Whats Next for American Democracy
Transcriber: Dania Méndez
Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
America is an idea,
but that idea is grounded
in certain fundamental ideals.
And the argument I want to make
in the few minutes
I have your attention here today
is that we have lost focus
on those ideals -
core ideals, defining ideals,
ideals that we have betrayed.
Now these ideals are important,
not because they’re original,
not because Madison said
we should like them.
These ideals are important
because they are right.
Some defining ideals we have rejected -
and it’s a good thing too.
Think about slavery.
But these ideals we affirm,
we continue to affirm.
These ideals we celebrate.
And yet, almost without noticing,
these ideals we have also betrayed.
So when I think what’s next for democracy,
I think we should reclaim these ideals.
We should make them ours again.
Because these ideals represent
the very best of the American tradition.
They could make us great,
or at least, they would make us good.
OK, first, the United States
was born as a set of colonies.
It took the subjects of those colonies
hundreds of years to recognize
just how awful a system colonialism was.
And so, the very best
gathered in Philadelphia
to craft a declaration,
really an argument
against this king, King George,
and against any king, really,
because it was an argument,
in effect, against colonies,
an argument for a republic.
Certain self-evident truths
guided that argument.
Certain slogans provided the sizzle:
“No taxation without representation.”
But the more general principle
underlying all of that work,
was a principle of equal representation,
that free societies
secure to their people
the right of self-government -
at least the white male property owners,
the right of self-government.
This document was deeply anti-colonial,
fundamentally Republican,
and it was an inspiration
around the world.
Now, this ideal lasted in America
for no more than about 100 years.
It was overthrown after a century.
And you can ask, how was it overthrown?
Maybe Ernest Hemingway would say,
“Gradually, and then suddenly …
in fits and starts before the torrent.”
So we first overthrew
the monarchy in Hawaii,
and the very next president,
Grover Cleveland,
reversed the decision, saying,
“We are not a colonial nation.”
But beginning in the 1890s,
the United States exercised its power,
including its military force,
to overthrow governments
across the world
all the way up until the present time.
So Hawaii and the Philippines and Cuba
and Puerto Rico and Honduras, Nicaragua,
Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Grenada,
Panama, Afghanistan
and most recently, Iraq,
these are nations which felt our force -
not our argument,
not the persuasion of our principles,
our force -
and were exorcised in that force
by a colonial imperialist will.
Now, part of this was animated by racism.
Rudyard Kipling described
the white man’s burden.
And in that description in his poem,
he presented an image
of white men above everyone else,
literally white men above everyone else.
And it was practiced with a brutality
that we still, to this day,
do not fully recall.
This war in the Philippines
was among the most brutal in our history,
openly using techniques of torture
to force our will upon the Filipinos.
One soldier, writing back to his family,
wrote, “Our men have been relentless,
have killed to exterminate men, women,
children, prisoners and captives,
active insurgents and suspected people
from lads of ten up,
the idea prevailing
that the Filipino as such
was little better than a dog.”
This imperialism grew into a certain peak
just before the Second World War.
In 1940, the United States was the fifth
largest colonial power in the world.
Thirteen percent of our population,
that’s more than the African Americans
in our nation, lived in the territories,
not in the United States.
But then after the war,
there was a fundamental shift
in our imperialist strategy.
We focused no more on territories.
Indeed, we did the unheard of.
We gave up a colony, the Philippines.
Instead, we became
what we could call pointillist,
as if the pointillists in the art world
became foreign diplomats.
Pointillist.
And that pointillism shifted
to exerting force through military bases.
Now, this is a point, I think,
many Americans are not fully aware of.
If you look at the United States
and our foreign bases
as compared to the rest of the world -
and in this graph, let’s say every dot
is going to represent 30 foreign bases -
then the United States today
has about 800 of these foreign bases,
800 bases located all around the world.
The rest of the world
has a different practice.
If you take the rest
of the world combined,
the total number of foreign bases
by all other countries added together
is just 30.
The United States has 800;
the rest of the world, 30.
So when we celebrate who we were,
when we think of our anti-colonial past,
in this we must recognize
that we have changed.
We have changed fundamentally.
Now one virtue about this change,
one virtue when we made
this terrible choice
to go down the line of imperialism
rather than the ideal of republicanism,
is that we did it democratically.
In 1896 to 1900,
we had the greatest debate
in the United States
about who the United States would become.
There was a pro imperialist side
and an anti-imperialist side,
people like McKinley
against William Jennings Bryan,
Henry Cabot Lodge against Andrew Carnegie,
Teddy Roosevelt against Mark Twain.
We had a choice and we made that choice,
but that choice was a betrayal
of who we originally were.
OK, second,
James Otis is perhaps
the most forgotten framer.
Slogans like “Taxation
without representation is tyranny”
come from him, and that’s still famous.
But the really important
work that Otis did
was in arguing a case in 1761,
called Paxton v. Gray,
fifteen years before
the Declaration of Independence.
In this case, Otis fought
the British Crown’s use
of something called
the “writs of assistance.”
These were warrantless searches
that the Crown thought
it had the authority to engage
to find evidence of criminality
or violations of tax laws.
Otis argued that this violated
fundamental principles of free government.
And this argument, John Adams said,
was when the revolution began.
As he wrote,
“The child independence
was then and there born,
every man of an immense crowded audience
appeared to me to go away as I did,
ready to take up arms.”
Now, Otis lost that appeal,
but America won because of his argument.
When the Constitution was finally ratified
and the Bill of Rights added to it,
the Fourth Amendment expressly protected
against unreasonable
searches and seizures,
and the requirement was that warrants,
if they were to be issued,
could be issued if and only if
they were supported by probable cause,
supported by an oath and affirmation,
and particularly describing
the place to be searched.
Louis Brandeis looked at this tradition
and said it defined
the character of America
that protected
“the right to be let alone,”
not always, but always
when the government has no cause.
These were their ideals.
Now, these ideals were tested.
When technology changed, they were tested.
Roy Olmstead was
a police officer in Seattle.
He was also a bootlegger.
He was called the gentleman bootlegger
because he refused to use violence
in engaging in his bootlegging activities.
In March 1920, he was arrested, jailed,
and the case against him was built
on a new technology of wiretapping.
The government connected wires
to the telephone lines
leading into his business
and used the information on those wires
to convict Roy Olmstead.
Olmsted appealed the conviction, saying,
“Hey, what about the Fourth Amendment?”
And in the case
Olmstead v. the United States,
the Supreme Court
looked at the Fourth Amendment
and said that protecting
unreasonable searches
means to protect against trespasses
that were unreasonable.
But wiretapping involves no trespass,
because the wires are connected,
not inside the house
where Roy Olmstead was living or working.
They were attached to the wires
outside the house.
So as Chief Justice Taft put it,
there was no violation
of the Fourth Amendment
and therefore wiretapping
was completely legal.
Louis Brandeis had a very different view.
He thought the Constitution was to
be adapted to a changing world,
and his view, 40 years later,
would become the view of the Supreme Court
when the court reversed Olmstead.
But the point is, during this time,
there was not yet any strong
constitutional limitation
on these warrantless wiretapping searches.
Yet even then, the searches were episodic,
episodic and costly.
They happened, but they happened rarely
because it took effort
to actually engage in the search.
But then the technology changed again:
first, the internet,
which became wired into our life
across the world and in the United States,
and then the tragedy of 9/11,
which triggered a ferocious desire
to protect the nation
in ways that would have been
unimaginably conceived
even five years before.
Those two together
produced the conditions described
in Edward Snowden’s book Permanent Record.
Because beginning in earnest after 9/11,
the government engaged in building systems
of perpetual surveillance of us,
everywhere on digital technologies,
massive technology to capture and store
what we did or what we said,
literally rooms set up
to snoop on trunks of the internet
to gather all the data that they could
to begin to identify
and make accessible to the government
facts about even citizens,
piecing together a picture
of anyone they chose to view
for the ends of assuring
they were not engaged in terrorism
or maybe even criminal activity.
This is betrayal number two.
But unlike betrayal number one,
there was no democratic deliberation here.
Indeed, Snowden sacrificed,
risking his life and certainly
his freedom he made,
because there was
no democratic deliberation here,
and he believed if this principle
was going to be betrayed,
at least the nation should discuss it.
But even though it’s been challenged,
it survives in effect to this day.
We live in a world of persistent,
not episodic, monitoring by the government
to the end of stopping terror,
but that end even itself cannot deny
that this is a betrayal.
OK, that’s two.
Here’s three.
If Otis was the forgotten framer,
the Northwest Ordinance
is the forgotten framing document,
actually, documents -
there are multiple ordinances.
And what’s striking
about these ordinances
is the view of the New Republic
that they reveal,
certain ideals that were
clear and fundamental.
One ideal was the anti-slavery ideal,
which was forbidden
in the Northwest Territories
after the ordinance went into effect.
And another ideal
was the anti-monopoly ideal.
The second ordinance described
carving up tracts of land
in the Northwest Territory
into 640-acre blocks,
but then granting to families
160-acre segments,
but only 160-acre segments -
limiting those grants
of one 160-acre segment to each family.
Now that limitation turns out to be
very common in our history.
The Preemption Act of 1830 and 1841,
the Homestead Act of 1862,
the Southern Homestead Act of 1866,
the Timber Culture Act,
the Desert Land Act,
the Reclamation Act of 1982,
all of these carved up land
in 160-acre lots
and limited the number of lots
that a single family could buy
to just one.
This betrayed a commitment,
that some property is good,
but small property is better,
and that competition
among property owners is essential,
that we can never allow property
to become too big,
the owners to become too big,
because if they could control a market,
then they could potentially
control the government.
This was the anti-monopoly principle,
not anti commerce - anti monopoly.
And throughout our history,
there has always been a fight,
and it’s been a cross-partisan fight,
to defend this principle.
Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft
were Republicans
who fought for this principle
when they were presidents.
Woodrow Wilson and FDR, in my view,
much more effectively
fought for this principle
as Democrats when they were presidents.
This fight on behalf of this principle
continued through the administration
of Ronald Reagan.
And then there was
the beginning of the end.
Because then, the ideas
of this man, Robert Bork,
began to infect the law
through the Department of Justice
and the judges
appointed by Ronald Reagan -
infected the law
and pulled back on the idea of fighting
for the anti-monopoly principle.
It’s astonishing to recognize
that the last major antitrust case
in the technology industry
was the Microsoft case begun in 1998.
And 20 years later, after that case,
Rip van Winkle would be astonished
to wake and recognize
that there are basically four companies
that exercise fundamental massive control
throughout our life
over commerce and journalism
and democracy.
Their monopoly power
is more everywhere.
Now, one part of this betrayal
is linked to the betrayal number two -
the persistent
and ubiquitous surveillance.
This is the surveillance
described by Shoshana Zuboff
in her magisterial work
as “surveillance capitalism.”
But the other part
is betrayal number three,
and this is inspired, in my view,
by Zephyr Teachout.
Zephyr in her book Break Them Up describes
the “chickenization of everything.”
Now, you might think of chickens
and you might think
of the happy creatures like this.
She’s not talking about those chickens
but these chickens.
And more importantly, she’s not really
talking about the chickens.
She’s talking about the person
in the center, the farmer,
who, as the industry has evolved,
bears all the risk of the farm -
takes out the loans,
and if he can’t pay the loans,
then goes into bankruptcy,
but because of the structure of farming,
exercises no control over
how his or her chickens will be raised
and has no alternatives
about where to sell his or her chickens,
because all the channels of distribution
have been concentrated
so there’s only one channel
in any locality.
And as these channels begin to experiment
with these different farmers,
they are squeezed,
squeezed all of their profit out
by the people who exercise control
over their business.
This is chickenization.
And it’s a metaphor for everything.
It’s a metaphor for the way
we have betrayed
a core and fundamental ideal
of how market economies
are supposed to work.
Because it’s not just for efficiency
that we keep enterprises small;
it’s also for democracy.
Because too big to fail
means too big for
the government to resist
or too big for the government to regulate,
meaning these businesses,
these big businesses
become alternative autocratic governments.
Now, here too, like with betrayal two,
there was no democratic
authorization of this change.
We never had an “end the antitrust”
movement in America.
It’s just endless money
in our political process,
in our Congress in particular,
that has had the effect
of corrupting the law.
This is betrayal number three.
(Choir singing America the Beautiful)
We are a set of ideals.
We are a nation grounded in those ideals.
But at some point,
we have to step back and ask,
So who are we really?
Because the anti-imperialist
ideal of our founding
is not the republic we are today,
and the privacy respecting republic
of our founding
is not the republic we are today,
and the power limiting
small creator republic
is not the republic that we are today.
We are not who we said we would be.
We are different.
And I think we are less.
Now, could we be more again?
Could we imagine waging a fight
to regain these ideals
at the core of our republic?
Of course we can.
Obama would say, “Yes, we can,"
but I’ll just say, “Of course we can."
Of course we can declare again
the ideal of peace
and bring home our troops
and cut defense radically.
A recent tweet showed
this extraordinary technology
being tested in the military
to see whether the ships
would survive or be stabilized
during an explosion,
and the tweet comment on top was:
“My kid’s school can’t afford
air conditioning.”
Can we afford this system of defense?
And we can certainly reclaim the value,
the ideal of privacy.
We could end the surveillance state,
both of government and corporations,
and we could reclaim
the ideal of progress -
enforcing the law of antitrust,
breaking up the giants
and enabling small and diverse creativity.
We could affirm that these are
our ideals again.
But we should recognize
it would be difficult to do so.
Tulsi Gabbard, who ran for president
in the Democratic primary,
as a soldier and member of Congress
fighting against perpetual war
and the imperialist urge in America,
was called by the very top
of our Democratic Party
a Russian spy.
Edward Snowden,
member of the intelligence community,
feeling himself compelled
to reveal to America
exactly the betrayals our community
had imposed upon us,
was also referred to as a Russian spy.
And Zephyr Teachout, who is, in my view,
the most important thinker
on the democratic left,
has been referred to as a “communist”
for her claim that we should
break up the monopolies.
America is foreign, or foreign is America,
and we need to build the movement
to resist this reality
and to fight for something better.
Now, this is a fight
worth having right now.
We need to take it up even if we can’t win
because every new idea takes time
and every old idea takes even longer.
Join us in this fight.
Thank you.