America's Unrepresentative Government
How can ordinary Americans regain political agency?
When you have an unrepresentative government, or, put differently, a government that represents oligarchic interests and corporations, as well as being heavily influenced by lobbyists, domestic and foreign (AIPAC), you get Trump and Congress conspiring to decrease Medicaid, to cut food support for the poor, while funneling more money upward to the very richest Americans.
American workers essentially have no agency, no ability to act in meaningful ways in the political realm. Along with no agency, Americans also have fewer liberties, especially if you should choose to criticize U.S./Israeli policies and otherwise challenge the imperatives of the powerful.
Be careful shouting "Give me liberty or give me death!" in these times. Death may be far easier to achieve.
What is the answer to regaining our agency? In "Between Past and Future," the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote how French resisters to the Nazis during World War II discovered themselves—their true nature—in and through action. In resisting the Nazis, they seized control over their own agency by exercising it in the face of danger. They chose risk, they fought to effect change, they took stands that often meant life or death.
Through action, these resisters lifted themselves out of “normal” time, Arendt argued, entering instead a realm between past and future, a realm of true existence, a present of dynamism, of possibilities, of clarity of commitment.
Political agency is not going to be given back to the people. If we regain it, it will only be by seizing it ourselves, through action, through commitment, through risk-taking, and perhaps most of all through large-scale organized resistance.
Hopefully, that resistance can remain non-violent. I prefer reformation or restoration to revolution, recalling the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that revolutions unleash the most elemental barbarism.
I abhor violence, but I think we have gone beyond fixing things by restoration (restore to what? our system has always discriminated against certain groups who continually have to fight for civil rights) or reformation (we can't trust the system to reform itself, it's too controlled by oligarchs). People of color, women, and people who fall outside of traditional gender roles have experienced how reforms are quickly backtracked. I like Chris Hedges quote: "The mafia state cannot be reformed. We must organize to break our chains, one-by-one, to use the power of the strike to cripple the state machinery. We must embrace a radical militancy, one that offers a new vision and a new social structure. We must hold fast to moral imperatives. We must forgive mortgage and student debt, institute universal health care and break up monopolies. We must raise the minimum wage and end the squandering of resources and funds to sustain the empire and the war industry. We must establish a nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s collapsing infrastructure. We must nationalize the banks, pharmaceutical corporations, military contractors and transportation and embrace environmentally sustainable energy sources." https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-mafia-state
People don't think about the fact that there has never been this type of wealth accumulation in history. There are many people in the US who have more money than most nations on the earth have. In fact, many nations only have debt. What can you buy with tens or hundreds of billions of dollars (where each billion is one thousand million). You can easily buy congress. You can easily own many, many news outlets. You can fund many think tanks that feed their vile machinations straight into congress. You can give vast "endowments" to universities to influence curricula and messaging and make sure there are no pesky protests. You of course already run the economy along with your criminal cohorts. You also hobnob with the CIA and other crime syndicates to plot various agendas. On top of this, you can pay the police overtime and give to the fraternal order of the police to keep them on your side when any protests do break out.
So how do we average Americans do anything about that? Currently, the oligarch news organizations have citizens at each other's throats over things like immigration, to make sure no one is looking behind the curtain at who controls it all. So, short of somehow getting Americans to focus on the billionaires, rather than things like poor immigrants who have no effect on anything in this country, we aren't going to be able to do anything. Small protests are met with clubs, tear gas and pepper spray, and that isn't going to get anywhere. Any protests or strikes would have to be huge to have any effect. But just getting the public to understand who the enemy is will have to remain job #1 for now.