The feudal state of America

Walt Whitman wrote in his pamphlet Democratic Vistas that "The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time." 

He wrote this shortly after the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.  The piece was, in part, a response to British historian Thomas Carlyle who disparaged American democracy.  Carlyle did not believe that ordinary people had the intellect or moral stature to govern themselves, but Whitman had "faith in the genius of ordinary men and women."  He saw that "the capacity for strong original experience, rather than being confined to a small number of geniuses, heroes, and eccentrics, should become widespread among ordinary people."   In contrast, Carlyle believed that an aristocratic elite of mind and manner was required to govern appropriately.

In our time, we don't see feudalism as a threat.  Our main concern is fascism and communism. But Whitman regarded Carlyle as making "certain judgments from the highest feudal point of view."  His contemporary Mark Twain's writing dealt extensively with critiques and satires of the remnants of feudalism that operates in our culture.  Those remnants are still with us.  And no one revives those remnants with more effect than Donald Trump.

According to Whitman's standards, America has failed.  It has chosen as its president a man possessed of the malice, depravity, and dishonesty of the worst feudal lords and who rules with with their precedents.  People who voted for him said they did so because his wealth was a sign of his business acumen.  There are people in America who still bow down to the lords of the current manors.

Neo-feudalism is the guiding basis of Trump's life.  He is the heir to a feudal estate.  He inherited a family business from his father.  He is notorious for welshing on his bills.  His business has declared bankruptcy six times.  At least 25 women have accused him of sexual misconduct.  According to the Washington Post scorecard, Trump has told the public 16,241 lies while he has been president.  Trump announced that the Constitution grants him the power to whatever he pleases.  What pleases him is unbridled corruption.  That quality of abject dissolution apparently also pleases those who support him.  They like the idea of holding other people in a state of vassalage.  They believe the way to self-elevation is to suck up to their masters.  So, they join their masters in denigrating fellow citizens. And they suck Trump and with Trump.

Trump's reversion to feudalism is shown in the fact  that he is a business man, and the business world is run largely on feudal principles.  Corporations do not try to reconcile their intra-organization administration and politics with democratic values.  Many companies deride and scoff at the idea.  So, when most people clock in for work each day, they step out of a nation which confers on them the rights of freedom, equality, and justice into a vassal state.  Where workers are under  collective bargaining contracts, that state of vassalage is mitigated, if not eliminated.  But in at-will states such as South Dakota, workers who are not covered by a collective bargaining contracts can be fired without cause at the whim of their employers.   They spend their working days as vassals devoted to serving their employers' whims so that they can keep their jobs--if their job is necessary for their survival.  

A popular cliche' among people aspiring to some public office is that government should be run like a business.  Most people have no idea of how badly many businesses are run.  The reasons they don't know is the media which is financed by advertising does not run critical information about their advertisers.  And so, the public generally believes that  business is a model for efficient and skillful management.

There is a fundamental reason why government in America should not be run like a business.  The job of government is to implement the premises of its founding.  Those premises are stated in 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.

The implementation of those premises is laid out in the preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Those are not the priorities of the people in government who try to run it like a business. Trump is a reversion to authoritarian government.  He runs it just like he runs his business.  A statement from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out the dangers of Trump:

Under Trump, U.S. democracy policy has reached its lowest ebb in forty years. If the United States continues this course for two more years, it will be stranded on the sidelines, or even on the wrong side, of the global democratic struggle.

Politico compiles a list of executive actions with which Trump abolishes democracy and converts America into a feudal state.  Trump really can't help it.  He is running America in the only way he knows how.  Like a business.

But Trump is doing this with the consent of the governed, at least those who voted for him.  They want to be his vassals.  They want to live in a feudal state.

Do you want to be a vassal, too?