Dejected and defeated—by the slimmest of electoral margins—Donald J. Trump spent his post-election nightmare hiding at a Washington golf club straddling between swings of his Titleist 910D2 Driver and plans for a bitter campaign of denials, recriminations and lawsuits. Having narrowly snatched victory out of the jaws of their own defeat, McLiberals celebrate the vanquishment of America’s cosplay fascist and promise to “save the soul of America” by bringing “decency and compassion to The White House”—a castle built by the ruthless exploitation of African slaves. Grazing through the deforested wasteland of our celebrity-food-chain media-scape, Blue-State Brunchers raise their champagne flutes to toasts of a “return to normal” on social media, while millions of desperate Americans remain unfed, unhoused, and unloved. Covid-19, like a knife that never stops, slashes into wounds already open. In the words of Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So what must be done to bring a new world to life? While electoral politics should not be simply ignored or discarded, we must recognize that its feckless attachments to spectacle at the expense of direct democracy leave the world more disfigured than transformed. Voting is, ultimately, the excrement end of social change. It’s a sign of where power turns to shit: sometimes fertilizing gardens of future flowers; but more often than not, it ends up poisoning our local water systems (e.g. Flint, Michigan). Real democracy requires deliberation: with strangers in the streets, with neighbors on the corner, with colleagues in the workplace, and at home with family & friends. More than just an American obsession with the reality-show dumpster fire of 45, the world has for decades suffered from a sick addiction to Presidential politics, a myopic deference to the almighty power of a single individual. Instead, what we desperately need is real democracy. So, for this episode, Matt & Jesse will consider practical solutions that can finally end the shit-parade of legalized bribery and pay-to-play campaigning that comprise electoral politics as we know it. Beyond the long list of obvious and necessary reforms (including abolition of the electoral college, public financing, and universal suffrage) lies the unearthing of a long-forgotten central pillar of democracy: legislative appointment by lottery. Sortition, or the drawing of lots, is a democratic tool as old as the notion of democracy itself, and may be a key to designing an egalitarian future. Democracy is a fragile, morpheus dream. And ultimately, democracy is a wish we release into the air like a question mark or a song; some sounds dissipate quickly, but others echo through the forest into the ears of others. As Mark Fisher once wrote, “The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
Mentioned In This Episode:
Fred Glass in Jacobin: “California’s Proposition 15 Ballot Measure Is About Rolling Back Neoliberalism”
Proposition 15 sought to undo some of the damage wrought from another proposition in 1978: “Have Californian Voters Finally Had Enough of Prop 13?”
Led by the Los Angeles Chapter of DSA, Democratic Socialists of America Made Over 300,000 Calls for Proposition 15: “15 Phonebanks for Prop. 15”
Richard D. Lederer in San Diego Tribune: “Here’s a Classical Primer of Political Word Origins”
Francis Wolf on the etymology of “Polis” and “Politics.”
Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian: “The Rest of the World Has Had It with US Presidents, Trump or Otherwise”
Robert Montgomery in The Washington Post Magazine: “The Abnormal Presidency: The Definitive List of 20 Norms Trump Broke as President”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Democracy Now: “We Must Rethink Our Society, from Policing to the Supreme Court”
“I think that part of the issue that we have is that there is such a myopia with Donald Trump that every sentence, every breath, everything that he does absorbs the entirety of public attention, partly because of the mainstream media. But I think, in doing so, it really minimizes the extent of opposition that exists in the country, not just to him, but to what is happening in this country…”
Thomas Wilde in GeekWire: “AOC Helps Set Twitch Record for ‘Among Us,’ the Viral Game Developed by a Tiny Seattle-Area Studio”
Megan McCluskey in Time Magazine: “Over 400,000 People Watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar Play Among Us on Twitch”
Thomas Wilde in GeekWire: “Follow-up: After AOC’s Twitch Stream, ‘Among Us’ Hit with Massive Pro-Trump Spam Attack”
Famous Quotes from Benjamin Franklin Concerning the Perilous Tensions Between Government & The Rights to Free Expression:
“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.”
“The first man, put at the helm will be a good one. No body knows what sort may come afterwards. The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy”
Tales of The Bohemian Club & The Bohemian Grove
Julian Sancton in Vanity Fair: “A Guide to the Bohemian Grove”
Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State by Gary Wills. Published in 2011 by Penguin Random House.
Bruce Y. Lee in Forbes: “Why Senator Mitch McConnell’s Hand Appears Discolored, Here Are Some Possibilities”
Ted Barrett and Clare Foran in CNN: “McConnell Says 'No Concerns' Despite Visible Bandages and Bruises”
Lisa Mascaro in the Associated Press: “Senate GOP Leader Relishes Role as ‘Grim Reaper’”
Saturday Night Live on YouTube: “Chris Rock Stand-Up Monologue - SNL”:
“I think we need to renegotiate our relationship to the government,” he said. “Does it work? I think Joe Biden should be the last president ever. We need a whole new system, OK? … What job do you have for four years, no matter what?”
“We’ve agreed in the United States that we should not have kings, yet we have dukes and duchesses running the Senate and the Congress, making decisions for poor people.”
Jacqueline Mulhallen in the Pluto Press Blog: “For the Many, Not the Few: Jeremy Corbyn and Percy Bysshe Shelley”
Aled Lewis, the designer and artist for Bernie Sanders’ campaign talks about the art that was inspired by the Vermont Senator’s common refrain when people shouted his name at rallies: “Not Me. Us.”
Frederick Kaufman in Foriegn Policy: “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis”
Greg Lindsay in Fast Company: “Let Them Eat … What? High Food Commodity Prices Could Cause A Global Revolution”
Meredith Shiner in Politico: “From Cairo to Madison, Some Pizza”
Matt’s Organization He Co-Founded After Occupy Riverside: The 28ers: Ending Legalized Bribery
Also Jump-Started from Occupy Riverside: The Riverside Food Cooperative
A "Freedom Budget" For All Americans; Budgeting Our Resources, 1966-1975, To Achieve "Freedom From Want." by A. Philip Randolph Institute.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?”
Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Website: “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights”
Popular Support for The Corbyn / Sanders Agenda: Avert Climate Catastrophe and Create a Society that Works for All of Us, Not Just the 1%; As Explored in Darren Louciades’ Essay in Foreign Policy: “Democratic Socialists Lost, but Their Ideas Have Won”
Vice: “117 Million People Didn’t Vote in the 2016 Presidential Election”
Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept: “Nonvoters Are Not Privileged. They Are Disproportionately Lower-Income, Nonwhite, and Dissatisfied With the Two Parties.”
Meagan Day Interviews Richard Dien Winfield in Jacobin: “Meet the Leftist Philosopher Running for Senate in Georgia”
A noteworthy exchange on the classic “Lesser of Two Evils" debate occurred with Noam Chomsky on the Bad Faith Podcast hosted by Briahna Joy Grey & Virgil Texas.
H.R.40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act
Sheila Jackson Lee in ACLU: “H.R. 40 Is Not a Symbolic Act. It’s a Path to Restorative Justice.”
Suffrage: A Wikipedia History on The Right to Vote
Astra Taylor interviewed by Joshua Keating in Slate: “The Real Reason Why Republicans Keep Saying “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy””
Richard D. Wolff’s Non-Profit Media Project Advancing the Movement for Worker Cooperatives: Democracy at Work
“Workplace Democracy and Cooperatives” – a scene from Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)
Getting (Private) Money Out of Politics & Creating a 28th Amendment with Wolf-Pac via an Article V Convention Process
Additional Organizations Involved in the Fight to Get Money Out of Politics: Move to Amend; Represent.US; California Clean Money Campaign; The 28ers
Nick Thomspon in CNN: “International Campaign Finance: How Do Countries Compare?”
Wikipedia on Publicly Funded Elections
Terje Birkedal in The Norwegian American: “How Norwegians Do It: National Elections in Norway”
Emmett Rensin in Mic: “What America Can Learn from Norway’s Success in Regulating Campaign Finance”
Luke Savage in Jacobin: “Once More With Feeling: America Must Abolish the Electoral College”
Thomas Geohegan in Baffler: “Abolish the Senate”
Alan Murray in Fortune: “Why It’s Time to Break Up America’s Most Powerful Duopoly”
Ranked Choice-Voting: A Wikipedia Definition
Anna Purna Kambhampaty in Time Magazine: “New York City Voters Just Adopted Ranked-Choice Voting in Elections. Here's How It Works.”
John Wildermuth in The San Francisco Chronicle: “Gavin Newsom Vetoes Bill to Allow Ranked-Choice Voting Throughout California”
Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It (Edition 2.0) by Lawrence Lessig. Published in 2015 by Twelve Books.
Andrew Yang’s 2020 Presidential Campaign Website: Democracy Dollars
Adam Eichen in Jacobin: “Bernie Sanders’s ‘Democracy Vouchers’ Proposal Can Help Democratize Our Broken Campaign Finance System”
Universal Suffrage: A Wikipedia Definition
Universal Automatic Voter Registration, As Explored in Nathaniel Rakich’s Article in Five Thirty Eight: “What Happened When 2.2 Million People Were Automatically Registered To Vote”
Maggie Astor in The New York Times: “16-Year-Olds Want a Vote. Fifty Years Ago, So Did 18-Year-Olds.”
Emma Bowman and Jonaki Mehta on NPR: “Young Activist Pushes To Lower Voting Age To 16 As 'The Logical Next Step' For Gen Z”
Kristin Eberhard in Sightline Institute: “The Secret to Ending Gerrymandering Isn’t a Secret”
Konstantinos Tsakiliotis in Digital Society Blog: “What if Politicians Weren’t Elected but Rather Drawn by Lot”
Sortition: A Wikipedia History
In ancient Athens, many citizens viewed a system of representative democracy as a status quo world where Politicians become silver tongued devils: As Explored by The School of Life in “Why Socrates Hated Democracy”
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson in The Atlantic: “The Joy of Jury Duty”
Why Jury Duty Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson. Published in 2012 by New York University Press.
John O. Newman in The New York Times: “To Save Our Justice System, End Racial Bias in Jury Selection”
In Aristotle’s View: “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.”
Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright. Published in 2019 by Verso Books.
From Wikipedia: In his book, Democracy and Its Critics (1989), Robert Dahl argues that no modern country meets the ideal of democracy, which instead exists as a theoretical utopia. To reach the ideal requires meeting five criteria:
Effective Participation
Voting Equality at the Decisive Stage
Enlightened Understanding
Control of the Agenda
Inclusiveness
Experiments with Sortition: The Citizens’ Assembly
Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck. Published in 2018 by Penguin Random House.
David Van Reybrouck in The Guardian: “Why Elections Are Bad for Democracy”
Guardian Readers and Caroline Bannock in The Guardian: “'Transparency and Fairness': Irish Readers on Why the Citizens' Assembly Worked”
Michela Palese in Electoral Reform Society: “The Irish Abortion Referendum: How a Citizens’ Assembly Helped to Break Years of Political Deadlock”
Munkhsaikhan Odonkhuu in ConstitutionNet: “Mongolia’s Long, Participatory Route to Constitutional Reforms”
Murray Bookchin’s idea of Third Nature; As Explored in Shaun Huston’s “Murray Boockin on Mars! The Production of Nature in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy”
Dunbar's Number: A Wikipedia Description
Christine Ro in The Guardian: “Dunbar's Number: Why We Can Only Maintain 150 Relationships”
California Population: 39,512,223. 2 U.S. Senators; 53 U.S. House Representatives.
California State Senate: 40 Senators: Each Senator Represents Approximately 931,349 Californians.
The Future Is A Mixtape Episode 029: The Anticapitalist Compass
Eliminate State Violence
Guarantee Social Welfare
Decommodify Life
Democratize Society