altogether. Failure to remove Trump is inexcusable, but it is not insignificant. It proves more than anything else in our national life does that the American empire has entered its declining phase.

All empires decline and end. Most Americans think that will never happen to us. They think that for two reasons, both of them inaccurate. First, they deny that we are and have been an empire. True, we have only a few colonies around the world—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Hawaii (now a state but originally a colony). We are however a different kind of empire. We project military might around the world. We say we do that to defend democracy and our national security, but that’s not why we do it. We do it to extend and protect American economic and political power, and that makes us an empire. We act,(at least when we want to) as the world’s policeman, and that makes us an empire. Countries around the world look to us to be part of solving their problems, and that makes us an empire. So many Americans are just wrong to say we are not an empire.

Second, they are wrong to think that the American empire will not decline and fall the way every other empire has. It seems simply to be in the dynamics of empire that they decline and fall. As they do, their internal political functioning and morality decline. Great Britain perhaps more or less escaped that part of the process, but virtually every other world empire has experienced it. Rome is the model here, and we seem to be going the way of Rome. We elect an philandering adulterer president. We address most of our social ills with power rather than really trying to find lasting solutions to them. We steal children from their parents at the border because we want to protect what we have from desperate, non-white people who don’t have it. We live on bread and circuses. Most Americans still have enough of what they need to live, so they devote their energies to rooting for their favorite NFL team and spend their tie playing video games rather than working for meaningful solutions to social problems. When we encounter hordes of homeless people in our cities we just want to make them go away rather than address the real causes of homelessness or spend the money necessary to provide housing for those who don’t have it. We hear that the world’s climate is changing in catastrophic ways and do next to nothing to address problem. A great many of us just deny that it’s happening or that we are any part of the cause of it happening. We face an epidemic of gun violence, and we say you can’t take my guns because I need to protect myself and my family as if an AR-15 were really any defense against the firepower of the police and the American military. Untold numbers of our people become addicted to both legal and illegal drugs, and all we want to do is cut off the supply of drugs rather than deal with the things that generate the demand for drugs. The list of social ills that we face and the ways in which we avoid addressing them in meaningful ways could go on and on.

And it all adds up to one thing. Our system is failing. Our empire is declining. We won’t even remove a grossly unfit and dangerous president from office though we have Constitutional means to do it. Given that reality I truly don’t know how to avoid despair. I could withdraw into a shell and pretend the problems don’t exist; but I’ve spent my whole life paying attention to national issues, and I’m not at all sure that now at age 73 I can stop doing it. Nor am I sure it is the proper thing to do. But what else is there? The House of Representatives district and the state in which I live don’t send Republicans to Congress these days, so I don’t even have anyone to vote against. I just have to put up with the reality that other districts and states elect politicians who are useless at best and destructive and worst. I can put up blog posts like this one that almost no one reads. I can write letters to the editor of the local paper that have no effect whatsoever. I can write letters to my congressional representative and senators, but they become just one voice among thousands and have little if any effect. I wish I knew how to avoid despair and effect constructive change, but I just don’t. That is the spiritual effect the failure of the American system has on me. If that changes I’ll let you know.