Doomsday democracy
Our political system is not going to kill democracy, unless we vote for it ourselves.
I’ve always wanted to see a sequel to Star Trek, season 2, episode 6: “The Doomsday Machine.” This episode first aired on October 20, 1967, and—if you’re old enough to remember the series—featured the almost indestructible Planet Killer device that drove Commodore Matt Decker to insanity. I’m going to spoil the ending: Decker drove his crippled starship into the maw of the enormous machine, exploding his warp core (and killing himself in the process), not destroying it, but turning off its power source, ending the menacing machine’s chomping of entire star systems.
My ideal sequel would be 100-plus years later, perhaps in the end-years after Jean-Luc Picard retired for good, whatever civilization that built the infernal thing returned looking for it, because it was needed in some giant cosmic battle in which our puny Federation barely registered worthy of being told. The big war was being fought at a time scale and distances beyond our leaders’ thought horizon, and now the machine’s owners wanted it back. Upon learning that we broke it, they demand we fire it back up, or whatever galaxy-ending consequences would follow.
Of course, we’d explain that the machine was being evil to us, and the owners would inquire why we didn’t read the manual before attempting to work on it. If you’re familiar with IT or military jargon, “RTFM” is the proper one. In any case, it would be a fun episode, though I doubt it will ever be made. My point, besides proving my Trekker geek card is really earned, is that some machines seem pointless, but function just fine if you know why they were built.
The band OK Go produced a music video about 14 years ago featuring a Rube Goldberg machine designed by some really smart college kids. It took a bazillion takes to get the whole thing to work in an uncut shot, but they did it. The entire purpose of the machine was not to fire paint at the band; it was to accompany the music (that’s the kind of stuff OK Go is known for). The purpose of that machine was simply for it to work.
Rube Goldberg machines fascinate me, because they accomplish very simple things by doing really complicated, but individually predictable, steps. I think our government is like a giant Rube Goldberg machine, but it’s also very similar to the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek. Long ago, a bunch of people we only know from history books, but were real people with their own thoughts, biases, troubles, foibles, and outright sins, compromised, argued, wrote hundreds of pages of justifications and treatises, and then came up with a relatively compact architecture for governing this country.
The Constitution is like a machine that is powered by democracy, the small “d” kind, but filters that near-indestructible power source through various valves, nozzles, gauges, flywheels—you get the idea—in order to harness it to do work. The purpose of the machine is to work. I am not the only one, nor the first, or smartest, to come up with that argument. Read “Suicide of the West” by Jonah Goldberg if you want the book-length version.
This machine has some basic assumptions that should be fairly obvious to everyone.
One is that the people of the United States should wish the nation to remain the United States. That was a big one, and 600,000 of us died proving it. Americans could have elected a different president in 1860: John C. Breckenridge and Stephen Douglas combined earned nearly 200,000 more votes at the ballot box than Abraham Lincoln, but would have fallen short in the electoral count. The nation voted for Lincoln, knowing that the southern states would secede if he was elected.
In 1864, Gen. George B. McClellan, whom Lincoln fired, ran as a Democrat. He would have ended the war by negotiation, leaving two nations. Americans re-elected Lincoln, though not as a Republican—Lincoln was nominated by the National Union Party, and instead of a Republican running mate (quick, without looking it up, name Lincoln’s Vice President in his first term!*), War Democrat Andrew Johnson was selected as his running mate. This proved important since Johnson almost immediately took over as president after Lincoln’s assassination.
The Civil War was the fruit of democracy. Pursuit of the war was the result of the levers of power offered to a president bent on winning the nations’s continuation as a single union. Though Lincoln violated the Constitution, and ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling against him, he did not break the machine.
Another assumption is that the people wish the government to obey the rules of the machine, and read the manual when trying to monkey with it.
There are myriad instances from all three branches of our government, the machine the Constitution created, ignoring the instruction manual, and proceeding to break pieces of the machine. The Dred Scott case, Plessy v. Ferguson, Fletcher v. Peck are failures of the Supreme Court. Many see Roe v. Wade as a cornerstone of bad law enabled by bad legal doctrine; Chevron U.S.A. v. NRDC can be an example of federal regulatory overreach. Both those cases were overturned by the Court and its three Justices nominated by former President Donald Trump.
In addition to Lincoln’s illegal suspension of Habeas Corpus, there was President Andrew Johnson’s willful disregard of the Court’s decision in Worcester v. Georgia, which led in many ways to our government’s centuries-long mistreatment of the Native American people. There was FDR’s illegal internment, by Executive Order 9066, of 112,000 American citizens of Japanese descent; Roosevelt also battled the Court on his New Deal provisions, most of which were struck down. He threatened to pack the Court to get his way.
Woodrow Wilson argued that the government was not a machine at all, but a “living thing,” which should be set on a task to make the world “safe for democracy.” This resulted in some of the most egregious abuses of power this country has ever seen. Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917; he enabled the Postal Service to quash free speech by censorship; he seized the railroad system, nationalizing it during the First World War. He ordered the military to segregate by race after it had been integrated under previous administrations post-Civil War.
I don’t even know where to begin with Congress. But one thing is clear: in 2021, at Trump’s second impeachment, the Senate had a clear duty to remove the president for his actions, and his inaction, on January 6th. Instead of following through with its political task to maintain order in the machinery of government, Republican senators, led by Mitch McConnell, went with their own political short-term needs, and killed the machine’s best way to disable a Doomsday Device. Apparently, they didn’t read the manual, and didn’t realize that later on—less than four years later—they’d need that machine.
One more assumption is that the machine itself should not be used to kill its power source. The machine shouldn’t eat the planet on which its creators reside.
Today’s Doomsday Device, democracy, is primed to power Trump back into office. Democrats and opponents of Trump have tried the civil courts, and the criminal courts, to prevent Trump from running, from appearing on ballots, and to literally put him in jail before he can be elected. It’s unclear exactly how successful those efforts will be, but it’s not for lack of trying.
However, the defining feature of our republic is that the people will have their way. The Doomsday Device is that a people intent on having a man who ignores the instruction manual for the machine of government, will have a machine that continues to eat worlds. The only way to break the machine is to break democracy.
It was unforgivable that our elected officials relegated their duty to the people, and blamed the Doomsday Machine’s perfect functioning according to its design on the democracy that powers it. The machine itself doesn’t have a failsafe—the failsafe is democracy, and voters who care enough about the machine’s purpose to use it correctly. We are not in that situation right now, with all sides resorting to gaslighting and horrendous lies.
The blame game is well afoot. The media is in full gaslight mode about President Joe Biden, who was “sharp as a tack” for years and could do no wrong, they trumpeted over and over. Now they all say he somehow, in just one night, lost his ability for mentation. This is the same media that acted in collusion with elements of the U.S. government to squash stories that politically hurt Biden in 2020. It’s the same media that has pushed every possible negative story about Trump—true or not—for eight years.
Listen: Trump doesn’t need help in being culpable for government malpractice. It’s truly his best-developed skill. But the Biden campaign, and the media surrounding it, along with the Democratic Party, is guilty of political malpractice at enormous scale. They’ve created a situation where the only way to quote-unquote “save democracy” is to break democracy by ignoring the will of so many people who’d rather see Trump in power than listen to the stream of “you oughttas” coming out of the current media complex.
What Trump could not accomplish in 2020 and early 2021, we are being told is the only recipe to keep him from legitimately winning in 2024, because the people telling us are too incompetent to give voters someone worth electing.
We are being told not to believe our eyes and ears when it comes to Joe Biden, but to believe everything they tell us about Trump.
Most individuals, when faced with that assault on their own intelligence, would assume that the folks who are feeding it to them believe them to be stupid. Some voters may genuinely be ignorant; but many are just angry and therefore act out against the machine, because they’d rather break it themselves, and at least have democracy, than have it broken for them by others who say with lying certainty that they know better.
President Joe Biden wants to continue running for president, just like Nikki Haley wanted to continue her campaign to stop Trump—until she didn’t, and now she’ll vote for Trump since she’s a good Republican. What’s going on right now is an exercise in how the Rube Goldberg part of the machine really works. In the vape-filled chambers and group chats that populate the Democratic Party, scrambling staffers and their bosses are trying to figure out ways to have bullet-proof excuses if Trump wins in November. Biden has the power to ignore everyone calling for him to drop out, but then he alone would get the blame if he loses. (Which I think he should: a man must reap his own consequences.)
If there’s anything we know about Joe Biden, it’s that he never wants to take the blame. Therefore, if he can find a way to step out and everyone else gets the blame, he’ll go. But those people who would get the blame—like Vice President Kamala Harris, or Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, or Pete Buttigieg, or whoever the Democrats would install as their nominee—don’t want the blame either. So Biden will go on claiming he’s in this for the whole enchilada, until he isn’t. Then the die will be cast and the blame game will become a matter of how things turn out in November.
It’s an awesome responsibility, the people who power this Doomsday Machine have. We get to decide if the machine will consume more planets willy-nilly, through bad governance, corruption, and ill intent; or if we will have a broken machine that only works because it was designed to work that way.
Ultimately, democracy will decide if it even wants the machine to work. I doubt it will come to that: too many people would reject Trump’s attempt to subvert the government to his personal will and become “el-Presidente”, even if the Supreme Court and Republican legislators go along with it. It might take more time than we’d like, and it might end with some very bad outcomes for people who trusted the folks they elected, but the machine will go on chomping. That’s how it works.
Sorry, but this is the cost of being short-sighted. It’s the cost of not reading the instruction manual when you try to monkey with the Doomsday Device.
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I am not a Trekker so don't know anything about the references made from that series, but regardless I have found nearly all of your postings to be fair and well balanced so had already elevated you to unicorn status (a very small herd by the way) and this article is no exception. This mess the media and DNC are now in, and consequently caused all the rest of us to be part of, has been nearly 100% self inflicted. If everyone had only stayed in their own lanes these past many years, Donald Trump would already be in the dustbin of history yet sadly here we all are.
Pretty good piece, as usual Steve. My main critique would be that you too often fall on criticizing "the media" as the fault of many of our problems. This is oft repeated elsewhere (and in the comments here, too). While there are some specific and legitimate gripes in this area, I find most people use "the media" as a scapegoat and a way of being lazy about calling out exactly what the problem is.
My issue with "the media" is that it isn't anywhere near a monolithic thing ... especially in this era--the media is everywhere and everything. And even if you just mean the legacy or mainstream media--they don't work for the same master. To the extent their motivations are aligned, it's to make their corporate masters' some money -- i.e. drive clicks/views. So when "the media" makes everything about Trump and whatever cockamamie story he's pushing today, it's only b/c consumers of the media click it every damn time! Trump (and his imitators) knows this well, and manipulate it to their advantage. If one news site chooses to ignore a batshit crazy statement .... well, two others will certainly publish it (just see Newsweek on any day ending in "y").
So at the end of the day ... the voters who still choose to stick with Trump (despite--or perhaps on account of--all the outrageous details they know about him) are to blame.
One other reason I think to blame "the media" is wrong and lazy: I can't think of any real "fix" to that problem. I'd love to hear some genuine ideas here, though. Considering the First Amendment ... at one point long ago, I naively thought fact-checking was the answer, but that went nowhere. Some people are immune to facts, I guess! I really worry about this problem (and the other media as well: social media) b/c of the massive spread of mis/dis-information by those who definitely don't have the US' best intentions in mind. I just don't know...