On What Scale?
By Steven J. Grisafi, PhD.
I agree much with what Ms. Tumulty has to say in this editorial. However, I believe that President Biden, and the others who express concern over the fate of democracy in America, are, in my opinion, deliberately circumventing the issue with a diversion. Democracy itself is not in peril. It is a matter of the scale upon which democracy is applied that is the pertinent issue. Ancient Greece demonstrated that democracy was viable on the scale of a city-state. Ancient Rome showed that a rule of law must be applied upon the scale of an empire. Democracy did not require a rule of law in Ancient Greece. The people themselves decided all issues put before them. Rome applied a rule of law which removed the people from the decision making process and placed it in the hands of a selected few. Our democratic republic allows the people to choose those selected few who make the decisions for us. Our problem is that the American people have grown culturally apart from one another such that we are unable to agree upon the selected few who are to make the decisions for us.
This problem is occurring elsewhere throughout the world. Germany no longer has the dominance of a two party system. Sweden and the Netherlands have struggled to form a governmental administration when confronted with the reality of a severely fractured parliament. The problem lay within the people themselves. They are no longer culturally united. They have lost their identity by being forced to accept within their fold others not sharing their cultural identity. This is the manner in which democracy has failed. It was the liberal tendency to pretend that “We the People” do not possess human failings. That “We the People” are better than any human beings have ever shown themselves to be.
The matter is a question of scale. Upon what scale can we effectively maintain a democracy? The answer is relatively simple. The successful scale is one applied upon a nation defined as a single people sharing one agreed upon culture. America approached that identity from about 1923 to 1965. Then it was lost. The People’s Republic of China, despite its enormous size, is closer to achieving the identity of a nation defined as a single people sharing a single defined culture than is America. But so too is the Republic of China, Taiwan, closer to the ideal than is America. So the question of scale is not merely a matter of size, but of homogeneity. America, Germany, the Netherlands and others are growing too heterogeneous to function as a democracy. We need to segregate.
There is no idolatry of Donald Trump. Not even within the fraction of the Republican Party that supports his deceptions. Democrats would prefer to believe that there is a cult of personality for Donald Trump that ails our democracy. If only that were true then all that ails us would vanish upon removal of Mr. Trump from American politics. Our cure is not so simple. We are no longer “We the People” but are “We the Many Peoples.” As a nation that cannot stand. Our problem is the failure of the melting pot and of assimilation.
I expected to see this strategy resurface within American news media. If you did not watch the January 2nd episode of “Face the Nation” I recommend that you watch it now on their website. In particular, pay attention to the interview with Professor Pape of the University of Chicago. He expressed nearly all that I expected. The mainstream movement of which Professor Pape described was given impetus from the presidency of Donald Trump. But the movement itself is not a consequence of his presidency. That animosity apparent in the insurrection has been brewing for decades. I expected to see a return to the old tried and true strategy. The article with the link that I give above confirms this. It was the successful ploy of alienating White American women from their fathers, brothers, and sons that enabled Black America to vilify the White Man.
When viewing American history one needs to understand that nowhere else in the world were women treated better than by White Men of European ancestry. Everywhere elsewhere in the world, including Africa and Asia, they were, and still are, treated like cattle. But Black America uses this ploy to agitate White American women to help them vilify White Men in general.
This will not stand. Support for Donald Trump was predicated on the supposition that Mr. Trump personifies the determination that White Men will not go quietly into the Great Replacement. President Obama confirmed that Black and White mixed race individuals identify solely as Black. This is of fundamental importance. Coupled with the vilification of the White Man through a selective reading of history, this understanding impels Americans of European heritage to consider civil war now preferable to death by a thousand cuts when all Americans self-identity as non-white. Civil war is neither desirable nor necessary. But it becomes more likely because those who govern us now are unlikely either to diminish or relinquish the full authority they have over us. The fifty states need to be reorganized as five sovereign nations bound together by treaty in a fashion similar to that of the European Union. This will require a second Constitutional Convention. Until that happens our current situation is likely to grow worse.