Too Big to Succeed?

 

The United States is the third most populous nation on Earth. Only India and China, culturally profoundly different and despite language issues oddly homogeneous compared with the United States, have more people. Each nation struggles with governance, China with repression, India with a strange balance between powerful local rule (Chief Ministers – the US equivalent of governors – exercise near total control over their designated state) and less powerful central national power (currently under PM Narendra Modi of the Hindu Nationalist BJP Party). The forms of government in these two Asian powers were only created in the middle of the 20th century, while the US form of government was created 200 years earlier.

Simply, the ability of the US democracy to govern effectively has recently unraveled to the extent that deep “irreconcilable differences” – mutually inconsistent visions of governance – have rendered that historic pattern of legislative compromise a vestige the past that has slipped by. Butterfly effects have redesigned our nation. As Canada has contained the cost of higher education, producing STEM candidates at reasonable costs, the average educational level has risen proportionally. With no real healthcare issues, Canada has avoided having classes of healthcare haves and haves not (or have a whole lot less). As an extension of these realities, Canada is now leaning less on religious foundations and increasingly on fact-driven scientific realities.

That Canadians are looking at fundamentalist religion and aversion to reliance on empirical facts as a uniquely American phenomenon which actually scares them, and those Americans holding what would be radical minority views in Canada are anti-democratic, pro-autocracy really, and represent a growing sentiment where democracy cannot be sustained.

That America has risen to be an economic monolith with bully tactics and a clear desire to extend her borders into nearby nations is sending political shudders across the Great White Northland. As discussed in the January 13th The Conversation by Canadian academics Galen Watts and Sam Reimer, organized religion’s brand is becoming decreasingly popular, just as liberalism and secular science have become culturally dominant: “In 1961, less than one per cent of Canadians identified as having no religion. In 2021, 43 per cent of those between 15 and 35 considered themselves religiously unaffiliated… Organized religion — and especially Christianity — is in decline. Secularization is advancing apace. Most sociologists of religion agree on this. What they disagree about, however, is why…

“To understand branding’s role in shaping views of ‘religion’ we drew from recent survey data on young Canadians’ shifting sentiments toward the term, as well as our own interview data with 50 Anglo-Canadians born between 1980-2000 who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ — a phrase claimed by around 40 per cent of Canadians.

“Our findings indicate that the decline of organized religion in Canada is caused by a significant shift in the country’s religious imaginary: while ‘religion’ was once widely seen by Canadians in positive terms, among younger people especially, it is increasingly seen in a negative light.

“Many of the Canadian millennials we spoke to tended to view the word ‘religion’ as:

(1) anti-modern;

(2) conservative;

(3) American; and

(4) colonial.”

But we Americans now live in a world where if the Americans who seem out of power (liberals) do not admit they are wrong and that red states are the only correct political voice, the blue Americans cannot receive benefits, like disaster relief, from the political party in power. And that includes denigrating scientific thought, decrying our finest institutions of higher learning as woke and out of touch with “reality” and elevating obviously inane conspiracy theories above empirical facts. Even as we are a nation of immigrants, dependent on poor immigrants to harvest our food and build our homes, as the local population no longer has babies anywhere near replacement value, we have turned on immigrants with no sensible policy ready to right our ship.

Addressing the recent fires in California, all sorts of “blame” has been heaped on our elected leadership. Trump himself could not fathom how local firefighters could not put out a fire… not remotely understanding that red state leaders could no more stop water carrying hurricanes than fires facing the same level of winds. MAGA officials continue to blame California for not cleaning up their forest land as the cause… even though these were not “forest fires,” and it is federal forest land that needs the clean-up.

There is no fault here except our “woke” refusal to face climate change as the underlying vector of power. 2023 as the warmest year on record was just a repetition of a string of warming records. But once those “theories” are uttered in MAGAland, they become immutable truths. “Obviously there's been water resources management, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems. And it does come down to leadership and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects… So that's something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid. That's my personal view." House Speaker Johnson, echoing the opinion of his most rightwing faction, some of whom simply want to withhold fire aid entirely.

As the United States grew, mostly from immigration, it got rich. Scientific facts and good old fashioned American engineering exploded economic growth. But as economic equality began to slip away, as a new class of billionaires rose, complaining about high taxes and too much consumer and environmental regulation, excoriating extending healthcare and retirement benefits to ordinary Americans as “entitlements” and “creeping socialism,” those oligarchs used religion and fundamental “American values” to stop those benefits to the American who paid into the system.

Canadians are happier these days, even with their own political turmoil, than are we. Why is that? How does a democratic government function when even the basic “facts” around us are refuted and replaced with vacuous conspiracy theories? I guess it doesn’t. It used to be that we were big enough to tolerate markedly divergent views… we were the great mixing bowl that accelerated growth and prosperity. But today, that very bigness has created such strong factions that we are slip-sliding in the wrong direction… and the piper is en route to our shores.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we cannot build our society on reality, how can democracy survive… or does that matter anymore?