Should we blame Trump? No.
Blame Madison and the Founding Fathers
As protests and outrage continue to escalate across the country, there's an irrepressible human need to find someone to blame. Someone to blame for coronavirus. For Amy Cooper. For George Floyd's death. For the escalation of the protests into looting and violence. Of course, the natural outlet is Trump, with his lack of coherent leadership and his role as divider-in-chief, stoking the fires instead of quelling them.
We've reached a point, however, where the true blame lies with James Madison and our Founding Fathers. When we talk about the contract of society that we all agree to abide by, at its most fundamental level, that starts with the Constitution. The US Constitution never claimed to be perfect, but it has now reached its breaking point. It passed its expiration date and its time for something new. JFK once said, at another time of social unrest, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." We are going to find out how true that is now.
In the United States of America, we are past the point where peaceful revolution is possible.
Why? We've known the Constitution wasn't perfect from the day it was created, starting with the unforgivable Three-Fifths Compromise. In fact, even the framers of our Constitution were well aware of its limitations. In some ways, we've spent the last 230+ years taking that starting point and improving on it where necessary. The Civil War led to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, abolishing slavery and expanding civil rights to slaves. The civil rights movement of the 1960s didn't lead to any amendments but did lead to landmark legislation in the form of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to outlaw discrimination in various forms, from segregation to voting.
Why can't this social and economic unrest just lead to the next wave of reforms? Presumably, the arc of the Constitution's morality is long, but it bends toward justice. The structure of the system has to allow for changes to be made from within that system. The 13th amendment abolishing slavery had to be passed by Congress and then ratified by the states. The Civil Rights Act had to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In our system, it's largely the legislative branch that is tasked with changes to the system.[1] Whatever the means, any system must be designed in a way to allow for fundamental reforms.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case with today's American system. Even the idea of passing an amendment today, with 2/3 support in the House and Senate and 3/4 of state legislatures, is laughable. With our polarized politics, it's doubtful we could even pass an amendment to outlaw rat poison in food today. Passing sweeping legislative reforms that drive irreversible progress seems impossible in the modern political climate.
What's changed?
Two forces have emerged that make transformational change impossible within the confines of the current constitutional framework.
1. Globalization
We've discussed this shift ad nauseam since Thomas Friedman argued The World Is Flat in 2005. We’ve all heard how this has impacted low-wage jobs, de-emphasized borders, and created more global companies. There are differing views on the positive and negative effects of globalization, but the effects on our governance are undeniable and, for the most part, overlooked.
Today, corporations, buoyed by global profits and accountable to no individual country, are more powerful than ever. This means executing meaningful reforms affecting corporate interests are hard to enact and even harder to enforce. Corporate interests have made lobbying an essential part of our government, and Citizens United has established the personhood of corporations. Corporations now dwarf the interest of citizens, exerting their influence on our political system in unimaginable ways.
The 2008 banking crisis came and went with only one banker going to jail.
These changes have made systemic reform much more challenging. We used to be able to try and elect and influence officials into reflecting our will. No matter our success, we knew we were fighting on the same playing field as every other citizen. Now, there’s a new player in town and we’re small potatoes in comparison.
Second, globalization has made borders less relevant while we're stuck operating within a system that is preoccupied with borders. At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, it's important to remember how precarious the union of states was. There was a large clamoring for states to govern themselves. In order to balance the interests of small states vs. large states, states dependent on slavery vs. those that weren't, the framers were forced to walk a federalist tightrope, establishing a federal framework but leaving the states with great power.
That distinction seems way less relevant today. Our allegiance largely lies locally with our communities and nationally with our standing in the global geopolitical arena. Yet, we operate within a federalist structure that emphasizes states, from the composition of our Senate to the electoral college to the amendment ratification process. Perhaps this is an important tool to prevent federal tyranny. Even so, ask yourself this - if the citizens of the United States attempted to draft a governing document today, would you vote for this document?
Would a Constitution made today be so deeply organized around the concept of states?
It's clear that the emphasis on state rights has crippled our ability to reflect the will of the people in improving our societal structures. There are some who are pushing a nationalist agenda, turning away from the rest of the globe. That won’t help us create change within our own society. This pandemic has exposed how interconnected our world really is – there’s no going back from that. Even if we try to close our borders politically, the economic engine and the large corporations driving it can’t do the same. We may have fewer immigrants, but we’ll still be stuck trying to figure out how to address police brutality and systemic inequality within an outdated political structure.
2. The rise of the digital economy
The denizens of the early Internet knew it was the dawn of a new age. They tried to structure the Internet around core principles of access and openness. They had no idea how those lofty ambitions would be subverted by corporate interests. When corporations started to understand the reach and power of the Internet, a fundamental shift occurred: they built an economy based not on money, but on attention. Instead of our typical role as consumers, in the digital world, we became the product. Our data. Our attention. Analyzed, packaged, sold to the highest bidder.
It didn't take an expert team at Facebook to realize that divisive content would increase our attention.
It’s easier to sell to polarized groups – in fact, alienation can be a powerful brand strategy. When we became the product, politics was never the same. Billions of dollars are now spent by the world's largest corporations, making us more divided with each click. Why is this relevant politically? In practical terms, we've always had a two-party system in the United States. Political theorists suggest that our winner-take-all electoral system lends itself to two large parties. In the past, that hasn't been an insurmountable issue. The parties themselves have morphed over time to represent different interests and different constituencies.
Today, though, our politics feel more polarized than ever. Our parties have moved to extremes, where there's little to no common ground politically. This makes bipartisan legislation or efforts rarer and less meaningful in their scope. Of course, there's more behind that than just our digital economy. But moving towards centrism, coalition, and unification these days is pushing against a tidal wave of misinformation, propagated by a digital economy that has a deeper influence on our beliefs than we'd care to admit.
Globalization and the digital economy may seem like a far cry from the protests you're seeing today in response to George Floyd's death (or police brutality and racism more broadly). Yet, one of the catalyzing events of the American Revolution was when John Hancock's ship was seized for allegedly smuggling in wine without paying the requisite duties. No one could have portended the dramatic consequences of that seizure. But there was a system that no longer could be changed from within ("no taxation without representation").
You can't predict what will be the spark, but you can start to recognize that there's no longer a viable path to systemic change.
Madison and the Founding Fathers laid the foundation for this great country. While that Constitution undoubtedly left people behind from the start and never let them fully catch up, most notably African-Americans and women, it has led to America becoming the greatest country on Earth and the preeminent global superpower. Believing that transformational progress is possible is often enough to placate those that are left behind, even if it takes herculean efforts. Without that possibility, though, it's hard to see how anything but revolution will reshape society in fundamental ways.
[1] In the American system, the most important avenue for change is through amending the Constitution itself. The second most important is the passage of laws through the legislative branch. The power of the executive branch, while having expanded in recent decades, is still severely limited in its ability to pass sweeping reforms. The judiciary, with a deference to precedent and the original text, is rarely an avenue for transformational change. Even when it is, like in Brown v Board or Roe v Wade, all it takes are new judicial appointments or a determined opposition to challenge and undermine those changes.