What's a citizen to do?

The daily paper reads more and more like the Hollywood gossip magazines I pass at the grocery store checkout counter every day. It is all about personalities. No day passes without another mouthwatering story about the president contradicting what he just said yesterday or rudely attacking another media personality. I wake up asking myself: what has he done today?

But that is an interesting question for fan magazines or gossip columns but it is not relevant when citizens make their political decisions.

You may love Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, or Bernie Sanders, or any of a number of other large-scale celebrities in the political world. Maybe you prefer Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Maybe you have given your loyalty to a white supremacist or still mourn the passing of Dr. Spock.

But that's an altogether personal decision for you and has nothing to do with the choices you make as a citizen.

Let me explain.

Your neighborhood mechanic has been taking care of a series of cars of yours over a long time. You have become friends. You welcome a mechanical problem because it provides an opportunity for visiting with your friend and exchanging stories about each other's lives, about his and your children and family.

The latest car you bought is a hybrid. Your friend tries to make needed repairs but has to confess, after a while, that he does not understand enough of this new kind of engine to restore it to working order. Your friendship is not affected by that. You do not like each other any less for the fact that his mechanical skills are limited. You still stop off from time to time to enjoy each other's company briefly even though you now entrust car repairs to someone else who has the necessary specialized training to repair hybrid engines.

Your deep affection for this man does not commit you to trusting all of his opinions. Friends are no less beloved for being sometimes unreliable or ill-informed.

As citizens we are in an analogous situation. You may feel very strongly that Donald Trump, with his mischievous, assertive little -boy refusal to be a serious politician is a breath of fresh air in the uptight, hypocritical and deceptive Washington DC. Trump tells you what he thinks. He tells you what he likes and does not like and he is not ashamed to change his mind when he receives new information. You like that a lot. And all anyone should say: good for you; go with your feelings.

But the fact that you like Donald Trump has little to do with whether his policies are good for America, anymore than that my friendship with my mechanic commits me to believing everything he says or insisting that his professional opinions are infallible.

There is an important difference between loving someone and thinking that they can do whatever needs to be done. I love my son but I would hesitate to accept his offer to correct a plumbing problem in the house or to repair of the electrical system when it malfunctions.

The same is true in politics. Your loyalty to Trump has little to do with the policies he is recommending. A great deal of factual information needs to be accumulated to assess a political choice of policy. Whether global warming is a hoax or a serious threat is a question of fact. If, indeed the indications are that global temperatures are rising, and if there is reason to believe that this rise in temperature is due to greenhouse gases, then we must act on this information and reject the policies of those who don't take this problem seriously, how ever much we may love them.

"I like him, therefore I believe everything he says" is the motto of the lazy.

The daily gossipy information about the president’s latest tweets or naughtiness is not relevant to deciding about government or national policy. They should be relegated to the back pages of the newspaper where we learn about the private lives of celebrities. The front pages of the newspaper and the top items in the news must be information about issues that affect all of us deeply. The decisions citizens need to make should not be affected by whom they like and whom they don't like, it should be based on the relevant available information.

You can like Trump all you want. He is sort of cute sometimes. But don't believe what he says just because you like him. You don't pick your mechanic because he is a friend. You choose him for his mechanical skills and knowledge and you do the same when you need the services of a plumber or an electrician as well as of different kinds of medical experts. You pick them by their qualifications and by the recommendations of persons whom have reasons to trust.

Political choices should be no different.

Being dense – one form of white privilege.

The expression "white privilege" is becoming more familiar. More whites are beginning to understand that the price they pay for living in this society and benefiting where the system works well is very different from the price paid by persons of color. Here are some obvious examples: no one locks their car when they see me coming up the sidewalk. I am not very likely to be stopped by police and interrogated about who I am or what I am doing here when I walk down the street to say hello to a neighbor. For me, the police are likely to offer support and protection. A black man walking down the sidewalk will often hear of the lock click in the car occupied by whites. The police will stop them and want to know who they are and what they are doing here in their own neighborhood. If they were walking down the street in my neighborhood, which is mostly white, it is even more likely that they be stopped. A large majority of victims of police shootings are black, the majority young black men.

In these and many other ways whites are privileged in this society. They do not bear the burdens borne by persons of color. One form of white privilege that does not receive enough attention is the privilege of not knowing what it is like to live in the United States as a black person and, another large privilege, not having to think about that.

This reminder was brought home to me by a story in the Sunday paper. For 50 years an organization called METCO has bussed students, exclusively students of color, from Boston to some of these suburban schools in towns like Sudbury or Swampscott. The newspaper article detailed how some of the black students are victims of open racist attacks. What is worse for them, there are hardly any black teachers or other role models in these suburban schools. The people from whom they are to receive the exceptional education not available for them where they live are all white. It is difficult for them to learn to think of themselves as knowledgeable and exceptionally capable young black men and women when the only capable people they meet in school are largely white.

I read this and think, yes that is a real problem. Maybe the school systems in Sudbury and Swampscott and other suburban towns must make a special effort to hire African-American teachers or counselors or someone who can present an image of African-American excellence to the students.

It took me quite a while before I realized that METCO and its project raise serious questions for the white parents in the suburbs and the politicians and leaders in Boston and the surrounding towns.

Once you think of them, the questions are obvious: why is it that African-American students in Boston – and the same is of course true of many white students in the city – need to be bused to get a decent education? Is not every child entitled to a high-class education and to the opportunity to learn as much as they are capable of learning?

How is it that the children in Sudbury and Swampscott get a good education that takes them on to good colleges and jobs that provide a good income and in many cases political power, while children in Boston proper may have to go to private schools at considerable expense to receive a comparable education?

Our very different, locally financed and run school systems are an important factor in stratifying the society of adults. By giving poor education to some children we set them up to do menial or manual work that pays modestly and leaves them in the shadows politically.

By being born in the suburbs of parents affluent enough to afford housing there, suburban children are selected when they enter preschool at 3 or 4 years old to get good educations, go to good colleges and become makers and shakers.

The life trajectories we map out for children have little to do with ability and everything to do with geography. They have everything to do with inequality which we not only tolerate but support actively by putting up with unequal educational opportunities for rich and poor, for white and black.

So much for equal opportunity.

A lesson whites have to learn from this example is that we are too ready to accept the inequalities that exist. We do not question why it is that a black student has a much harder time to get a good education than a white student.

We must learn to be much more alert to the inequalities that exist and are perpetuated virtually without criticism if we ever hope to create a society that seriously struggles against inequality. In our society our leaders mouthe condemnations of inequality and, having done that, continue to support the status quo.

The willingness of whites to overlook the daily inequalities of Blacks supports the unwillingness of the powerful to make change. In other words, white behavior, as usual, continues to support and maintain white privilege.

Frederick Douglass on the 4th July

In 1852, 10 years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass then living in Rochester, New York, was asked by The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to address them on the 5th of July. In his speech he praised the Americans who 76 years earlier had declared their independence from England and had fought the Revolutionary War to make that independence a reality. They earned the gratitude of future generations of Americans for asserting that "all men are created equal" and making that principle the basis of their new government.
Douglass, was born a slave. While traveling in England in 1846, his British supporters bought his freedom from his owner in Maryland. Now free, self educated, he spent much of his life traveling through the United States, as well as England and Ireland, to speak in the cause of Abolitionism.
In his 4th of July speech, he reminds his audience that universal human equality did not extend to the slaves. They continued to be grievously oppressed. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which allowed Southern slave owners who kidnap runaway slaves anywhere in the United States, had only deepened the suffering of African-Americans.
In his speech Douglass does not mince words: "There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour… For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."
In recent years, many cities and towns have held public meetings to read this speech by Frederick Douglass. One such meeting was held where I live. It was a hot, sunny day, the sky blue with hardly a cloud, where a long line of volunteers, African-Americans, Whites, people of other origins lined up to each read one paragraph of this heart rending speech.
The audience was small but the readers conveyed their intense sorrow at the continuing injustices suffered by people of color in the United States.
Then the meeting was over. The organizer of the event, a local Black business man, ended the event with the words "God bless America."
God bless America, the nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than those of any other nation? The final invocation of God's mercy seemed at odds with the uncompromising condemnation of America's racial practices we had just read in Frederick Douglass’ speech..
To be sure, even Douglass himself, as he comes to the end of his condemnation of slavery, ends on a hopeful note. He is confident that slavery will come to an end. Most comments on the Douglass speech draw attention to this final expression of confidence that America will finally live up to its own principles and extend equal rights to everyone, black or white.
And is that confidence not justified? We just had a black president. Slavery has come to an end. So has Jim Crow. Black Americans vote and run for office and sometimes get elected.
But wait. Slavery still exists. Our government holds more than 2 million persons in prison. Many must work in prison industries where workers get paid somewhere between $.23 to two dollars an hour. Prison workers have no benefits. They are not allowed to organize. They will be punished if they refuse to work for a pittance. Their condition is not unlike that of their slave ancestors.
The number of Black prison inmates is quite disproportionate to the number of black Americans in the population as a whole. One in three Black men are in prison or live under the supervision of parole officers. They come from black communities where the unemployment rate is close to 50%, where schools fail to teach elementary reading and arithmetic skills to children, and their parents, the working poor, have no time to supervise their children because they are too busy trying to earn a meager living.
The Black Lives Matter movement arose in response to unarmed black men and women being killed by police officers. To date very few of these police officers have had to face court and those that did, were most often acquitted. In the United States in 2017 all men and women are still not created equal.
    We should not invoke divine blessings for America. We should ask for blessings for the small Black children who braved angry mobs of white, racist adults to claim their right to an equal education--a right they still have not won. We should ask blessings for the generations of African-Americans who patiently demanded equality at great danger to themselves.
    We should see our present turmoils as troubles we brought on ourselves for what Douglass called our “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy.”

Is health care reform fair?

The proposed health care bills both in the house and the Senate will save a good deal of money but will also reduce the number of Americans with health insurance. If the current bills become law, 14 million people will lose their health insurance in the coming year and another 8 to 10 million will lose their insurance in the coming 10 years.

Who are these 14 million Americans?

The majority will be poorer Americans and older, retired persons. A disproportionate number of those will be persons of color. African-Americans are about 12% of the population but about 20% of the poor. About 11% Americans are Hispanic and 14% of them are poor.

Few voters are going to be moved by those numbers because they have bought into the mythology of the "welfare queen" first invented by Ronald Reagan. The story is about people of color who are too lazy to work and therefore live off government handouts. In Reagan’s story, a Chicago woman on welfare drove around in a Cadillac and carried Gucci bags. Reagan’s story was a fiction--a lie.

No doubt some welfare recipients are lazy and avoid working. But that is, of course, also true of some of the sons and daughters of the captains of industry who don't have to work and therefore don't and party instead. Think of Paris Hilton. But the made-up story about the welfare queens ignores the facts about the working poor. According to government census data 12% of people working make barely more than $15,000 for a couple. They can survive only with food stamps and other government assistance. A significantly larger number of working Americans still do not earn enough to put food on the table and to avoid being homeless.

Huffington Post gives us some examples of working poor families:

"Not so long ago, Kathleen Ann had a house, vacation time, spending money and everything else available to someone with a high-paying corporate job. Then she was discarded in a layoff, cast into a world where she could only find occasional part-time work. Ann now makes less than $20,000 a year, lives in an apartment and has been forced to accept that she is poor — a “Used-to-Have,” as she described it. “As a ‘Used-to-Have,’ I know exactly what Corporate America, lobbyists and politicians have taken away from me “,”she said.

Carla Shutak thought buying a house with her husband, who was gainfully employed as a civil engineer, would be a wise investment. When he was laid off in 2009, they couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments and their home was foreclosed on. “My American Dream died,” she said. “Despite doing what we were taught was right by putting 20 percent down and asking for a fixed 30-year mortgage, we were now in our 40s and starting over with nothing.”

Monica Simon, 24, works full time at an online advertising firm, earning $23,000 a year after taxes. She’s still paying off her student loans and often relies on credit cards to cover basic costs. “Sometimes I get paid and then I have, maybe, $150 left over for the two weeks,” she said. “I just feel I’m getting way behind where I want to be for my age. I feel I’m just starting my life and I’m already miles and miles behind.”

A significant portion of the poor who will lose their health insurance are actually working. It is just that their jobs pay little, and their hours are quite unsteady and unpredictable. The new proposed health care bills favor the young and those who earn more than $50,000 a year. It penalizes the poor, regardless of whether they work or not.

This is blatantly unfair.

“What is fair? Everybody has their own idea of fairness.” Many people think that but they are quite wrong. When they take their children to baseball or football games they know when the umpire is unfair, when he or she does not apply the rules in the same way to both teams. There is no argument about fairness there. The same idea of fairness was involved in the Inflatagate scandal. It would not be fair if one team’s footballs were inflated to a different hardness than that of the other. The same idea of fairness forbids insider-trading. It is unfair for one person to have information not available to others. There are many more examples. Fairness means that prevailing rules are applied evenly to everyone.

Applying different rules about health insurance to the poor than to the remainder of the people is unfair.

But in American politics fairness does not seem to count for much. No one in Congress seems to worry much that the rules applying to the well-to-do do not apply to the poor.

At this point many people will try to blame the poor for their mistreatment. If they had done better in school, if they had gone to college, they would not be under-or-unemployed, they would not work at minimum wage jobs.

It may be true that if the people who are now among the working poor had managed to get more education, they would have a better income, although today some college graduates are selling cups of coffee at Dunkin' Donuts. But the fact remains that there are jobs that don't pay enough for people to live on their earnings and someone will do those jobs. Regardless of who gets an education and doesn't, 12% of American workers earn way below the poverty line and someone is going to do those jobs and be really poor in spite of working hard. These are the people who are going to lose their health insurance under the new proposed health care law.

There is no way of defending that uneven application of rules as fair.

Congress and the US government do not care about fairness. Our system is designed to favor the rich.

American Fascism

Since Donald Trump became the 45th American president, we hear a lot of talk and hinting about Fascism in America. It is important for us to be as clear as possible about our current condition.

Fascism is a form of authoritarianism. The government's powers have no limit. Popular opinion carries no weight. All power is in the hands of a fascist party. There are no elections. What laws there are, are decreed by different government officials. Citizens may not appeal the orders of the government to an independent judiciary. Citizens do not have any protection against the government police power. If the government believes you to be a threat to its power, they can arrest you and if they so choose kill you. You may disappear and never be heard of again.

In a fascist society there are no rights to privacy. Any organization you may belong to, is organized and run by the government. With the rise of a facist government, labor unions are turned into branches of the government as are other previously voluntary organizations. Clubs of stamp collectors, clubs of genealogists, garden clubs-- all become official state-sponsored organizations.

Fascist governments tend to be paranoid. They have their spies everywhere. Families are disrupted when some members belong to the official fascist party and spy on other members of the family who may be less enamored with the new government. It is not safe to make negative comments about the government in your workplace; someone may report your jokes to the police and you may find yourself arrested in a concentration camp before you know what hit you. The government controls education. The government takes books off library shelves that it regards as hostile to its own mission. The government decides that certain kinds of art and music are unacceptable. They may not be performed in public. Private performances expose the performers to government suspicion. The government declares certain groups of the population to be no longer legitimate citizens. In extreme cases, such as Nazi Germany, these select groups consisting of Jews, of homosexuals, of communists were slaughtered in large numbers.

The government institutes a reign of terror. Citizens who are disaffected will be very careful not to voice their criticisms for fear of disappearing in prison camps. The new fascist party and its government are in complete control.

Fascist governments are wild eyed nationalists. They incline towards military adventures in order to expand the nation's territory and power. They do not tire to boast of the superiority of their nation and its culture over other neighboring nations.

Can Americans in 2017 recognize themselves in this portrait?

Yes and no. We may point to President Trump’s "America First" rhetoric. But we need to acknowledge that American nationalism has been in the ascendant for a long time. We have invaded and bombed foreign countries in order to promote our particular form of government which we call "democracy." The belief that our institutions are superior to those of other countries has dominated American foreign policy for at least a century.

But our politics, you say, is not dominated by one party. After all we have the Democrats and the Republicans and they are at each others’ throat quite regularly. But this two-party system does raise interesting questions that need a lot more reflection than is possible here: it often seems to many people that we really have only one political party – the party of the rich and that those of us who are not rich are not represented.

We do have, we think, an independent judiciary. There are constitutional protections of citizens against the government. The government cannot just make you disappear and even kill you if that's what they feel like—unless you are undocumented.

The government cannot freely censor literature and art. It is not free to determine what children will learn in school. It is not independent of popular opinion about schools or cultural matters. It cannot simply cleanse libraries of books it considers a threat to its own power.

We do have private organizations that are not arms of the government. The local kids sports or poetry organizations are not under government or fascist party control. It would be completely illegal for the government to try to take over those private groups.

Moves in the direction of fascism are always a threat. Since 9/11 Congress has allowed the government new forms of supervision of private communications by citizens. It has allowed government police forces such as the FBI or CIA to interfere with private citizens and their property in ways which are of dubious legality. The freedoms we brag about are much more precarious than we are willing to admit and their defense is a continuing effort – an effort that is not always successful.

But none of that makes the US a fascist country. For most of us fascism is a constant threat, but not a reality.

Fascism is a constant threat but not a reality if you are a middle-class white person, especially if you are a man. Your world is very different if you are a black youngster or even a black adult – man or woman.

In 2016, long before Pres. Trump got elected, more than 250 black persons were killed by police. 34% of unarmed people killed by police were black men. Black men constitute 6% of the population of our country. Very few of the police involved in these killings were indicted. Even fewer were convicted.

If you are black in America your government resembles a fascist government much more closely. You may be arrested and killed pretty much at the discretion of the police. You have no recourse to the court system to protect you.

The Constitution protects citizens very unevenly. White middle-class citizens live in a more or less constitutional democracy. The country in which black Americans live resembles fascism a lot more closely.

And God help you if you are undocumented.

Is America a fascist country? There is no unambiguous answer to that question. The answer you get depends a whole lot on whom you ask and who you are. Sadly, white citizens do not frequently enough recognize that Black citizens live in a very different America from that inhabited by Whites.

Memorial Day 2017

Remembering the dead and maimed of our many wars is always a somber occasion. If our leaders – politicians, generals, business tycoons – had any wisdom, they would be content to remember. But that wisdom is lacking and so the Memorial Day speeches not only remember but also engage in lavish myth making about the reasons we were involved in all these wars. The myth is always more or less the same: we went to war in Europe, in South East Asia, in the Mideast, in Latin America in order to protect our freedoms and our democracy.

The wars we fought since 1940 were of different sorts. Not one of them was unquestionably inevitable in order to defend our freedoms.

What about World War II, you will say. Surely Nazi Germany was a threat to freedoms not only in Europe but perhaps also on our continent. While that is no doubt true, no Memorial Day speech will mention that World War II also saved the harsh dictatorship in the Soviet Union for another 40 odd years. World War II did not preserve the freedoms in Russia or in Eastern Europe satellite countries. Instead it preserved the brutality of Stalin's government and that of his successors.

               The role of World War II in defense of American freedoms may be ambiguous. There is no such ambiguity about any of the wars we have been embroiled in since.

In Vietnam, as Martin Luther King explains in his Riverside Church speech of April 1967, the Vietnamese were defending their freedom against being colonized by the French and then by us. The eventual victory of the North Vietnamese did not deprive any Americans of their freedom to speak their mind, to assemble, to campaign for office and to vote. The Vietnamese were not a threat to our freedom. We were the threat to their freedom in that war.

“In his 1995 memoir of the war, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Robert McNamara– Secretary of Defense during much of that war – said he and his senior colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn President Johnson around.” (Washinton Post, 7/7/2009)

The war in Iraq was justified in a number of different ways by the administration of Pres. George W Bush. First we were told that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction." When that turned out to be a pure fabrication, we were told that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack of 9/11. That, of course, was also a lie. What was not mentioned as often was that the majority of the 9/11 attackers were born and raised in Saudi Arabia, still our firmest ally in that region. The justification of the attack on Iraq still remains to be given. Was it really just about controlling the oil?

The Memorial Day speeches do not usually mention that Saddam Hussein was our ally in the 1980s when he attacked Iran. We supported him then. Presumably that alliance was not a threat to our freedoms. How did Saddam Hussein become a threat to our political institutions in the few years between 1980 and 1991? The answer is not at all obvious.

President Obama was more forthcoming than many others when he explained repeatedly that we needed to send our troops to all four corners of the earth in order to maintain our position as the most powerful nation in the world.

But even that explanation for our continued war making is implausible. It is true that we have troops everywhere in the world. But it is also true that we have been loosing all the wars we have been involved in since World War II – except for the invasions of Grenada (by President Reagan) and of Panama (by the elder President Bush). We lost the Vietnam war. We have not managed to bring peace to Afghanistan after 16 years of fighting there. We have not brought peace to Iraq. We are not playing a dominant role in Syria. Our intervention in Libya has left that country in political chaos.

In its early days, Osama bin Laden's Al Quaeda was armed and supported by our government. Since then Islamist movements have spread, expanded and become more destructive in their terrorist attacks. They have not been defeated by the most powerful military in the world.

The "most powerful nation on earth" continues to be on the losing end of its wars. Not an impressive record.

We are still waiting for a plausible explanation for fighting all these wars and demanding all these sacrifices from Americans and from the peoples of many other countries.

In the end we need to admit that our leaders are victims of their own myth making. After telling the nation every year on Memorial Day that our military interventions were glorious defenses of freedom and democracy, it appears that they themselves have forgotten that this story is made up. It has no relation to reality. The loss and bitter pain our wars have inflicted on the families of its victims did not in any way safeguard our institutions. That story simply cannot be supported by what actually happened. The enemies we have fought in all these different wars in did not threaten our institutions to begin with. When we lost those wars we did not in any way secure our freedoms for future generations.

The losses imposed on so many American families by these wars only show that lies repeated often enough will finally confuse the liars. The victims of these lies are the families whose members died far from home and, more broadly, all the Americans whose health and welfare would have been so much better if we had not wasted trillions of dollars in needless wars.

Rule of the People or of Majorities

We say two things about democracy. Both of them are sort of true. But it is easy to see that they cannot be true at the same time. And that creates a problem for our understanding of what democracy is.

The first thing we say is that in a democracy the people rule. To be sure, we do not govern. We do not issue executive orders, issue driver's licenses, or building permits. The government does that. But we always have a supervisory role because we elect representatives to the legislature and we elect the head of the Executive, the president. Persons to fill many other important jobs in the executive must be approved by the elected representatives. All of this is familiar.

We also say that our democracy is an electoral system where there are periodic votes, with every vote having the same weight and getting counted only once. Votes are secret so that no one is exposed to political pressure for the vote they cast. When not everyone casts votes for the same candidate, for instance, the majority wins. Where two or more candidates compete the one who has more votes gets elected.

The people who vote for the majority, whose candidate gets elected thereby gain some influence over the next government and thus may be said to rule.

But what about the minority? What about the people who work really hard for their candidate who is, for whatever reason, less popular and does not win? They have no influence over the government. They have no influence at all. They cannot really be said to rule.

Here is our problem then. When we practice electoral democracy with majority rule only the winners of elections maybe said to rule and the other people do not. When we say that democracy consists of an electoral system with majority rule, we seem to contradict the other thing we say, namely that in a democracy, the people—meaning all the people—rule.

Many people are fully aware of the tension between the different ways in which we describe democracy. If it were easier for us to come to agreement on different things or on who is the best candidate for a particular job, obviously this would not be a problem. The people would make their choices by "consensus" as it is called. They would discuss a matter, consider alternative proposals for resolving an existing problem and then figure out the best resolution of the problem and adopt that. Once everyone agreed, the only thing remaining to do would be to execute the policy agreed on.

That scenario would obviously be lovely but it is, in our world quite unrealistic. In almost any situation we are unable to reach agreement. To this many people say: “Yes, majority rule is a second best arrangement but it's really not so bad.” Electoral systems with majority rule are widely accepted as an acceptable form of democracy. 

But to do so is a mistake. Decisions are made only by a portion of the citizenry. The minority has nothing to say and it is not  accidental who belongs to the winning majority. The people who can pay for expensive lobbyists,who can afford to hire high-class advertising agencies to promote their perspectives  win most elections; the people who are poor, who work more than one job and therefore have no time to agitate on behalf of their points of view usually lose. Electoral systems with majority rule are not democratic. They produce oligarchies, the rule of mere portions of the population, of the wealthy, the owners, the employers.

The defenders of electoral democracy will argue that we have no choice because people just cannot agree and therefore we need to fall back on majority rule. But this defense of majority rule completely ignores the fact that there are a whole lot of trained and highly skilled people in our country at this time and, in fact, all over the world who know how to get people who have different perspectives on something to agree in spite of their differences, but many of these people make their living helping different groups to overcome serious disagreements and forging agreements that everyone is pretty happy with.

This sort of technique is called alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Thousands of practitioners of ADR all over the world have training institutes, trainings and conferences. They have different domestic and international organizations that accredit practitioners. Their members write many books and pamphlets. The different versions and techniques and theories of ADR are readily available to anybody who wants to know anything about it.

ADR differs from the typical political. In ordinary political conversations people debate with each other and are at pains to win and to show that the other is mistaken. Businesses cannot afford to waste time on debates that do not reach a speedy and mutually acceptable agreement. In the business world, the conversations between groups of people who disagree are often facilitated by trained experts. These experts learn to remain neutral. They do not take sides. Their only interest is in getting the conflicting parties to come to some desired agreement, be that about a policy, or about the possible candidate for an important position, or about some more general principles of politics. The facilitators have many tasks. Often political debates go round and round because people misunderstand each other. A facilitated debate will make quite clear what they disagree on.

In a political debate each side is wedded to their particular proposal; in contrast, facilitators will encourage parties to be creative and find new solutions that both parties might accept gladly. Political debates are often hard to close because the parties make assumptions that they have not really examined or fact-checked. Facilitators will probe gently to encourage each party to examine any unexamined assumptions. That process will often open up new conversations.

Using such techniques, facilitators, mediators and others resolve problems every day --often problems that have festered and have created serious hostilities. Testimonials to that accomplishment come from large corporations, important law firms, and other powerful people whom we can trust not to spend money for help with their disagreements unless that help is indubitably worth its price.

If we applied these techniques to our political disagreements many of those would disappear and our decisions would more often be based on consensus and not exclude electoral minorities from ruling. Using the skills of various professionals in facilitating agreement and consensus, we would be able to turn our back on the injustice of majority rule. Using the techniques of facilitation and mediation, democracy resting on consensus may well be possible.

“But this will take too long” the defenders of majority rule will tell us. However, the reality is that mediation and facilitation have not so far being used to any extent  to settle political disagreements. We do not know how difficult  or time-consuming it  would be to apply these techniques in politics. A lot of experimentation will be needed before we are in a position to have reliable opinions on the feasibility of resting consensus democracy on mediation and facilitation techniques. The encouraging results in various business situations should encourage us to engage in that kind of experimentation.

We do not know today how well a mediated and facilitated democracy would function. But we do know that it is a real alternative to our present. The insistence that majority rule is the optimal procedure is clearly mistaken, given the positive experiences many enterprises are having with mediation and facilitation. Electoral techniques and majority rule  or not unavoidable. Using electoral systems and majority rule is a choice we make. It is, as we saw above, a choice of oligarchy over genuine democracy.

The dogma of the inevitability of majority rule is being promoted by the winners in existing oligarchies. It is in their interest to make everyone believe that there are no other options. But there are. We should take back our democracy by trying large-scale experiments with mediated and facilitated democratic conversations.