Revisiting America’s Institutional Credibility Crisis
Over and over again, I find myself revisiting the notion that America's experiencing an acute, and apparently intractable, institutional credibility crisis.
That's a recurring theme in these pages. So much so that some of you are probably tired of hearing about it. If that's you, rest assured: I'm tired of writing about it.
Not much bothers me. Not really, anyway. I'm a loner in what amounts to my second act, I'm well-off and have few cares in the world outside of maintaining my relationship w
I can easily imagine five or six states having contested election results this November (no matter what the actual results are). That would potentially throw the election outcome into the Supreme Court’s lap, and their approval is already fading even before they have ruled on Donald Trump’s primary eligibility in Colorado and Maine. What does next January 6th look like if Democrats decide they got the Bush v. Gore treatment once again? Not good, not good.
I continue to wonder at Biden’s not addressing any changes to the Supreme Court after being elected (and January 6th) – it worries me that Democrats take for granted our democracy.
Stuffing the Supreme Court (McConnell and Trump) is definitely a power grab and leveraging that institution’s mistakes (overturning Roe v Wade) to try and win votes is both cynical and shortsighted.
Now is a good time to firm up data collection plans.
Contempt has been here before and we have endured. It may be that we are more aware of this emotion or any emotion than in the past. Probably too the effective reach of a person’s contempt is farther today than in the past. I think of the miners up the hill from where I live in the 1800’s who were forced to go back to work by bayonet point. Eventually the strikes were culminated by sending cattle cars full of unionists on a train ride to a place with little water and unhooking the cattle cars. I can imagine some contempt was involved on both sides for years as these events came to culmination. We have may other examples that did not rise to the profile of the civil war: The Ludlow Massacre, Meat Packing Districts (Upton Sinclair writings), Love Canal, 1929 crash, 1930’s depression, world wars and many others. What mostly reconciled the contempt for a time till the next crisis was changes in law.
I will therefore venture that a peaceful culmination of contempt in the U.S.A. today will be a change in laws. I am not sure what laws should be changed, maybe that is not yet clear. I have my favorite, which is elimination of the bribery system we use to finance elections. However I strongly doubt any idea I have will be a good solution to our current problems.
Despite the efforts of the mainstream media and whatever we do to ourselves on social media, I feel like there is a pretty strong consensus on a number of issues that have become seemingly intractable due directly to our institutions. Most of the country wants immigration reform, gun control, abortion rights access, much stricter limits on campaign finance, lower drug prices, no stock trading by Congress and higher taxes on the rich, among many other things. Yet none of those things is being addressed as our politicians and policy makers either pursue diametrically opposed and irreconcilable solutions, or let the absence of pure solutions get in the way of perfectly good ones. So until then, kids in elementary school classrooms have to die in large piles because some mythical good American might want to buy a gun and immediately go hunting. Surely this is what the founders intended,