How Our Democracy Can Prevail Over Authoritarianism and Fascism
||| FROM EMILY GEYMAN |||
Today’s national politics are highly polarized, with one of our two major political parties dysfunctional with internal conflicts and public confidence in government and the Supreme Court in decline. The electorate has become increasingly diverse, with a white supremacy movement inciting further division and hate crimes across the country while some on the right still believe Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
The democratic process has been damaged over many years by the growing power of corporate money in the election process. Supreme Court rulings have allowed unfettered amounts of political donations to politicians under the guise of ‘free speech’ so campaign money from billionaires now plays a major role in who gets elected. Trends over the last 40 plus years include rising income and wealth inequities, decline of the middle class, and growth of social media with spread of disinformation.
This book offers a unique perspective on how oligarchy (power invested in a few or a dominant class) has enveloped our government and country; how oligarchs defend their power as it grows; how wealth influences elections in their favor; and how citizens, in addition to voting in the 2024 elections, can support steps to strengthen our democracy so that we can hold together as one country for the common good.
John Geyman, M.D. is professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine from 1976 to 1990. As a family physician with over 25 years in academic medicine, he also practiced in rural communities for 13 years.
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I wish Dr. Geyman all the luck in selling his new book, How Our Democracy Can Prevail Over Authoritarianism and Fascism. I just ordered my copy, and very much look forward to reading it. It should be noted that there were only 3 left in stock when I made my order.
“Today’s national politics are highly polarized, with one of our two major political parties dysfunctional with internal conflicts and public confidence in government and the Supreme Court in decline.”
In contrast to your opening statement, as a progressive it appears to me that both major political party’s have become increasingly dysfunctional, both with their share of internal conflicts, with both having achieved at this time an all-time low in public confidence in government, and that nearly all U.S. institutions, (not just the Supreme Court) are in decline. This being, IMO, the result of a long-term, two-party dominant political system, operating on the doctrine of lesser evils.
I purchased a copy of your book because I too believe that an oligarchy (power invested in a few or a dominant class) has enveloped our government and country, and that, oligarchs defend their power as it grows, and that wealth influences elections in their favor, and I’m also very interested in “how citizens, in addition to voting in the 2024 elections, can support steps to strengthen our democracy so that we can hold together as one country for the common good.”
I’m looking forward to reading your book, and I hope it offers something more than the usual, our party is better than your party narrative… for the people deserve better.
It appears to me that human beings are quite well adapted for dealing with local/tribal scale organizational/governmental functions but that as the group becomes larger and/or more diverse, our inherited skills and capacities no longer serve us as well. In fact, it seems that the larger the social group, the less suited we are to manage it.
As Orcas islanders we obviously have our share of disagreements about local issues, but, so far at least, we seem to be able to find some kind of workable outcome without tearing the group to pieces in the process. But as soon as we expand to county, region, state, national and global levels, our innate social understanding seems to serve us less and less well. For example: the feeling that I “know” the character and intentions of a local politician because of our shared history allows me to have confidence in a representative form of government at this level. But at the national level, how is it possible to “know” the character and intentions of public figures? We are attempting to make good decisions and be informed voters while still using the same decision making paradigm that has evolved to function at a level where we literally know everyone by their first name. And that just doesn’t seem to be working with 330 million of us in the group…
I suggest that we need to find a different way of organizing ourselves at those larger scales. What works at the island level doesn’t seem to be working at larger scales.
Perhaps that is impossible though? Can leopards change their spots? Can we collectively evolve to make rational electoral decisions rather than intuitive/emotional ones at those larger scales?
It seems painfully obvious that what Western Civilization is currently doing is not ecologically sustainable nor ethically equitable. As Churchill quoted in the House of Commons: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
So, what can we do?