Juan Cole has an interesting spin on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law, which at one point was a required reading for a college liberal education in the US.
Juan Cole, Informed Comment: As Trump Breaks it, Top Ten Things we need to do to Fix America
Just to summarize:
- Where actions exceed the law, they must be stopped.
- Find ways to reemploy neglected or atrophied institutions and engage new centers of influence.
- Review the structure of the electorate. The Trump revolution was made possible not only in the more visible (and vocal) pronouncements and edicts on which the media was (and still is) concentrating but. structurally at the state and local level.
- Challenge the flow of money into politics, institutionally.
- A policy of fiscal restraint on “defense” that will be extremely difficult to put in place.
- Underneath all these feelings about foreigners is a deeper dilemma: we are all immigrants but are divided by tenure. Developing shared interest.
- Restore a habitual attachment of the people” to what aims to promote the public good.
- Restore the hostility to what the Federalist Papers called “faction”. Note that this is not wishy-washy bipartisanship that collaborates in selling out to 1% interests.
- An ombudsman. Hamilton’s idea that the Electoral College could perform this task failed in the 2016 election. Something is needed to get us back to the system that made American politics work, at least generally, as Hamilton wanted for “the happiness of our country.”
- Put the power to make war back under restraint. (This is quite a good discussion of the issues and how they were discussed in the debate over the Constitution.
This is a discussion that small-d democrats need to have urgently. Most of what Juan Cole discusses can be done locally through individual and small group action with existing supportive institutions, generally non-profits and the remaining healthy functions of government. The latter items, especially the ombudsman function and slowing the rush to war are the more difficult struggles. (You thought opposing Trump would be as easy as bringing down the New Deal was for Repubicans?)
Here’s the peril in not moving quickly something along these lines. There is a Constitutional Convention call moving through state legislatures. If the required number of state legislative calls is approved, the state will send conservative corporate and primarily white delegates to the Convention with the political instructions to undo those parts of the current Constitution that they don’t like. In this event, the entire Bill of Rights is in formal danger; it is long past being in practical danger. When the Bill of Rights ceases to be the norm of government action, even if often breached, the United States fails the 240-year-old experiment in self-government that against entrenched interests has the vision of being extended to everyone. Too much “realism” becomes the cynicism that gives up on the struggle to make that vision a reality in fact.
Juan Cole has given a point to change the discussion in a more helpful direction than it has been since the 2000 election first breached Constitutional norms.
