SAVE OUR SHIP

How accumulated political failures, institutional assaults and decay, and concentrated power are pushing America off course. A republic in heavy seas, burdened by corruption, division, and the concentration of wealth and power.

Like a vessel suffering multiple breaches below the waterline, the United States faces a series of interconnected failures that, collectively, pose a profound challenge to the durability of its institutions and traditions.  The greatest danger facing the United States is not any single policy or personality, but the combined effect of years of democratic erosion, factionalism, and elite self-dealing that have left the nation increasingly unable to govern itself effectively.

I’ve always had a soft spot for nautical metaphors when called upon to characterize the management or mismanagement of events, whether they’re moving smoothly and according to plan or when corrective measures must be taken to save a ship and crew faced with foul weather, shipboard catastrophes or enemy action.

Like an almost incomprehensibly complex modern vessel where thousands of elaborate systems must function reliably, all interconnected, and thousands of crew members who must execute their duties to exacting perfection, often under stressful or perilous conditions, our country, mirror-like, similarly reflects the quintessence of collaboration under strong, enlightened leadership.  It is the combination of such essential efforts that the safe and sane conduct of the republic demands of each of us.  And when that ship is faced with an existential threat and under the command of a demented, incompetent leader, as many in our country believe we are today, courageous subordinates step in and push him aside.  Shades of the Caine Mutiny abound, if you hadn’t noticed.

The nation these past several years has taken on a great burden of unwanted negative political and social ballast, slowing our progress and inhibiting our maneuverability to change and fix broken things.  It is the kind of ballast produced by our fouled and divided politics, an incompetent legislature, unbridled greed and corruption, vile language and a personalized, wicked leadership.  These conditions threaten to sink us, morally, spiritually, politically, economically, and they are gnawing away at the despoilment of one of our greatest national assets, our collective self respect.

These political storms and supremely flawed judgment at the top that have been tossing and turning us for nearly a decade now are the accumulated weight of the incumbency of this president, dragging us down, while much of America watches, stomachs turning.

Let’s not look not at the horrors of individual policies or presidential personal failings, but at the sum total of these many twisted, thoroughly un-American moves.  When stitched together so they can be seen as a whole, they compellingly illustrate that we are  under a crushing and ponderous ligature, a suffocatingly wet blanket across the length and breadth of the country, and a pernicious weakening of two hundred years of developing our national republic’s structure. Trump is mangling all of us who live below the celestial zone of uber wealth and power, well beneath but in the grasp of mega corporations and oligarchic mergers.  Captains of industry, technology, communications, entertainment and broadcasting are in a tight brotherhood with the unimaginably corrupt Trump administration, and they are remaking their own version of America.  There are stirrings of resistance among us for certain, but dissidence against the Goliath is still in the early stages.

The focus I want here is on the sweeping degree of infection that the brotherhood in its entirety has already created to strangle the rest of us.  I want to illustrate how terrifying it is when we step back and see it as the scurrilous whole that it is.  The creeping dissolution of American democracy has infected to some extent nearly every aspect of national life, and this is only a partial accounting:

• Our ability to work together in the legislative branch has been non-existent in the face of “polarization” for nearly 20 years.  But Trump’s creation and expropriation of a hard core, hermetically sealed MAGA contingent, slavishly loyal to his every irresponsible whim, has poisoned American politics to the point that the two party system has grown incapably sclerotic.

• The nation’s trade picture is wretched, unnecessarily broken among close friends and allies as well as distant cousins, unnecessarily, unwisely, stupidly managed, because of personality quirks and no concept of international economics.  Blind acts of personal vindictiveness lead to mindless tariffs, poorly understood by Trump and whimsically imposed.  Trade deals authored by him between our two most important trading partners, Mexico and Canada, are in the tank.

• Our vaunted and superbly trained and formerly equipped military has been hijacked by incompetent leaders, a finely tuned and committed machine of spectacular capabilities has been surrendered to lumbering and sightless fools at the controls.

• Our foreign policy is a shambles.  We have today no real, reliable allies who are prepared to come to a joint mission of urgent need or who are aligned with a new and crumbling set of priorities in Washington.  Consistent and ill founded criticism of old friends has sent them away.  We fly solo, with the exception of some third-rate nations who come along for the ride on the occasional, nonsensical initiatives such as the “Peace Board” who will be there only as long as sit suits them. We have lost respect, standing, purpose. The President lies and lives within the prison of his own mind and narcissism when he says we are respected.

• The pursuit of excellence has been utterly forsaken for mediocrity in all things that contribute to the well being of the nation; scientific and medical research is being abandoned, renewable energy is disavowed while other nations embrace it; experimentation has given way to regressive economic, social, commercial and a vast host of soft power mechanisms. Competence swapped for blind and cowardly loyalty.

• The introduction and endorsement of narrowly rigid religious preferences throughout the federal government has allowed a camel’s nose of intolerance into the tent, threatening a hard to win enlightenment with respect to the relationship between government and religion, forsaking the precious principle of the separation of Church and State.

• The founders’ fears of Party and Faction, accepted in the early 19th Century as essential to a governing democracy, have been tense over two centuries, but managed.  The current administration has so terrorized resistance to it that the full merger of the Republican Party and the office of the Chief Executive is near complete, collapsing a foundational principle of a democratic republic.

• Wall Street and much of the financial sector have dismissed many of the rules governing the protection of its investors in boosting new IPOs of record size, and is increasingly in the hands of the American titans of finance.  Small investors are either priced out of the market or involuntarily and hastily included in investment packages invisible to them.

• Financial oligarchs grow stronger with federal collusion and ignorance of trust-busting needs; a steadily enveloping oligarchical kakistocracy is gobbling up critical information sources and seizing more influence.

• Great imbalance is happening in the distribution of fiscal transfers meant to assist education, medicine, food assistance, infrastructure development, those funds returned to federal coffers and projects of either personal interest to the president or the brotherhood at large.

The United States is on the verge of an election that could conceivably turn the ship around or shackle its captain, or both.  But make no mistake, the administration will make multiple efforts across a broad front to interfere in November.  If that effort ruins what should be an honest and fair election, this nation of growing disaffection and disgruntled, angry Americans may well explode in the non-violent, mass protests of millions in the streets, the kind of turbulence that brought down the Eastern European satellite states in 1989-1990.  That, perhaps, would be the best medicine for us, saddled as we are with an impotent legislature which refuses to impeach.