Faith Reaffirmed

In this campaign year, now at a conclusion following Election Day 2012, the essential faith in democracy held by the American public has been reaffirmed with the reelection of President Barack Obama. This faith was sketched by the President in his victory speech:

Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight. And it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty, and we can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.

Our national faith in democracy held fast in the face of an almost overwhelming assault by corporate and moneyed elites. Today’s United States has witnessed a widening gulf between the haves and the have nots, the rich and the poor. The Citizens United decision in 2010 that empowered corporations as “people” has propelled this disparity and allowed millions of dollars of corporate money to be funneled into a rightwing opposition, an opposition that in its extremes—and sometimes at its heart—is profoundly anti-democratic.

Democracy is enacted through coalitions among disparate groups of like-minded individuals. In some Western democracies, particularly those with parliamentary forms of governance, the coalitions are more fluid than in the United States, where groups tend mainly to coalesce under the banner of Republican and Democrat. Few other parties have gained more than token traction during the modern era, since the mid-twentieth century.

The Republican coalition has become virulently rightwing and, I would argue, has dragged the country right of center generally. On its most radical fringe are the Tea Party tax resisters, religious zealots, homophobes, xenophobes, and racists. Unfortunately, mainstream conservatives have seen fit to pander to these anti-democratic factions in an attempt to hold political power. That strategy has worked in various places at various times. It did not work for this presidential election.

The Democratic coalition, pulled right by the ardent conservatism of the Republicans, is consequently more centrist with a purely tepid radical left. Fortunately, the Democratic Party has not been pulled so far right of center that it has abandoned basic tenets, such as universal civil rights and equality in education, job, health care, and so on. The Democrats remain the “big tent,” where folks of all races, sexualities, and incomes can come together. It is under this big tent that hope resides that the American middle class can be salvaged and, in time, expanded. President Obama put it this way:

I believe we can keep the promise of our founding, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight.

The presidential election has affirmed that we will not, as a nation, follow a path where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer…at least not for the next four years. The electorate has reaffirmed its faith in American democracy, not corporate oligarchy.

Faith in the People

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Sadly, we have not followed Jefferson’s advice. The consequence is that corporations have increasingly come to dominate our national sense of direction, so much so that the United States now leans strongly toward corporate oligarchy as a form of governance. Is “we the people” becoming “we the corporation”?

In this election year we are seeing the effects of corporate “personhood,” as it is called, particularly in the arena of campaign finance. Much of the current presidential contest revolves around money, and not just Mitt Romney’s personal fortune and where he keeps it. It has become, to the disgust of many across the political spectrum, a tenet of the current conservative contenders that votes can be bought and lies passed off as truth if enough money is thrown into the mix. In the party of the wealthy, who has the money? Corporations, of course.

Two Supreme Court cases dominate. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the Court held that political spending is protected by the right to free speech in the First Amendment. Then, crushing Jefferson’s hope, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Court held that corporations have a right to free speech under the First Amendment, just as though they were individuals. The latter decision opened the floodgates for corporate spending to promote the interests of monied elites—wealthy corporate entities—over those of individuals.

Democracy invests faith in the people to govern. The United States was founded on the democratic principle that all citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. This principle has yet to be fully achieved. But progress has been made incrementally over the past two-plus centuries, granting equal civic personhood through freedom and enfranchisement of various segments of the demos, such as African Americans and women.

In this progressive realization of our democratic principle, however, the granting of corporate personhood has been a misstep. When the powers of governance come to be held by a small number of people, an elite of any sort (the military, royalty, etc.), which is the danger of corporate personhood, then we trade democracy for oligarchy. For Aristotle, oligarchy was synonymous with the rich.

Most of us—the 99% much referred to this year—are not rich and are being disenfranchised, our individual personhood diminished, as wealthy corporations become an ascendant aristocracy. Whether the American “experiment” can survive will depend on whether we the people can revive the power of the demos in our democracy. 

Faith in the Common Good

Recently “socialism” has become a principal pejorative in political rhetoric. The label is applied to anything and everything that smacks of affecting, usually to their benefit, the majority of the population. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), so-called Obamacare, has been labeled as “socialist” in the same sense that Social Security was so labeled by its critics when it was created in 1935, during the Great Depression. One might be excused for confusing the “social” in Social Security with “socialism” were it not for the fact that such confusion, particularly now, is political rather than definitional. In the eyes of Obamacare’s critics, socialism equals bad, therefore any program that can be painted with the brush of socialism can be characterized as bad for the nation. This is patent nonsense, of course. But it sells well in some sectors.

Social Security was created at a time when more than half of all senior citizens lived in poverty. PPACA has been enacted—and upheld by the Supreme Court—at a time when more than 50 million Americans are without health insurance, which in this country amounts to being shut out from adequate health care. More than 60 percent of the uninsured live in households earning less than $50,000 a year. Children living in poverty are more likely to be uninsured than others. Indeed, the lower one’s income, the less likely one is to have health insurance or adequate health care. This situation might be excused in a developing nation but is unacceptable in one that claims to be the world’s leading democracy and is the world’s wealthiest nation.

Socialism is an economic system wherein means of production are owned by the society, the government in the case of state socialism, which is what most politicos who use “socialism” as a pejorative mean. To conflate “socialism” and the “common good,” which is a tenet of American democracy, is disingenuous at the very least. One is reminded of something Hubert Humphrey said, “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” The idea of our nation being founded on the belief that democracy provides the best possible hope for the common good is imbedded in the first sentence of the Constitution, in the phrase “promote the general Welfare.” The common good is fundamental to our “more perfect Union.”

Faith in the common good also is a tenet of Christian belief, though the Christianists on the far right seem to disavow it. For those crying “socialism” of a religious bent, it might be piquant to quote Woodrow Wilson, himself highly religious, a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister: “There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.” I also like Rev. Matthew Dutton-Gillett’s take on the notion. In a commentary dated February 19, 2010, on the blog, Below the Surface (subtitled A Conversation Between a Priest and a People about Life in Christian Community), Dutton-Gillett of Trinity Episcopal Church in Menlo Park, California, writes:

All that stuff about loving your neighbor as yourself, taking care of the poor, giving people who asked you for your coat more of your clothing than they had asked for, the suggestion that we should sell what we have and give it to the poor, the parable about the rich man and Lazarus the beggar—these are all teachings about redistributing one’s own wealth so that the more vulnerable in society would be protected and provided for. It seems clear to me that if we were to classify Jesus’ views according to today’s political definitions, he would probably fit into the category of “socialist” more easily than any other.

Faith in the common good seemed evident when Mitt Romney, as governor, signed the Massachusetts healthcare insurance reform law (referred to as Romneycare) in 2006. The law mandates that state residents obtain government-regulated minimum health insurance coverage and provides free health insurance for residents earning less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Now, ironically, as the Republican presidential candidate, Romney must—in order to align with the “socialism”-shouters in his party’s rightwing base—argue against the common good, against the very law he championed that is mirrored in Obamacare.

Faith in the common good—for the good of us all and for the good of American democracy writ large—ought to be unwavering. When it is smeared by epithet and battered by the hot winds of political expedience, we should be wary of those doing the smearing and blowing the hot air.

Faith, Race, and Religion

The term faith has many meanings, and one purpose of this blog is to explore them. One expression of faith is a belief that the principles of our nation’s founding are still sound. For more than two hundred years we, as a nation, have put our faith in democracy as it was articulated by our eighteenth-century founders—people such as Washington, Franklin, Madison, and Jefferson. Their vision of democracy has had staying power but only, it might be argued, because we have enlarged upon the realization of their vision.

For example, when the founders wrote the first words of the Constitution, “We the People…,” the de facto definition of “the People” was white male property owners. They were the demos of our democracy; they could vote. But they comprised only ten to sixteen percent of the population of our fledgling union.

As our “experiment” in democracy, as Jefferson called it, has evolved, it has been understood that through the office of time “the People” would come to encompass the entire citizenry of the nation. We are still working toward that realization in many areas of civic life—all rights are still not equal—but we have largely succeeded at minimun in enfranchising all citizens. The property-ownership requirement was eliminated by 1850, the 15th Amendment extended the vote to nonwhites in 1870, and the 19th Amendment in 1920 finally enfranchised women. These were major advances.

Other inclusive actions, often overlooked, include the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which granted Native Americans citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections; and the 23rd Amendment, which granted District of Columbia citizens the right to participate in presidential elections.

The evolving nature of enfranchisement also is illustrated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was passed to protect minority rights that had been compromised by some states’ erection of barriers to voting, such as literacy tests.

Remnants of old prejudices, however, linger in today’s politics, often intersecting with religion. A strident—and at the moment, increasingly visible—racist faction is rattling on the radical right. This has meant that some candidates, such as Rick Santorum, have played pander and deny, first aligning themselves with the radicals and then backpedaling to assure the moderates. Santorum, for example, was widely reported talking about “black people” and welfare this winter, something he later tried to deny, despite video evidence.

The most egregious example of racism at work in the current presidential election campaign is “Don’t Renig in 2012.” Despite fancy linguistic footwork by some defenders, the phrase is short for “Don’t Reelect a Nigger in 2012,” and when that slogan is paired with an echo of the Obama logo, the meaning is clear.

Faith in our democratic experiment remains thin among a significant portion of the population, not a majority but a substantial, often strident, sometimes influential minority. This minority fears and opposes anyone who is not them: not white, not their brand of “Christian,” and so forth. In this respect, the remarks of Dennis Terry, a pastor whose introduction of Rick Santorum recently went viral on the Internet, are illustrative:

“There is only one God, and his name is Jesus,” Terry said. “I'm tired of people telling me that I can't say those words. I’m tired of people telling us as Christians that we can’t voice our beliefs or that we can no longer pray in public. Listen to me: if you don’t love America, if you don’t like the way we do things I got one thing to say—GET OUT. We don’t worship Buddha. We don't worship Mohammad. We don't worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”

In a nation as diverse as ours, this is a narrowly defined demos indeed.

On Faith

The term faith is distinct from both religion and morality, with which it shares a connotation. Implicit in virtually all definitions of faith, however, is trust. Thus to be faithful is to trust and to be trustworthy.

One intersection of faith and governance in our democracy is the absolute necessity for those who aspire to or already hold public office to trust in the democratic principles that provide the basis for their election and, in turn, to be worthy of the public trust invested in them as servants of the people.

It may be glib to say that governance is what a government does, but it is precisely correct. Governance comes from the Greek verb κυβερνάω, meaning “to steer.” Plato is credited with the first use of the term. But, then, Plato also wrote, “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors,” which rightly should be understood to admonish all citizens—the “demos” (δῆμος, “people”)—to participate in the processes by which we are all governed, from the vetting of candidates to the supervision of our servant leaders once they are in office.

“Good governance” ought to be a redundant phrase. Governance, by its nature, implies the mutual exercise of trust. We trust those whom we place into leadership positions, and our public servants must keep faith with us and with our democratic system in order to govern properly. We all must have faith in our democratic principles and the structures of government derived from them. And those whom we place in positions of power must keep faith with us—all of us—whether we favored or opposed their election.

In 1996 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) declared that “promoting good governance in all its aspects, including by ensuring the rule of law, improving the efficiency and accountability of the public sector, and tackling corruption” are “essential elements of a framework within which economies can prosper.”* While the IMF is focused on “economies” (upholding those, in particular, in the world’s progressive democracies), these “essential elements” apply equally to civil society. All of these elements—rule of law, efficiency and accountability of the public sector, and tackling corruption—are iterations of trust and must be paramount in the actions of those who are charged to keep faith with the people.

The intersection of faith and governance is brought into sharpest focus during periods when public offices are contested, as they are now during the run-up to the presidential election this year. Competition for public favor often brings to light not only a candidate’s beliefs, feigned or genuine, but also his or her faith in the democratic process. An unfortunate reality is that politicians’ stances on issues that sway voters are often guided by polls more than principles. With long media memory in play, it’s no wonder that accusations of flip-flopping on issues abound, as candidates “adjust” their beliefs to accord with the perceived wishes of a seemingly fickle electorate.

Faith again should be the response and the guide when candidates are tempted to alter their beliefs instead of holding true to their principles—faith that the people will discern through the miasma of hype and spin the true nature of their political aims. Sadly, most candidates succumb, to some degree, to the temptation to pander to the public’s wishes that their pollsters tell them will make their contest winnable.

Faith in democracy is an educated faith. In today’s over-legislated, over-tested, and underfunded schools, we are shirking our public responsibility to educate the voters of tomorrow in the discernment necessary for the maintenance of good governance. The most articulate of the American Founders, Thomas Jefferson, has been much quoted on the necessity of education to inform the citizens of a democracy if that democracy is to endure and to thrive. Although his most-quoted admonition refers also to a free press, it applies directly to education, which is vital to ensure that those who rely on the press, as we all must, can judge whether information is accurate or biased. Jefferson wrote: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”

Jefferson had faith that an educated citizenry would be able to safeguard our democracy. Thus our faith would be misplaced—indeed it may well be misplaced—if we failed to educate our public, the guarantors of our democracy. Whether we are doing so adequately is an open question.

In answering this question, we cannot rely on blind faith. We must apply what may be termed an “informed faith,” by which we and our elected representatives act on the good governance practices of examining our education system and the various institutions that embody it and holding accountable to the public trust those at all levels whose oversight of education promotes or impedes education for democracy. Only then can we trust in the preservation of our democracy by “the people themselves.”

*The IMF’s Approach to Promoting Good Governance and Combating Corruption—A Guide. Updated June 20, 2005. http://www.imf.org/external/np/gov/guide/eng/index.htm.