How Did We Get Here?

Sitting here at what may well be the end of American democracy, it seems fitting to look back over our 200-year fling and ask, what went wrong? How did a democratic republic of, by, and for the people become a plutocracy in which corporations dictate terms to the government and join with it to hypnotize the people into throwing away their rights like smokers tossing away cigarette butts?

Many forces have contributed to the disaster. A few salient examples:

• Enormous power and wealth have been concentrated in a military-industrial complex that depends for its survival on keeping its customers, including us, frightened. Ike warned us about this one, and he knew what he was talking about.
  

• Advances in communications technology, especially television, have been combined with advances in applied psychology to develop machinery of propaganda that Goebbels and Hitler could only dream about.

• Floods of advertising have created the first culture in history where lies are an ordinary and accepted part of social intercourse. This has corroded the commitment to objective truth as a common goal, one of the bedrock Enlightenment values on which our system was built. It has culminated in the infamous ridiculing of "fact-based reality" by a functionary of the current administration. A related phenomenon is the enormous growth of militant and intolerant religious sects based upon ecstatic illusions of power and freedom derived from the capacity to will a belief in things contrary to observed fact. This has all contributed to a widespread sense that one's ideas are simply a matter of personal taste, like one's choice of deodorants.
  

• The public has come to rely for its information on an industrialized media complex in which professional journalism has entirely given way to bean counting. Worse, because of their immense size and the privileged status of their owners, the mass media inevitably favor entrenched interests over minority ones. A culture of groupthink reminiscent of high school cliques is used to police the journalistic workforce and marginalize anyone asking questions or reporting facts that jeopardize the consensus.

• Public education has been crippled at all levels. Grade school pupils do not learn to read; many college students graduate with nothing resembling a liberal education and hence never learn the habits of thought on which Jeffersonian democracy depends.

Many other forces could and probably should be cited, but these are some of the structural ones that occur to me. Such a list raises an interesting question: Which of these, if any, is a sine qua non for the current mess, without which it could not have occurred? This question in turn suggests a thought experiment: If you were empowered to go back in history and attempt to avert the present crisis by a single act, what would it be? Obviously, some fuzziness surrounds the notion of an "act" in this context. But I'm thinking of things like enacting or repealing or amending a law, electing or defeating a leader (or even assassinating one, or saving one from assassination), ordering the armed forces to fight a war, or not to fight one, or to fight one differently.

The question is interesting not because of its answer -- it doesn't really have an answer -- but because of the opportunities it provides to think about how we got here, and who knows, maybe even how to extricate ourselves -- or at least give a warning to others who might stray into the tar pit where we seem about to go down to join the saber-tooth tigers.