How Democrats Lost an Election They Should Have Won

Despite the low popularity of President Obama and people’s concerns about the economy, this was an election Democrats should have won big ... that is, if the campaign had been run well.  But as so often has been the case, the Democrats did not run a good campaign.  What would have been a good campaign?

1.  Use Obama to lead the charge.   Because of his low standing in the polls, most Democratic candidates stayed as far a way from Obama as possible.  The Senate candidate in Kentucky wouldn’t even say whether she voted for him in 2012!

This was plain stupid.  They forgot that although he was down in the popularity polls in 2012, he won that election handily.  He and his people know how to run a disciplined campaign and get out the vote.  But this campaign wasn’t run by him; indeed he hardly participated.

The people who truly dislike Obama weren’t about to vote for a Democrat regardless what the candidate did or said.  The lines are very clearly drawn in their minds.  However, without Obama as cheerleader-in-chief, the Democratic base of blacks, latinos, youth, and women were less likely to vote historically in a midterm election.  Without getting out that vote, Democratic candidates were bound to lose any close election.   And that’s what happened.

2.  They should have run a very positive campaign that told people clearly where Democrats see the country going and how they propose to get us there … a clear vision statement with legislative particulars, geared to the average voter ... the put-upon middle class ... and communicated in a way that the average voter will get. This should have been the main thrust and the counter to Republican laissez faire, let the market take care of itself, policies.

The middle class has been suffering for decades, but the past few years have taken an even greater toll on their standard of living.  Democrats should have made it clear that they understand their pain and had policies to turn things around.

3.  At the same time, Democrats should not have let the public forget who has kept our current economic problems from being solved.  That should have been easy since Republicans in Congress are held in even lower esteem by voters than Obama.  

And Democrats should have nailed Republicans for being the hypocrites they are … they pose as the party of the people but really are the party of big business and the rich. Those are the interests they are protecting.  Those are the legislative positions they are advancing.  This is not playing class warfare, this is speaking the truth.

But since the Democrats did not run the campaign this way, Republicans were effective as usual at defining the terms of the campaign, making it a referendum on Obama.  Their base was motivated, and they really worked their get-out-the-vote campaign better this time than ever before, ironically learning from Obama.  The Democratic base on the other hand was dispirited and just didn’t vote in sufficient numbers.

Education and Health - Fundamental Rights

We have been bludgeoned over the past few years with the Republican’s mantra that if you haven’t made it, it’s your fault (see my post, “The Mendaciousness of the Responsibility Game”).  So it was with a huge feeling of nostalgia that I was reminded recently of a time not so long ago when a large segment of Republicans had a very different perspective on life and the role of government, or at least the role of the broader society.

In reviewing a new biography of Nelson Rockefeller, the reviewer noted Rockefeller’s credo, “If you don’t have good education and good health, then I feel society has let you down.”  WOW!  How times have changed.

If someone said that today, even if a Democrat said that today, they would be viewed as a left-wing radical.  It sounds so over the top.

But it isn’t.  Let me quote, as I often do, from the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

If one is going to have a meaningful right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, certainly two of the most essential elements of that right are having a good education and having good health.  No one would argue with that.

But the Declaration goes further and states that the purpose of government is to secure these rights, which in this context would mean access to good education and access to good health.  I am not downplaying the importance of personal responsibility.  As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”  But it is the government’s responsibility to provide the water.

So at a minimum, the government is responsible under this standard for supplying access to a good education (meaning good schools, good teachers, etc.) and good health (meaning comprehensive health care ... medical, psychological, and dental ... that is affordable or free, depending on your circumstances).  Note: Obamacare has not come close to providing the latter because although the basic premiums may be affordable due to government subsidies, the large deductibles and out-of-pocket caps of the basic plans discourage people from getting health care except in emergencies.

If that is the minimum, you might ask, what else is there?  While good schools can make a huge difference even in the midst of a bad inner-city neighborhood, growing up in an area where poverty, drugs, and crime are the norm and often impact family life creates major obstacles to being able to take advantage of a good school.  

Government, together with private agencies and organizations, must do much more to improve the broader context within which such children grow up.  Whether it’s creating more jobs, providing adult education, making prisons focus on rehabilitation, creating social policies that encourage two-parent households (as opposed to the old welfare rule that broke up families by penalizing them if an adult male was living in the household) ... there are ample ways that government and society working together could dramatically change the context of inner-city life.

It is time for Rockefeller’s credo to become the credo of government and of our society.  It is past time for this great, rich, but unconscionably unequal, nation to live up to the promise stated in the Declaration of Independence.

The Socialism Canard

Every time Democrats propose having the government provide assistance to those in need or regulate business, the Republicans scream, with their throat veins bulging, “This is Socialism.”  And a large segment of the public, like a hypnotized subject, nods their head and agrees that this is terrible.  It’s only one step away from Communism.  It is against what makes America great.

To listen to the Republicans, one would think that they were against any government spending or action that helps others or in any way interferes with the market place.  That, however, is not the case.

Republicans are very supportive of the billions of dollars that the government spends, either in the form of direct payments or beneficial tax laws, that provide American corporations, especially big business, with government subsidies.  They are also very supportive of government regulation/interference that supports corporations, such as elements of the farm bill.  NOTE: Almost all government farm subsidies go to large corporate farms.  The embattled family farmer benefits hardly at all.

The only difference between the spending and regulation they support and the ones they don’t support is that the former benefit big business while the latter either benefit the average American or protects him by restricting the unfettered ability of big business to act as it wills.

This is hypocrisy.  But the immorality of their stance is even worse. To argue against measures that protect the average American or helps those in need while supporting spending and other measures that help those who are not in need is to take a stand which is immoral.

“Ah,” they say, “but cutting back on such spending or measures will harm American business on which the economy depends and will result in the loss of jobs.”  Any attempts to cut back on these items, or imposing new costs on business, are labeled, “job killers,” by Republicans.

But that is not true.  What is true is that if such subsidies are cut back or new costs imposed, corporate profits will be reduced (unless they raise prices) and thus shareholders will be impacted by lower stock market prices for their shares. 

I am not against corporations making a profit and benefitting their shareholders.  But many of these companies have profits at such high levels that the benefit to the larger society of cutbacks or new regulation/costs far outweighs the reduced profits to industry.  For example, many of our largest, most profitable corporations pay almost no taxes through the loopholes that they enjoy.

The cost to the American taxpayer of these corporate subsidies is unconscionable, especially at a time when the American middle class and the poor are being asked to make sacrifices in order to reduce the government deficit.  It is obscene that our middle class and poor are asked to shoulder the costs of providing subsidies to those who typically already have more money than they know what to do with, other than spend it on more luxury.

The American social contract has traditionally (since the early 20th century) required all aspects of our society to support the greater good, each to its ability.  That concept of fairness and the greater good has been so denigrated over the course of the last few decades by the Republican Party that Republicans in government should hang their heads in shame.

Government and business both have their place in American society and in our economy.  It is past time, however, to correct the balance between the two.

All Men Are Created Equal?

In my writings, I often refer to this iconic phrase from the Declaration of Independence, together with its companion language setting forth our unalienable rights and the statement that government’a purpose is to secure those rights, as the touchstone against which all acts of our government should be judged.  

Yet this very phrase, when viewed as hypocritical because of its obvious disconnect with what was actually happening at the time in the halls of government and in people’s lives, has called into question the intent of the framers and signers of the Declaration.  Was this merely a bold rhetorical flourish to gain acceptance both at home and on the world stage. or was it a deeply held conviction which was meant to chart the future course of the nation?

Not surprisingly, much research and writing has been done on this topic.  And the answers provided are by no means uniformly in one direction or the other.  In truth, the answer is often foretold by the politics of the researcher.  

Because of the enormous importance and potential of these words, to my mind, in redirecting our government and our citizens to a stronger, more just society and nation, I wanted to survey the literature to see what answers I would draw from it.  As objectively as I could, despite my admitted liberal bias.  

First let me restate the obvious.  Slavery was present in the country, both in the south and the north.  The Constitution codified slavery in the “3/5 compromise,” which stated that each slave shall be counted as a 3/5 person when the census was taken to establish the population of each state and thus its representation in Congress.  Thomas Jefferson, who crafted the phrase, was a slaveholder and remained a slaveholder to his death.  All the signers from the South were slaveholders.  

And the problem does not just lie with the fact of slavery.  Women were legally little more than chattel under the total control of their husbands; they had virtually no rights. And in fact, it would take women longer than African-Americans to achieve legal equality and the right to vote. The evidence arguing for a finding of hypocrisy could and has filled up books.

But that is not where this question ends.  Thomas Jefferson and most of the men who were present at these debates and signed the Declaration were men of the enlightenment.   They were men of ideas, and ideas are not always ... actually almost never ... a reflection of the reality of the moment.  Ideas, by their very nature, are meant to chart, to influence the future, whether in science or in human affairs.

In looking at various writings and notes of Jefferson and others, some researchers have thus concluded that what this phrase relates is their belief that all men and women are created equal in the sight of God.  Yet they were all well-aware that the kingdom of God is not to be found on Earth.  And so. like many ideas, it’s inclusion in the Declaration was meant to be an aspirational statement, something to guide the future of the nation.

In our current age, in which the paucity of ideas is reflected everyday in the halls of Congress, in our schools, and in corporate and government offices throughout the country, it is hard to fathom the age of enlightenment and the role that ideas played in bringing about changes in all areas of human activity.  To understand that Jefferson was neither hypocritical nor schizophrenic when writing “all men are created equal,” but rather a man caught in his time who knew, however, that there was something beyond the exigencies of the present, something larger, that needed expression and preservation.  There was no intellectual dishonesty here.

And so the power of the words of the Declaration of Independence remain undiminished.  They should be used to repurpose, to redirect our government and our citizens ... not to something new and unfamiliar, but to something deeply embedded in our founding documents, waiting to be put into action by a nation grounded in social consciousness.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

Stop Complaining - You Do Have a Choice

In my previous post, “Changing Free Will from a Harmful Illusion to a Life-Affirming Fact,” I argued that we are programmed by our learned experience to act, and react, in certain ways and thus do not have free will in the way that term is normally understood.  But, if we were properly nurtured, even as adults, we would be able to free ourselves from this programming.and act with real free will in a way that would be of benefit both to ourselves and to the rest of society.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of such a fundamental change happening in our society is next to zero  Instead, it devolves to the individual to become aware that they have been programmed and to free themselves from that programming.  You can’t change the world around you, but you do have a choice to change how you relate to yourself and that world, and thus end your doubts and confusion, your fear and anxiety, your anger and negativity.  This is the fundamental teaching of Buddhism.

To free yourself from this programming, to change your habit-energy, is a choice we can make.  Without question, it is a choice that is very difficult to make and carry out because our ego will fight making that choice with all its power and cunning.  But it is a choice that people have made and that we can all make.

Let me restate two critical steps.  First, one must come to recognize that you, and all others, are a function of the environment of your upbringing, all your learned experience, and that this experience has programmed you to act in certain ways.  That is something that most people can accept after some thought.

It is the second step which is the kicker.  You must come to an awareness that all your learned experience, being dependent on what you’ve been taught, is thus empty of any intrinsic existence ... the point being that you think the way you think because you were taught that way, whereas another person thinks quite differently because they were taught quite differently.  Where does reality then lie?  

People generally claim to have access to the truth, to reality ... they know ... whereas they don’t in fact because all they know is what they’ve been taught and reality cannot be taught.   It can only be experienced directly, which means free of the intervention of the ego’s thinking mind.  NOTE:  I am talking here about how we view ourselves and the world around us, the judgments we make, not the facts of the physical world or mathematics.

All your feelings, perceptions, mental formations ... indeed your entire consciousness ... are empty of any inherent existence.  It is just in your head.  Strange though it may seem, despite the all-too-real problems in your immediate and the larger world, the direct cause of your suffering, your unhappiness or frustration, is not the state of things you must contend with, but how you relate to yourself and the state of things.

Are you unhappy with the way things are?  Are you suffering because of that unhappiness?  Do you want your suffering to end?

The first thing you must do then is decide, if in fact what I posit is true ... that all your suffering is a function of how you relate to yourself and the world around you, not the actual state of things ... do you really want to change, not who you are, but how you relate to yourself and others.   I emphasize the word “really” because the next question is whether you are willing to go deep within yourself, to do the work which has been hinted at above, in order to free yourself from the way you’ve been programmed?  If the answer is “yes,” read on.

How does one bring about this change in oneself?  How does one unlearn the lessons of a lifetime?

The first thing one must do is find a mechanism to enable you to step outside of yourself.  To be able to look objectively at yourself and the world and how you relate to things.  Slowly, you will begin to discern the disconnect between your learned experience and reality and begin to see things as they really are, free of labels, thus bit by bit freeing yourself from your programmed mind.  Ultimately, you will be able to make the choice to find peace and happiness and end your suffering.

This is not surprisingly a complex process that demands discipline and commitment over an extended period of time ... years.  Such awareness does not come in a flash.  But there is a path to follow.  It is set forth in detail in my various books and discussed further on my Buddhist blog.  For a summary, you might want to read the post, “End of Suffering Cheat Sheet.”  For more information please go to, www.thepracticalbuddhist.com.

Changing Free Will from a Harmful Illusion to a Life-Affirming Fact

Underlying many of the social systems and moral perspectives that govern our society is the concept of free will.  Whether stated as the ability to know right from wrong or whether it’s the belief that anyone can pick themselves up by their bootstraps, our system of laws, both criminal and civil, and government’s approach to helping those in need is founded on the concept of free will.

But do we really have free will?  Does each person really have this broad range of options from which he or she can choose?

The answer, in short, is “no.”  We are, each of us, a product of our upbringing, in all its many aspects ... from our experience in the womb, to the nurturing we receive in our early formative years, to everything we experience and learn at the hands of our family, peers, and the larger culture.  How all those different factors impact each person results in the multifaceted nature of humanity ... literally, no two people are the same, not even twins, and certainly not siblings.

While this statement should not be controversial, the further implications of it will likely be viewed as highly so.  The environment of our upbringing programs us (our minds are like extremely complex computers) to act the way we act. This is not to say that we are like robots.  Because we have minds and the ability to think, each of us has a range of actions that we can take.  But it is a much smaller range than assumed by the concept of free will.

Whether someone has ambition or has none, becomes a criminal or not, is kind or ruthless, and the list could go on and on ... regarding almost every area of human activity, most of the “decisions” we make are not really decisions, because decision implies a real choice.  Instead, these “decisions” have been made for us by the way we have been programmed by the environment of our upbringing.

Let’s take the example of two individuals growing up poor in the ghetto in similar circumstances and with a similar lack of educational achievement.  One takes the path of crime to provide money for the basics of life; the other rejects that route and takes a low-paying job.  The conventional view would be that the first individual makes a conscious decision to do what he knows to be wrong, while the second one makes a choice not to do what he knows to be wrong.  

But that is false.  The first individual, by virtue of his upbringing, does not think crime is wrong; he knows it’s illegal, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong as far as he is concerned.  The environment of his upbringing programmed him to disregard the larger society’s morality and to believe he had no other options for making it.  The second individual, on the other hand, had something in his upbringing ... possibly a parent or church ... that taught him that crime is wrong.  He could no sooner do that than chop off his hand.

Then there is the well known example of the child or wife abuser.  As research has clearly shown, these individuals do not choose to abuse their children or their wives.  They themselves were typically abused as children and their minds equate abuse with love because as children that’s how they coped with being abused by a parent.  And so, they are programmed by their past to abuse their loved ones.  They have no choice, absent intervention and therapy.

It is the mind’s programming that causes those who are abused to become abusers themselves.  As hard as it is for us to understand and accept that fact, as incomprehensible as it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact.

The implications of this analysis is significant.  There is no such thing as a bad person; that is to say, no one comes out of the womb a bad person, no one is an inherently bad person.  But people do come to do bad things because of what they’ve been taught by the environment of their upbringing.  

While that should and can have no impact on the laws of what is socially allowable behavior.  And those who violate those laws must take responsibility for their behavior, even if they in reality had little or no choice ... that is necessary for the stability of society ... how we treat such individuals is another matter.

Based on this analysis, how we deal with those who violate the law needs to change drastically from current and past practices.  For example, the goal of the criminal justice system is to increase public safety.  We know all too well from experience though that fear of incarceration or even death does not act as a deterrent and change people’s behavior.  Such is the power of their programmed minds.

Thus, while the criminal justice system would still determine guilt or innocence, the driving goal of the sentencing process would be rehabilitation not punishment.  Not just sentencing, but the whole prison culture would be totally transformed because in order to rehabilitate, a person’s thought process must be reprogrammed.  This is a complex process, but first and foremost it involves building someone’s feeling of self-worth and his sense of oneness, his interconnectedness with all people.  Only then will a person stop treating others badly, whether family, peers, or strangers.  (See my post, “Prisons as Monastery not Dungeon,” 11/20/14.)

The latter lesson will be very controversial for most readers because our whole system of social interaction, from the micro to the group to the nation is based on an us v them analysis, which in turn is based on our insecurity.  Virtually every conflict that man has been involved in has been a result of this insecurity and his us v them perspective.  Even the three great western religions have an us v them perspective at their core.  But this human weakness must be eradicated wherever it appears if we are ever to achieve peace at any level.

This analysis of the programming that robs us of free will also should impact the function of our public schools.  It is not enough to teach people job-related skills (yes, I know that many schools do a poor job of even that).  Schools must teach people what they are all too often not taught at home or by the media ... to be ethical human beings, regardless of the circumstance.  (See my post, “Schools as Educators of Citizens,” 3/10/14,)  Only then will children see beyond the immediacy of their environment and have a real chance to exercise free will

The goal of these changes I’m suggesting is to provide a real opportunity for people to exercise free will, to free themselves from the straight-jacket of their mind’s programming.

I stated in the beginning that for the most part, our systems are based on the invalid assumption that we have free will.  But in one critical arena, the injustice suffered by many results from the opposite assumption ... that they have no free will.  Schools, especially inner-city schools, mostly accept as given that children from bad backgrounds are hopeless, s lost cause, and nothing but trouble.  And that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy,

Let’s take two people of equal talent and intelligence,  One is born in an upper middle-class family with all the attendant privileges and supportive parents. One is born into a drug-addicted family living in poverty on the fringes of society.  There is no difference in the two children regarding their genetic-based talents and intelligence.  

In the one case the talents and intelligence are recognized and nurtured, sometimes obsessively, the talent and intelligence blossoms and the person goes on to become a productive person.  But in the other case, the talents and intelligence are neither recognized nor nurtured ... the seeds that are within are not watered ... and so that talent and intelligence atrophies and the person goes on to the life that is more or less typical for people raised in those surroundings.  Free will was not a factor in either case.

This is a huge waste of human potential and a crime against humanity.  Children indeed do not have free will, but they are young and their minds are malleable enough that they can more easily be taught to feel self-worth than adults.  Thus, all schools must instead function with the goal of making the most of each child’s potential and from the perspective that a child’s background and SES group does not predetermine that potential.  Just as our criminal justice system ideally follows the maxim “innocent until proven guilty,” our schools should follow the maxim, “talented and intelligent until proven otherwise.”

Our system of justice and social engineering based on the assumption of free will, or in the case of many inner-city schools, the lack of free will, has done an injustice to untold millions of people to the detriment not just of their lives but of the health and stability of our society.  We assume that people have free will when convenient for us, when in fact they do not; but at the same time believe that people have no free will, when that is what’s convenient.

What we must do is reform our systems so that all people develop a sense of self-worth, of opportunity, and thus in fact can exercise free will.  Only with such reforms will we ever see the full implementation of the promise of the Declaration of Independence ... that all men are created equal, have an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted to secure these rights.

The Mendaciousness of the Responsibility Game

We are brought up in this society to think that we have control over our lives.  That if we do this or do that, if we work hard enough, if we go to college, etc., that the desired results will materialize for us.  And if things don’t work out, it is our fault.  In its crudest form, this has been expressed in recent years by Republicans in Congress who have stated bluntly that if you are poor, if you haven’t made it up the financial ladder, it’s your fault; you’re lazy.

This perspective on life is totally an illusion, a lie.  While we do have control over whether we work hard, whether we study hard, how we treat other people, whether we get married, etc., we have absolutely no control over whether those actions bear the desired fruits, which for most people are security, success, money, and as a result ... so we are taught ... happiness.

In truth, all we have control over is the way we relate to ourselves and to others, to the world around us.  Whether our actions bring about the desired result lies in the control of others  or is just a matter of good fortune, happenstance.  

Everyone will understand when I speak of the control of others.  But what about happenstance.  In common parlance, the phrase, “being in the right place at the right time,” is an example of that.  So many of the breaks that people receive in life, while often in part the result of careful planning, are really a result of everything falling into place, which is a function of happenstance.  

For example, let’s say you set up a meeting with several people and you learned of a great job opportunity and made a great contact.  Had the meeting taken place two days later, the discussion could have produced nothing, either because one person didn’t show or because an opportunity that was present on one day wasn’t there anymore two days later.  This is part of the vicissitudes of life.

Unfortunately, people who have “made it” tend not to be aware of how they have been blessed by happenstance.  Their ego tells them that it was all because of their hard work; luck or fortune had nothing to do with it.  And so they lack any compassion for those who haven’t made it, whether they are poor or struggling middle class or a lower level executive who isn’t going anywhere.  They’re not aware of the saying, “They’re but for good fortune (or the grace of God) go I.”  A preeminent example of this, perhaps, is Justice Clarence Thomas.

And so those who haven’t made it are made to feel by our culture that they are at fault.  They haven’t tried hard enough.  This internalized self-blame is very demoralizing.  People may often blame a particular individual for some opportunity not materializing or a venture failing, but they rarely get the larger point that the whole concept of control is an illusion.

Most of the frustration and pain we experience from trying and not succeeding comes from this illusion of control.  The lesson we as individuals need to take from being aware of the illusion of control is to let the idea of control go, to accept that all one can do is the best one can, but ultimately the result depends on many factors outside your control.  To have any peace, one must have the attitude, “If it works, great.  If it doesn’t work, that’s OK too.”

For those who are in government, the lesson is to understand that what our society deems “failure” is most often not a matter of someone not having tried.  It’s a result of growing up in an environment over which one has no control, whether it’s being born in poverty, having addicted parents, going to a school that doesn’t teach, growing up in an atmosphere of drugs and violence, the list goes on and on.  This is not an excuse; it is a fact of life; it is reality.

Or alternatively, it’s a function of all of a sudden the floor dropping out from under a successful life, often because a job has gone abroad or because of  major illness that leads to bankruptcy, which can start a cycle of long term unemployment, loss of house, and even homelessness.

Everyone who as a public servant is sworn to uphold the constitution needs to remember that the purpose of government, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, is “to secure these rights” ... namely, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  This places several responsibilities on government.

The first is to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve those goals.  And equal opportunity isn’t just a matter of ensuring that there is no discrimination in employment, housing, etc.  Real equal opportunity means that the playing field is leveled by ensuring that all children have access to the same level of quality education, something that is definitely not the case in this country.

The other major government responsibility stemming from this task is providing a safety net for those who are in need.  Whether someone is homeless or living in poverty or disabled, or at risk because they are old or unemployed, government needs to have programs that help people in need and provide them an opportunity to lift themselves up.

That this essential function of government has been so trashed by the Republican Right makes a travesty of our democracy and of their claim to be the defenders of the Constitution.