Turn Away From The Tyrants And Towards One Another
Withdrawing Our Consent To Be Ruled By An Illegitimate Regime And Choosing To Govern in Partnership With One Another
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 to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.
Franklin, Jefferson and co-conspirators editing the Declaration of Independence, June 1776
It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the American republic: democratic governments derive the legitimacy of their rule solely from the consent of those they claim the authority to govern. And when their misgovernance becomes destructive of these ends, “it is the right of the governed to alter or abolish it and to institute a new government” — or new forms of governance that are more functional and faithful to the purposes that first brought them together.
We are now at the threshold of just such a moment. In four years of monumental misrule, Donald Trump and his enablers have usurped executive powers far beyond the bounds of the Constitution’s letter and spirit and have imposed a degree of destruction and lawlessness never before witnessed in this country’s 243-year experiment. They do so with the deliberate intention of transforming a flawed democracy still struggling to fulfill its founding promise into an authoritarian despotism subject to the reckless whims of a solitary deranged individual.
This is not an administration or even a mal-administration of a well-meaning but incompetent team — and we should stop speaking of or treating it as if it were one. It is an altogether illegitimate regime with no intention of actually attempting to address the mounting range of challenges this country now faces, all made vastly worse by its misgovernance. Its aim instead to disable, dismember and destroy the federal government’s institutions with the sole objective of rendering them incapable of ever again governing as anything other than a conveyor belt to funnel public funds into the hands of an ever smaller number of private individuals and self-enriching corporations. In the chilling metaphor of conservative tax campaigner Grover Norquist, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
The November 2020 election thrusts the issue of countering illegitimate authority into a Constitutional crucible from which neither the Constitution nor democracy can escape intact unless those of us still faithful to constitutional democracy assert our inalienable right as inscribed in the Declaration to withdraw our consent to be governed by a criminal regime when our putative rulers irredeemably fail to govern in good faith. Donald Trump has made explicit dozens of times that he reserves a right he does not possess to reject any election outcome in which he loses and to remain in office regardless of due process under the Constitution. In a stunning Atlantic article published on September 23, 2020, journalist Barton Gellman describes a plot by Trump’s campaign operatives to altogether bypass the November vote count and engineer an Electoral College coup in the battleground states. This attempted electoral coup contravenes one of the core tenets of the U.S> Constitution — the orderly transfer of power — and in itself renders his mandate to govern null and void, regardless of the actual results of the election. If he continues in place as a consequence of refusing to leave and sabotaging the vote count, he will face an ungovernable country with a potential majority of citizens refusing to recognize his authority.
Trump Has Already Forfeited the Right to Rule
In his four years in office Donald Trump has daily transgressed against every norm of behavior by which presidents have heretofore governed this country and their own behavior. He has already forfeited any right to rule.Moreover, even the validity of his “election” in 2016 remains clouded in uncertainty about the impacts of widespread voter suppression, Facebook and Twitter disinformation campaigns and the role of Russian cyber operatives in interceding illegally on his behalf. In that sense too, in the eyes of many Americans Donald Trump is a presidential imposter, a reality-TV facsimile pretending to be reality itself — in short, a fake President.
Many observers believe that in the first hours after polls close on November 3, Trump and his enablers in sycophantic media will claim victory based on early returns that may tip Republican since more Republicans are predicted to vote in person while many Democrats intend to vote by mail. Democratic-leaning vote tallies could therefore lag behind. Any eventual “blue tide” of Democratic votes like those that dramatically shifted outcomes in dozens of races in the 2018 midterms elections in the days after election night could become subject to a blizzard of legally contested recounts that will undermine confidence in any verdict. Like the Florida “Brooks Brothers raid” that Trump trickster Roger Stone engineered in 2016 to tip the election to George W. Bush, the readiness of Republicans to break every rule and norm to retain power could be deployed to devastating effect. Democrats are already keenly aware of this possibility and are urging voters to vote in person whenever possible and prior to Election Day. Early indications are that Democratic voters are doing so in record numbers.
Protests and demonstrations at the White House, across the country and around the world will undoubtedly ensue and are vital to support and empower legal and political strategies to prevail in what is likely to become a protracted electoral struggle. But in a contest in which the one party is willing to contravene every Constitutional process in pursuit of victory, Republicans usually hold the “Trump card.” A recent report from the Transition Integrity Project, which included “members of both major political parties, former high-ranking government officials (including two former governors), senior political campaigners, nationally prominent journalists and communications professionals, social movement leaders, and experts on politics, national security, democratic reform, election law, and media,” concluded that “As an incumbent unbounded by norms, President Trump has a huge advantage.”
Withdrawing Our Consent to be Governed by Illegitimate Authority
It is therefore imperative that those of us who adhere to the Constitution and the democratic republic it established play from our own potent strengths by withdrawing our consent to be governed by a feckless, reckless, illegitimate authority and instead intensify our cooperation with one another through existing and emerging networks of cooperation. Both formal compacts of joint action and myriad informal forms of coordination already function at all levels of government, the private and nonprofit sectors and civil society, established by necessity to replace a federal government largely immobilized by a combination of massive incompetence and deliberate destruction. These new and alternative forms of governance have sprung into being to address every challenge the Trump regime has chosen to ignore or exacerbate. These new modes of governance are not hierarchical in the tradition of formal governmental institutions but lateral, informal, collaborative arrangements. They are made possible by the emergence of decentralized forms of distributed power, connection and information enabled by 21st century technologies ranging from renewable energy to social networks.
Such networks and collaborations were altogether unforeseen when the Constitution was drafted nor at any point prior to the past few decades. But now they constitute the leading edge of new growth in a social landscape in which fossil-fueled political power and fossilized habits of mind still hold a hammer lock on conventional forms of governance. The brazenly bare-knuckled tactics of Donald Trump and his enablers within and outside government are a mark not of their strength but of their ever more tenuous grip on public trust in their right to rule.
One might dismiss such a fundamental power shift from hierarchical to lateral, formal to informal, and conflictual to collaborative as pure fantasy but for the fact that it is already happening. No better example of this deliberate paralysis can be found than responses to the Trump regime’s handling of the global pandemic. Mere incompetence doesn’t account for its consistently catastrophic failure to step up to its responsibilities. This president actively sabotages every effort to provide leadership to a nation in helpless disarray. Yet into this void states have formed ad hoc regional compacts, formulated joint policies on the fly (as in the Cuomo and Newsom coalitions to coordinate pandemic restrictions with neighboring states), consulted with one another, and sought to create coherent, consistent strategies that any competent federal administration would normally provide.
It’s as if with a disabled executive function in the national brain, individual limbs and organs must make do with whatever makeshift arrangements they can cobble together to continue to function. It’s a miracle that with no prior preparations they are managing to do at least some things together to mutual benefit. In the absence of coordination their initial efforts are weakened by inexperience and inefficiency. Yet the Trump regime’s deliberate destruction of the capacity to govern and administrate at the federal level is forcing the rest of us to develop functional workarounds, growing more flexible and adaptive forms of cooperative, coordinated, cross-sectoral governance.
Withdrawing our consent to be governed by a failed state sounds a lot like secession, and in some ways it bears certain similarities. But it is not a wholesale abandonment of our national project. Rather, it may be the only way we can continue to live within the same nation and avoid an outright civil war in which all irretrievably lose. The emphasis here is on a two-step process in which the second element is equally essential — our withdrawal of consent to illegitimate authority must be accompanied by our simultaneous commitment to inventing in its place more effective modes of self-governance and joint action. The emphasis is equally on resistance to illegitimate rule and recommitment to the enduring virtues of a Constitution that has withstood every kind of abuse and been improved (though not yet enough) by subsequent amendments. It is not a wholesale rejection of federal authority, since when well administered central coordination serves many essential common purposes. But it seeks to redress a dangerous concentration of power in an imperial Presidency and an increasingly ineffectual Congress. The catastrophe of Trumpism is both that it fails to govern when it is most urgently needed and dares to rule with imperious excess where it has no business intervening.
What we are discovering in the new millennium is that traditional top-down forms of governance lack the flexibility and adaptability necessary to effectively address the complexities of today’s cascading crises. Climate change, economic and social inequality, poverty, racism and calcified institutions all require coordinated responses at all levels of government — federal, state and local — in coordination with the private and nonprofit sectors and animating energy at the grassroots where much of the passion for change originates.
It’s as if we’re trapped in a failed marriage from which we can’t escape and and which in our fury and frustration all we can think to do is to make each other miserable. “Make libs cry again!” reads the t-shirt of the man next to me in the checkout line. And we progressives have our own cherished curses to bestow on those who seek to curse us. Yet the consequences of an abrupt and irrevocable divorce would be cataclysmic. There’s been much reckless talk about an impending civil war, and some at the extremes, in their despair and rage, threaten to “burn the whole house down.” Yet the rivals for national power in this futile contest are too closely matched in strength for one to decisively prevail in the near or long term. For the moment Trumpists hold the commanding heights of institutional and armed power (though their hold is shaky), but the countervailing powers of progressives and moderates — their cultural and elite media dominance, creative dynamism, economic vitality, motivated youth movements and distributed political power in statehouses, mayors’ offices and other positions — will continue to generate far too much irrepressible energy to be altogether snuffed out by a rump Republican base that is elderly, white, and rapidly aging away, even if supported by the dark money of big oil and the billionaire class.
We And Our Opponents Share More Than We Realize
Yet the most stunning irony is that in many respects, at the level of ordinary citizens the two sides in this struggle share similar emotions, feeling disempowered, dispossessed, disrespected and disconnected from those in elite precincts of American political and economic power. We share a visceral fear of a future in which everything we hold dear will be taken from us and we will no longer be able to support ourselves and our families — a fear with considerable basis in reality, though we differ greatly about its cause. We fear that nothing we do to prevent such a collapse will succeed. We turn to our preferred candidates and movements to protect us and they in turn pose our choices in apocalyptic terms that blind us to the possibility that we might ever find our already existing common ground on which to address these threats together.
The coming crisis of legitimacy in the mayhem of post-election chaos promises nothing but paralysis — Mutual Assured Obstruction, like the Mutual Assured Destruction of nuclear deterrence — as we plunge into economic depression, an unchecked pandemic, violent social and racial conflict, and massive collective trauma. There is no option that will fully satisfy either side (the decisive, irreversible defeat of the other), but there is an approach that gives us breathing room: Loosen the bonds of federal power and make room for new forms and varieties of governance to emerge whose levers of change are more widespread, diverse in character and closer to the local. Bring more decision-making back into the hands of those most affected by the decisions being made. Adopt what some are calling “the new federalism,” the decentralized, balance-of-power approach to governance brilliantly envisioned by our Founders, who were rightly wary of royal tyrannies. Just as the states have long been called “laboratories of democracy” where policy experiments can be tested in real time and the results propagate outward and upward, a realization that neither side is likely to prevail over the other could motivate us to loosen the bonds of federal authority enough to permit each locale and jurisdiction — states, cities and towns, counties — greater latitude to launch their own initiatives and engage in joint experiments to address shared challenges and rapidly learn from one another.
This is an admittedly utopian vision given the vitriol and partisan rancor that characterize our current duel-to-the-death contests. A sizable minority of Americans, maybe 30 percent by some estimates, are so dug into their trenches that they will never accept letting others who don’t agree with them try their own approaches, even when the power relations make it impossible for them to force their preferences on them. But surveys indicate that a workable majority of Americans (the remaining 70 percent) are more pragmatic than ideological and that given the grim choice between permanent paralysis and catastrophic national decline and “you go your way and I’ll go mine,” they would reluctantly but decisively choose the latter.
Loosening the Bonds of Federal Authority
But there’s a more constructive possibility that lies just beyond the breathing space opened by loosening the bonds of federal authority. Politics at its best used to be thought of as the art of compromise. But the results have often proven frustrating, guaranteed to please no one. Yet compromise is not the same thing as problem-solving. The art of problem-solving requires learning an altogether different set of skills and activates a different part of the brain, not the conflictual fight-or-flight amygdala (our ancient reptilian response) but the cooperative inclination of the neocortex (a more recent evolutionary development). To problem-solve, each participant in the exercise must agree that he or she doesn’t possess the whole answer. Begin with the premise that everyone at the table possesses a piece of the puzzle and the collective challenge is to figure out how they all fit together. In practice, this is the way engineers design, say, a next generation hydrogen fuel cell engine. They don’t come into the lab armed with a fixed ideological position about how it must be done but with an open mind, maybe a half-formed idea they’d like to share, and the curiosity to figure out with the indispensable help of others how to make it work.
This is the mindset that produces not a lowest-denominator compromise but an elegant, transcendent solution. Giving ourselves and each other the breathing space to conduct experiments outside the typical winner-takes-all political power dynamic enables us to think freely and design alternatives first with those with whom we share values and a common language of trust. Tasting that freedom and learning the skills of collaborative design, we are then better prepared to welcome a broader range of individuals and institutions, including some who don’t initially agree with us, into the design conversation. Using our constructive intelligence rather than our competitive instincts as our animating energy, we begin to experience the pleasures of collective creativity. Few activities are more surprisingly delightful than aligning our hearts in common purpose and our minds in solving challenges together. Instead of butting head against head, we stand shoulder to shoulder stepping forward together. Which feels better?
This is all a far distance from withdrawing our consent to be governed by a regime that has been taken captive by forces that turn it against those it is sworn to serve. Yet it gives us a sense of positive possibilities that resistance alone, however noble and necessary, does not offer. And we are closer to these possibilities in practice than we realize. All over this country and all around the world groups and individuals are self-organizing learning communities that are together tackling our knottiest challenges, recognizing that the obstacles are both institutional and emotional. Never more so is this true than during the covid pandemic, when meeting in person is not possible. In its place, Zoom and other collaborative social technologies are enabling the self-organizing of meetings, idea exchanges, cultural festivals, and a plethora of new forms of self-governance and joint action that were heretofore severely limited by complicated logistics and costly travel. They are also opening admission gates to participation by anyone with an interest in the topic. Pre-pandemic, invitations to professional meetings were filtered through elaborate systems of status and hierarchy, all the more effective for being invisible. In-person meetings also cost a great deal, to organize, attend and cover travel expenses. Pre-pandemic, one needed to be affiliated with an institution that could afford to pay the high cost of admission. Now that most gatherings are virtual, the costs of arranging them are minimal and the admission fees low enough to be affordable to most anyone.
These gatherings are far from perfect alternatives to face-to-face meetings, though they place participants on more equal footing. There are not yet well-developed venues for “water cooler encounters” where spontaneous interactions in the break room lead to shared epiphanies and common projects. But they are rapidly accelerating the pace of collective creativity at a moment when we most urgently need it and can find it in no other way.
The breakdown of faith in the institutions of constitutional democracy that served us, if highly imperfectly, for more than two hundred years, along with relentless attacks on them by Trumpian Republicans, are hastening the emergence of alternative forms of governance whose pace, participation, responsiveness and creativity better match the urgency of our times. American democracy has always been more an experiment than an answer. Turning away from the authoritarian temptation and loosening the bonds of federal authority to enable rapid experimentation and innovation at all levels and across varied perspectives may be our best means of resolving our most vexing challenges and reviving the bonds of affection we have so painfully lost.
