A month ago, for the fourth of July holiday, my husband Jim and I attended a party at a friend\u2019s house in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles.\u00a0 He has a pool.\u00a0 The weather was lovely.\u00a0 We had a great day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Naturally, at one point, the conversation turned to the upcoming elections and which of the candidates we were supporting for the Democratic nomination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Several names were mentioned:\u00a0 Buttigieg, Harris, Warren.\u00a0 There were some Sanders supporters there, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then one guy asked, \u201cHow does the candidate get chosen?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wasn\u2019t sure what he was asking, so I didn\u2019t answer right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So then he asked again, \u201cI mean, how does it get decided who will be the Democratic candidate?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so I realized that this was a serious question.\u00a0 He really didn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I explained that starting in February next year, there would be a series of state-by-state elections.\u00a0 Winning candidates would earn delegates according to the percentage of votes each received.\u00a0 The process would end at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in August.\u00a0 If a single candidate had won more than half of the delegates that person would be the nominee.\u00a0 If no candidate had a majority, there would be some bargaining and perhaps multiple rounds of voting until a single candidate emerged as the nominee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be charitable, the primary process is complicated; I didn\u2019t mention super-delegates, for instance.\u00a0 And Jim pointed out that choosing the party nominee by popular elections is a relatively new innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it wasn\u2019t those complications that had this guy confused.\u00a0 He just didn\u2019t know.\u00a0 40 something years-old; he had lived through numerous presidential elections.\u00a0 He just hadn\u2019t paid attention.\u00a0 Maybe he voted in the Presidential elections, or maybe not.\u00a0 Maybe he even voted in the primaries, he just didn\u2019t remember or really care, or anyway care enough to remember from one election to the next how this whole business of American citizens choosing American presidents actually worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I like the guy.\u00a0 There\u2019s no requirement that a citizen understand how elections work.\u00a0 No requirement that an American citizen participate in our American democracy.\u00a0 Although, is it really democracy if citizens don\u2019t participate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The host of the party was a guy who makes a living designing furniture that his company sells to high-end hotels.\u00a0 The manufacturing is done in China.\u00a0 He travels to China several times a year to meet with the owners of the factories and check on production.\u00a0 So I was curious to ask the guy how the tariffs that Trump has imposed on Chinese imports affected his business, and to get his perspective on the situation in Hong Kong.\u00a0 In Hong Kong, protestors have been pushing back against a government proposal that would allow the mainland Chinese government to reach into Hong Kong and extradite any person that the Chinese government wanted to put on trial for a crime, potentially even for crimes like protesting the Chinese government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My friend said that shifting trade policies had always been a part of the cost of doing business internationally.\u00a0 He resented the tariffs but he didn\u2019t seem to think that the current administration\u2019s meddling in free trade was much different from previous incidents over the last 20 years since he\u2019s been doing business with China.\u00a0 “It\u2019s always something,” seemed to be his attitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for Hong Kong, he said that situation didn\u2019t concern his business at all.\u00a0 His furniture is manufactured in mainland China.\u00a0 But his guess was that the people of Hong Kong might win this round of protests.\u00a0 The Chinese government might withdraw its pressure.\u00a0 They could afford to give in, for now, because eventually, he said, China will win.\u00a0 Hong Kong will lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in the even longer term, he said, nothing lasts forever.\u00a0 Xi Jinping, the leader of Communist China, will eventually lose power.\u00a0 Most likely he will lose power to someone else in the party and the changeover in personnel at the top will make very little difference.\u00a0 But nothing lasts forever, and eventually, even the party itself will lose power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What keeps the communist party in power in China, he said, is that for decades the government has provided economic prosperity and a measure of personal freedom in China.\u00a0 And the deal that the government has made with the Chinese people is essentially this:\u00a0 we will create the conditions where you can make as much money as you want to make, and we will stay out of your personal life, and, in exchange, you will not protest our decisions or question our power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so, for the last 50 years or so, the government has delivered on its promise of providing economic prosperity.\u00a0 And as long as a citizen doesn\u2019t protest the government the Chinese people are fairly free to live however they like.\u00a0 My friend talked about China\u2019s permissive attitudes about things like sex and alcohol use, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government controls access to information.\u00a0 Religion is tightly controlled.\u00a0 Because things like information and religious institutions can pose a threat to the government.\u00a0 My friend says that when he watches international cable news in his hotel room the news feed is always 15 minutes delayed and when it looks like the station is about to broadcast some story the Chinese government doesn\u2019t want its people to see the screen simply goes blank for a few minutes, and then a little later it comes back on, having moved on to the next story, with no explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This kind of government control over the public aspects of Chinese life is part of the deal.\u00a0 The government doesn\u2019t meddle in personal lives.\u00a0 And the Chinese people are free to make as much money as they can.\u00a0 And so they keep their side of the bargain, too.\u00a0 They live their lives, make their money, and don\u2019t bother about national politics, or which leader of the communist party happens to be in charge. And if the television screen showing international news suddenly goes black for a few minutes they just shrug their shoulders and wait for it to come back on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So it seemed to me that my host\u2019s story about politics in China, was also, in a way, the explanation for my other friend\u2019s ignorance about how the primary process works to choose the Democratic party\u2019s presidential nominee in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My friend doesn\u2019t really pay attention to the political process because politics doesn\u2019t really matter too much to him. The things he cares about are the basic things that all people care about. Leave me alone to run my own life. Let me have my little pleasures like sex and drinking. Guarantee that there\u2019s a certain amount of economic prosperity generally, even if I only get a little while others get billions. And then I won\u2019t bother too much about which political party is in power, or which interchangeable individual is sitting in the oval office.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A week or so after that pool party, there was an editorial published in the New York Times (a newspaper not available by the way in China, says my friend) where a woman named Jessie Kanzer wrote about raising her two children in the United States, compared to her own experience as a child in Russia.\u00a0 She talks about the kids, age two and a half and four and a half, running wild around a Warby Parker store under the bemused eye of the clerk.\u00a0 And then she says, speaking about her liberal neighbors:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure they can understand what it\u2019s like to live without freedom. They didn\u2019t receive warnings from the KGB, the precursor to imprisonment. They never lost family members to government work camps. They got to explore, to rebel, to make up their own minds. Our children have the luxury of individuality.<\/p>
My childhood was vastly different from Charlie and Gigi\u2019s. It\u2019s as if I came from another planet. At day care, I got yelled at for talking, or for lying on my cot with my legs immodestly splayed, or for not finishing my soup. I was scouted for gymnastics when I was 4 \u2014 you couldn\u2019t just choose to participate in a sport. My coaches would sit on me to perfect the shape of my splits.\u201d<\/p>Jessie Kanzer, The New York Times<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
But the freedom that this woman is talking about is not the kind of freedom that\u2019s under threat in Hong Kong.\u00a0 Social rules about talking, displaying the body, eating, are not rules an authoritarian government cares about.\u00a0 Those kinds of freedoms are part of the bargain that the Chinese government cedes to the people.\u00a0 In China, Russia, and the United States, you make your own social rules, as human communities always do.\u00a0 If you get yelled at for not finishing your soup, that\u2019s not the Russian government, that\u2019s the Russian people managing your behavior.\u00a0 The freedom that you don\u2019t have in China, or in Russia, and the freedom that the government cares about is the freedom to criticize the government or if you don\u2019t like the government strongly enough to vote them out of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jessie Kanzer doesn\u2019t see that she makes just this point in her editorial in the New York Times.\u00a0 Her next paragraph is this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAt home, my parents were loving but firm; societal expectations prevailed. I was potty trained in infancy, taught always to be polite \u2014 \u201cPlease\u201d and \u201cThank you,\u201d \u201cHave a nice day.\u201d I chewed with my mouth closed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
But those are precisely the kinds of life choices the Russian and Chinese governments don\u2019t care about.\u00a0 They give it to you and to your community to determine social norms, but for that social freedom and for economic prosperity, in exchange, you get the KGB and work camps if you protest, and you get television stations that only broadcast stories that praise the government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And in the U.S., it\u2019s precisely because the U.S. government doesn\u2019t tell my friend that he must be polite in public and chew with his mouth closed under threat of law, that he finds he\u2019s able to ignore the question of how candidates get chosen for the presidential election.\u00a0 He would care about the election if it had consequences at the level of his personal life.\u00a0 But the right to participate in democracy itself? \u2013 eh, that\u2019s a freedom he\u2019s willing to give up.\u00a0 When freedom only means freedom to run wild around a Warby Parker store, or when the social freedom to talk back to your teacher in preschool gets confused with the political freedom to talk back to your representative in Congress, then the threat to democracy becomes real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last week we had the second round of Democratic party presidential candidates debates.\u00a0 Two nights.\u00a0 Twenty candidates.\u00a0 Plus four more who are running but didn\u2019t qualify for this round of debates.\u00a0 Here they are, all twenty-four, arranged as a rap poem:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Delaney, de Blasio, Castro, O\u2019Rourke
Biden, Ryan, Buttigieg, Bullock
Klobuchar, Booker, Inslee, Moulton
Harris, Sestak, Messam, Warren
Gabbard, Gillbrand, Williamson, Bennet
Sanders, Steyer, Hickenlooper, Yang<\/p>\n\n\n\nOne point I\u2019m listening for as I consider the candidates, is how each of them talks about the underlying health of our democracy.\u00a0 And that\u2019s what I wanted to talk about this morning.\u00a0 In the United States, until recently, when we talked about politics it was enough to talk about political issues only:\u00a0 health care, immigration, economic inequality. But now our U.S. democracy itself is under threat.\u00a0 Without a healthy democracy none of our talk about issues will matter.\u00a0 Now we need to talk not about political issues, but the issue of politics itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t believe the United States is likely to become a Chinese or Russian style authoritarian government in the next few years, but I do see our democracy under threat, and increasingly so, and in many ways.\u00a0 And as democracy weakens it does increase the possibility for an authoritarian government take over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m worried that a lot of Americans, like my friend at the pool party, are happy to take the bargain that\u2019s offered in China, and increasingly here in the U.S.\u00a0 Give me a comfortable level of economic prosperity, leave me alone to live my own life and enjoy my simple pleasures, and I won\u2019t care too much about who\u2019s in power in Washington or how they stay in power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m appalled at the recent Supreme Court decision on Gerrymandering whereby the Court abdicates responsibility for ruling on the fairness of congressional district boundaries.\u00a0 It is the Court\u2019s role to protect cornerstone principles of our democracy such as the principle that politicians should fairly represent the people governed.\u00a0 Allowing state legislatures to draw their own boundaries without oversight allows the party in power at re-districting time to further entrench their power against the will of the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the President instructs the people in his Administration to ignore subpoenas issued by Congress, it subverts the House\u2019s constitutional power and the rule of law\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the Electoral College regularly allows the President of the United States to be elected while losing the popular vote\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the leader of the Senate manipulates voting schedules in order to time which President gets to nominate a Supreme Court justice\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When a state legislature controlled by one party, possibly through Gerrymandered districts, realizes that their party is about to lose a governorship due to the impossibility of gerrymandering a state-wide vote, and so then responds by stripping the incoming governor of as much legal power as possible\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the Supreme Court rules that corporations are people, and that cash donations to politicians are protected political speech\u2026
<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen the Supreme Court in Shelby County vs. Holder ruled that state and local governments don\u2019t need to obtain pre-clearance from the Federal Government to change voting laws, even when those state and local governments have a clear and deliberate pattern of enacting voting laws that unjustly suppress the votes of minorities, and then, in the wake of that Supreme Court Ruling many state and local governments do, immediately, enact laws that suppress the vote, even to the extant, in Georgia last year, where voter suppression may have altered the result of the Governor\u2019s election from a win for the democrat Stacey Abrams to the Republican Brian Kemp.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen, in sum, one of our nation\u2019s two main parties has engineered multiple ways to retain power despite representing only a minority of US citizens then our democracy is under threat.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt isn\u2019t fair to criticize the Chinese people for accepting the bargain of authoritarian government. They had no choice. In Hong Kong they are rejecting the bargain, but it is an offer they are increasingly unable to refuse.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut my friend at the pool party, and Americans in large numbers are passively accepting the bargain. While Americans are focused on their personal economy and freedom from government interference in their personal lives, the larger system of democracy and the larger freedoms our democratic system guarantees are being eroded.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cThose who govern are there for you, it is not you who are there for them,\u201d wrote Walt Whitman, born 200 years ago this year.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nOur nation is suffering because our leaders have figured out that in a manipulated system it\u2019s possible to stay in power by convincing only a thin core of voters to be merely happy enough in a narrow portion of their lives. It works for those in power, yet even those voters who put them there get so little from this bargain. It\u2019s tragic. And meanwhile millions of Americans go without healthcare, live on the street, can\u2019t afford the education required for today\u2019s jobs, suffer discrimination based on race or gender expression, lose access to reproductive health services. We all drive on broken roads and unsafe bridges, live in fear of gun violence, are anxious about the threat of foreign wars, suffer through droughts or powerful storms due to human caused climate change
<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut this isn\u2019t a sermon about political issues. It\u2019s a sermon about the issue of politics. All of those issues could be better addressed, reversed, solved, if our democracy itself were stronger. If we cared as much about our politics as we care about political policies.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen we hear a candidate\u2019s promise of personal economic security and permission to live your life as you please, as though that’s\u2019 all that\u2019s required of government, as though that\u2019s all that we should expect from democracy, as though America and Americans require nothing more than a paycheck and a six-pack, before we say yes to that offer, we must remember what more is really at stake, what more we might be losing, that there is a deeper and more sinister side to that bargain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"