These articles are meant to create discussion. My views are not sacrosanct, Please feel free to take issue with any of my remarks. The hope is to create a dialogue that works towards improving our lives within our democratic. If I knew all the answers I could be a demagogue of democracy and hand out democracy to all. One man attempted to do that. His name was Lyndon Johnson.
Democracy is the alternative to kings/autocratic leadership. Ultimately democracy promises leaders chosen by citizens of a democratic society thus taking away the power of top-down leadership and returning it to citizens, thus enabling basic human leadership where leaders are chosen by citizens to serve the citizens. If democracy were actually delivered on this promise there would be no need whatsoever for me to write anything because we would all be living in the type of society that I have argued was the type of leadership that allowed for our species to successfully evolve. We all know that there is currently a growing global tide to move towards more autocratic leadership. Many articles and books are currently being written on this subject so that even though i have been reading about this for nearly all of my life, i have probably doubled my output of reading about the subject in trying to ascertain comprehension of the issue in the last couple of years since the “stolen’ American election. This article is going to be primarily focused on current thought about why democracy appears to be failing. I am going to take a two-pronged approach. The first is to look at how democracy has succeeded in allowing more people to perceive they have more goods and a greater part in the society but the perception others of their own class are the cause preventing them from full possession of an equality in the fruits. The second prong is to look at how democracy has increased stratification rather than decreased it and the psychological consequences that those consequences lead to extremities in belief resulting in increasing chaotic behavior of individuals within those societies. No matter whether you believe everything in the universe was the result of orderly physical laws or chaotic chance, I do not think many will think that human society should be chaotic. In other words I find little cotestation of the notion that people do not assume their society should not be orderly. There may be challenges about how it should be ordered and there have been historical movements to disrupt established order chaotically, but the goal is always to reach a new design of the order in which the society should behave. Autocratic leadership from the top attempts to maintain that order to maintain their position of power by information that deludes those into believing their power is necessary, in rewards to supporters, and with violence against those who attempt to challenge that leadership. Democracy is supposed to fill the needs of society equitably and when it fails to do so, chaos within the society leads to movements towards autocracy to restore the order, again caused by the delusions of the failed promise.
The first ‘democracy'' was probably not in Athens. At least there is a lot of speculation that it was not first introduced in Athens and that it is cultural bias that only westerners could have had any democratic societies or that they initiated the concept. Research in this area is not universally accepted but the evidence from more research is beginning to mount. There is some speculation that early Sumerian communities might have had democratic communities under the control of an autocratic state. If this is the case, then either they became dangerous to the state or the kings perceived a possibility of danger to their supremacy. At any rate if such early communities were democratically organized as Sumerian kings conquered more communities to satisfy his increased needs for more communities to be subdued, these small city democracies were consumed by the growing Sumerian autocracy. Another possibility that some far eastern scholars have suggested is that the Cham communities might have been to some extent have been participating in some type of democratic league, Others have suggested there might have been some Cham communities who practiced a form of democratic leadership and others that had autocrats much like what did occur in Greece. At any rate if there is any truth to this idea the need to unite under an autocrat when the Vietnamese wars began and ended with the subjugation of Champa and the eventual subjugation of the Chams into the Vietnamese kingdom. However there is a growing consensus that outside of Europe in many areas of the Southeast and in some of the Native American communities and parts of the South Pacific there were, if not democracies in the sense of elected leadership, at least the non-European world was filled with “communities of discussion’. I have spent years studying the Native-American culture of the Plains tribes and basically this is how they organized their communities, not exactly big man but certainly not top down. In the plains societies women appeared to have no role in the discussion but every adult male was supposed to participate in discussing the direction and leaders were followed who were considered to have the best ideas. On the eastern side of the culture the Iroquois had a matrilineal hierarchy (which is not necessarily equated with female leadership; it refers to societies whose inheritance and lineage was traced through the female line and not the male). The female line were considered the cultural leaders and protectors of the culture but only sometimes seemed to have equal say in political discussions that were also led by community discussion, first within the state, then via representatives to the tribe and eventually each tribe sending representatives to the confederacy where once again there was discussion aimed towards consensus of each of the tribes. Crossing to the west coast, to the north pacific we see variations. Some matrilineal tribes, some patrilineal tribes, some autocratic and some led by group discussion. Some of the tribes that were matrilineal had autocratic female leadership who were some of the more violent against their neighbors, and some matrilineal communities gave little leadership responsibilities to the females.. Ostensibly it boils down to community leadership and individual recognition by the community was of a diverse nature in areas of the world where resources were plentiful enough and the autocrats at least attempted to insure the community was resource responsible. There was also in these communities less grain cultivation which therefore created less environmental disruption and less need for conquest of more land to support a dying environment. Not that the americas were replete with perfect citizens who had no competition. They all fight territorial wars, some tribes were displaced and forced to relocate which caused further competition and displacement. Any species will fight incursion into their own territory if they feel it lessens the resources they need for survival.. Which is probably precisely why the mesolithic age was a time of great expansion into all areas of the globe. The mesolithic age probably had a lot of conflict to maintain population levels they felt their environment.could support. The leaders of other kings that paralleled existence with the big men, at least existed in their leadership roles by showing more concern for individual importance of communal members and needed to show responsibility to the community by not over-taxing their environment. Wars, what there were of them were of smaller nature, not as much about conquest but survival and relocating was more about need if there were too many communities or tribes in a given area. Societies were built to fulfill the survival needs of their communities within their communities and in order to protect the environment; tribes could interact or force others into displacement to protect the sustainability of the environment to fulfill the needs of the community. Now I see a lot of wisdom here and a lot of parallels within non-human species of all kinds from insect communities to marine communities. There is an innate sense of species to comprehend the need to preserve the environment that allows for their survival. All species have a genetic propensity to survive and to preserve the environment that allows them to do so. So kings, who ravaged both people and their environment, trained our species or the followers of those kings to lose all their comprehension that all species evolved comprehending. Once again I reiterate this type of leadership was evidence that genetic mutations are not always favorable to society and whatever mutation allowed for some to think they could conform nature to their will, and disregard the needs of those they attempted to control was not an advance in genetic ingenuity but a devance in the intelligence of those who tried to do so and required the deception of superiority in order to maintain their own genetic perversion that had pushed them to such inferior loss of recognition of the holiness of the environment that gave them survival. They replaced that holiness with gods that anointed them to power and rewarded enough to support their perversion and punished enough to maintain their position.. As we discussed previously however, maintaining that power was precarious from all directions. They were attacked by their siblings and children, by those they rewarded and by those they attempted to subdue and by those they had subdued, and by the very environment they thought they could change that would become hostile from abuse. And then the gods they created to authorize their authority would turn against them in the form of the dissatisfied caste of religious priests, and sometimes from the zealous followers of those religions. Furthermore while they had no regard for those they conquered, they were also in fear of being conquered. There was no safety, but constant threat against their own survival all due to the fact they had no regard for others survival or the sustainability of their life within their environment. Many kings didn’t survive long enough to create their own dynasty. Those that did saw dynasty after dynasty fall across the globe. Once unleashed the demon of power hoarding became the norm of human behavior and cultures that resisted were usually ill-equipped to resist but even after sublimation people continued to resist, to fight for the recognition of their individual right to survive. The problem with resistance however was the successful resister now in power had no way to maintain that power without acting exactly like those they rebelled against.
I am going to mostly jump over the “first historical democracies” of Athens and Rome except to say they were in no way democratic for any but the minority who qualified as the autocratic class, and were formed as a manner to prevent any particular autocrat from becoming overly powerful and reducing the authority of other autocrats. Both were relatively short lived. Athens from circa 594 B.C.E. to at the latest 404 B.C. Aristotle claimed there were other city-states in Greece practicing autocratic-democracy but they were mostly sub-states of Athens and mostly lost their own individuality when Athens needed to subdue them to support their increasing wars and deplenished resources. The Roman republic did survive for almost five centuries. It came about similarly to the nobles who forced John to sign the Magna Carta only Lucius Tarquinius Superbus wasn’t willing to grant any right to the noblemen and they simply stripped him of his power. Unwilling to let any other have too much control they formed a consulate leadership on a rotating basis from the autocrats who, when not in the actual consulate, could debate each other, pass laws and rule their dominions by the select few. It never worked well. The kingship had enslaved the citizens and ravaged the environment beyond sustainability and so conquest became necessary to support the autocrats who were supposedly democratic, but democratic only amongst themselves. And influence and power and consulship was earned by amassing an army, conquering other dominions and returning to the gates of Rome expecting, and receiving, consulship. If that is your idea of democracy you are welcome to it, it is not mine. We hail it today as a pillar of early democracy only because the American constitution bears some similarities to its organization, and was created for somewhat similar reasons. But in practice it was an oligarchic minority led by several would-be-kings none of which had enough personal power to take over until Octavius succeeded in doing so.
But I do want to sidestep to the current discussion of democracy in ancient India. This discussion has been ongoing for 30 some years now. Actually you might say it goes back to 1903 and T.W. Rhys Davids who first began to suggest the possibility, or you might want to go back to accounts written during Alexander’s conquest of India that claim multiple democratic communities within parts of India conquered by Alexander. This evidence was almost always disregarded though, because Brahmanical literature predated Alexander and it supported a stratified and kingly society. Recent scholarship however, is redating Brahmanical literature to around 200 B.C. well after Alexander’s conquest. (And in general, not supported by many Indian scholars who cling to the concept that the Brahmanical literature as one of, if not the oldest philosophical system.) This has led to interest in T.W. Rhys David's scholarship on the Pali Canon, the oldest known canon of Buddhist scripture, dated around 400 B.C.E. and before Alexander’s conquest. The Pali Canon is dated to 400 B.C.E., but set two centuries earlier to Buddha’s lifetime and it describes Indian communities based on a mix of oligarchic communities similar to what existed in the Iroquois and Pacific Northwest and discussion-type communities similar to the Native-American plains tribes. Of course this would contradict the western buddhist teachings that Buddhism was of kingly inheritance who saw great suffering and founded Buddhism as a means of repose from suffering, and I don’t know the source or the date for those teachings. So at present the debate is ongoing. Let me throw in my 2 cents which may or may not be of any validity. The population of India at the time of Buddha is estimated to have been around 35,000 people. Considering the size and the diversified landscapes of India and the multiple ethnicities, it is unlikely that it was massively overpopulated or that the environment was overstressed in support of the populations. Only in western India, near Persia which had ⅓ of the entire population of the world at that time, were there any larger communities. Alexander encountered no massive resistance and mostly small villagers in his march into India, . The encounter with Alexander probably altered the nature of those villages and we know he left behind some organizational remnants, at least the Seleucids did some administrative organization and India would have fallen under their domain. But again they were primarily involved in Persia and only very western India which of course would have had to have been influenced by Persia. Now by the time the Europeans, primarily the British, became interested in, and conquered, India almost 2200 years had passed. India had multiple warring rajahs (kings), extreme stratification enabled by a caste (color) code to prevent racial mingling, and hinduism had surpassed buddhism as the leading religion supported by these rajas,and it identified the caste system as valid and supported the kings as the “godly” order. The Western encounters led to what might be a mistaken belief that hinduism was the elder religion and that the Indians had always been ruled by kings, had always had a stratified caste system and had always lived in large overcrowded cities that couldn’t sustain the population that were rife with diseases due to the environment being incapable of sustaining the population. Evidence appears to be mounting in the last 30 years that this was a false pre-history of India and it was possibly similar to other areas of the world before contact with kings and stratification. I can’t say there is a definitive consensus at this time, so I speculate upon the new evidence, but once again we are basing our information on prehistory. If the Pali-Canon is dated to 400 B.C.E. then there was a written language and written languages usually indicate an involvement with kingships, who needed to record inventories of their expected revenues. Writing did not begin due to increased intelligence but in order for kings to keep tax records. The earliest known writings from Sumerian, from Egypt, from China and from the Incas are all tax records or accountings of revenues. I have never seen any information of the earliest writings in Sanskrit but it was long considered to be the vedic writings which already mention the caste and the king. It is doubtful the Pali Canon and the Indian script was begun by non-kings since it is already a full blown script so that quite probably indicates that at the time of its creation there did exist some kingships who had had to create a script to track their rewards. At this point, once again there is no definitive answer but there is a great probability that it was not contiguously uniform and as in the vast North American continent there were different types of society with varying levels of leadership and varying regards for the environment and that also developed in the south pacific. It was probably also true in Europe because while we have evidence of mesolithic European settlements we have little historical evidence, as elsewhere, before kingdoms began to appear and before encounters with other kingdoms. We know quite a lot about the vikings and how they had severely overtaxed the northern european environment and were forced to seek to colonize elsewhere but here the kings did not develop a script as expansion itself included bounty but little taxation. But what do we know of the mesolithic settlers who were more than likely the first humans who made their way into the rapidly changing environment and allowing humans to survive in the environment of the far north? Probably more is known and it is I who am ignorant, but what I do know is humankind had moved into the area at least 1000 years before the Vikings arrived, displaced earlier inhabitants, and were themselves the product of having been displaced and pushed further north into an alien environment that could not provide enough resources or they simply mishandled the available resources.
Ultimately evidence mounts to illustrate that democratic-type government is prehistorical and ultimately the natural genetic nature of our species. That is why the refrain is so commonly reiterated. “People everywhere just want to be free”. Why do we see people clamoring for democratic governments and then seeing democratic governments fade back to autocracy. If democracy is our true nature genetically and if that nature has led us to attempt throughout the course of history to pit people into a continuous battle against leaders to recognize our individual needs and strive for leadership who allow us have equitable power, if that is true, then why do we move always away from democracy and towards autocracy? Maybe the saying is wrong. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe human nature is one of submissiveness to overpowering leaders. If the human evolved to be democratic, then achieving democracy should be the end and there should be no backsliding or desire to backslide into autocracy. And so many assume, so our leaders assume, and don’t quite grasp how people turn to Hitler, or vote in autocratic leaders like Viktor Orbán. They give us democracy, why aren’t we grateful? Lyndon Johnson at the end of his life, broken and despised, purportedly asked “Why am I so despised? I did everything I could to give people more freedom, more equality, and more opportunity, why am I hated for that?” I agree he probably did try to do all of that and I also wonder why he was so despised. Personally I think there was never a democratically elected leader in history who tried harder to create a more equitable society, enfranchise more people, and create more opportunity. FDR didn’t come close. He did a few things, but he was interested in restoring an economy and providing jobs, but he didn’t give a whit for racial injustice. He never supported the growth of unionism although he did support a minimum wage. (Some say he did support unionism, but he needed southern democrats to support his programs and they feared unions granting equality to blacks, so Roosevelt’s support was to support the institution and the right to strike, but to sectionalize their influence). He initiated social security but didn’t think about ways to care for the rest of society. He spent a lot of government money on creating massive jobs projects but gave little interest in having the private sector invest their wealth in job equity. He was despised by the rich and delighted in it because he was loved by the poor. Johnson expanded the vote, passed laws to eliminate segregated housing projects, enforced the desegregation of schools, restaurants and transportation. He had all the leftover segregated bathrooms and water fountains removed. Cities in Indiana where I was from had to remove their damnable “Niggers who enter may be shot on sight” signs. They weren’t removed after Brown or during Kennedy’s administration because we returned for a year during his administration and everyday I walked to school and passed that sign as I entered the town limits.). He started early education to give the poor a Head Start, he made pell grants and scholarships available so those same poor could attend university. He expanded community college programs and he required universities to expand grants and admittance to an unprecedented amount of “minorities.” He expanded social security to include payments to disabled or for some other reasons that might prevent people from being able to work. He supported striking workers in favor of owners and mandatory arbitration. He started the food stamp program and hot school lunches. (Or expanded them to such a degree he more or less started them, though both had some minimal prior existence.)
So the rich hated him for that. Well they hated FDR, so to be expected, And the working class hated him. And the poor hated him. And the white middle class youth hated him for the war in Viet Nam and because he only did all that other stuff because it was Kennedy’s plan (which absolutely none of it was of high priority on Kennedy’s agenda) and he was really a bigoted southern white man.
Johnson as a young school teacher taught in southeastern Texas, heavily minority and hispanic and saw kids too hungry to lift up their school books. He took money from his own pocket, and school teachers in those days didn’t make much, to bring lunch to his students. And he made a vow to himself that he had to do something in his life to make America a country where no one went hungry and everyone had the same opportunity. He entered politics to do something to keep that vow. He was enabled by marrying into a family with enough to help him fulfill his singular vision of democracy. Some accuse him of stealing his election. If he did, I’m glad. Some say he lied and cheated to get ahead. If he did I’m glad He certainly manipulated white southerners into thinking he agreed with their principles but something needed to be done or they would all lose their power. And so they voted for the Civil Rights Act of ‘57, okay,not the best, a step, the best a majority leader could do with a non supportive president and half of his majority not wanting any blacks to be enfranchised. But he knew it wasn’t enough. But he used his victory of getting that victory to run for president in 1960. There were not a lot of primaries in those days but the few there were in northern states had little interest in voting for a southern over a charismatic young senator from Massachusetts who made pragmatic and rhetorical speeches with little substance but left the door open for many to consider promises.The convention was rather contentious that year but on the first ballot Kennedy won overwhelmingly 809-406 Since Johnson had no appeal in the north, and since the biggest state of California was the most conservative state in the union who voted for only one democratic presidential candidate til 1992 (ironically Lyndon johnson in ‘64) was sure to go to Nixon (which it did) Johnson would not be able to win carrying only the solidly democratic south.. The more liberal voices favored Johnson but the pragmatic, and the delegates who had difficulty tying their own shoelaces went for Kennedy. Ideally the party liberals shunned Kennedy but the intellectuals favored him and there were no other real choices at the convention. Johnson then did something unusual. He opted to do something no other senate majority leader had ever done. He would give up his position of the most powerful member of the United States Senate to accept the most powerless position in the United States government of Vice President in the hopes that in 4 or 8 years he might get to become President. He knew there was only one way to have enough power to actually transform the American Government into being a democracy with all citizens enfranchised and all citizens having an equal opportunity. The democrats dressed up Kennedy to appeal to Americans as a pragmatist who could lead America into the glorious future, we would beat Russia to the moon, we would beat them economically and we would continue our military dominance and lead the world with the success and the pragmatism of democracy. As for civil rights? It was a matter upon “which we need to consider how to make progress”. Black leaders took that as a promise. They encouraged black voters to go to the polls where they could. In one of the narrowest margins in history the blacks who could vote made Kennedy president. On inauguration day Kennedy spoke the immortal lines he is still renowned for “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Oh boy, here we go—
What is the promise of democracy? The citizens will be enabled to choose leaders who will ask what the country can do for them instead of having top down leaders who will tell what they can do for the country. So what becomes the catchphrase, the defining quote that we still teach our children today. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” I am ten years old and am listening to the radio (we didn’t at that time have a TV) I started feeling agitated, my father is enthralled. I blurt out “no, that’s wrong!. “Quiet,” he says. So we listen to the rest of the speech. I didn’t hear another line. That line is running through my head over and over . Finally Kennedy stops speaking. “Wow!”, my father says, “That’s the greatest speech in history.” “No no, it’s all wrong!” I yell at him. “What do you mean by that?” he queries. “Don’t we vote so the government does what we want? If we have to do what the government wants doesn’t that mean we’re communists?’ “You don’t understand, “ my father says. “But—”. And so he gave the final word, “Until you understand there is nothing to discuss.” So I still do not understand. I do not comprehend that if the promise of democracy is a government selected by the people to do what they want, via a free press, and a free discussion to determine what people feel are the needs they wish that government do for them via a vote. If that is the promise, then how is the keynote catchphrase of American democracy the reverse, to cast a vote for the candidate whom we cannot ask to do anything for us? Therein lies the confusion that leads to the delusion that democracy covers over our eyes.
Now I want to briefly return to Lyndon Johnson. Tragedy and circumstance enabled him the opportunity to fulfill that youthful dream of a government that responded to the needs of the people rather than took from the people to fulfill the wants of the powerful. Johnson as far as I am aware is the only elected official who actually believed and attempted to make the promise of democracy a reality.. There have been others who have spoken of equity and who have made incremental steps in the direction. Johnson attempted a complete overhaul all at once, to force Americans into a society of equitableness and a government that was responsible to ensure the needs of all of its citizens, thus eliminating power stratification by giving every adult citizen equal empowerment via the votes and via the resources to equitable standards within the community. I’ve heard many politicians promise incremental steps towards equity but never such a complete overhaul. He did live 5 years after his departure but seldom ever appeared in public again . He was a broken, defeated, lonely man after his presidency who could never understand why he was unappreciated or despised. He had had a dream as a young man to actually eradicate poverty and inequity and to make democracy a system where no individual’s vote could be more valuable than another’s. He was smart enough to know he had to deceive southern backers and southern voters into sponsoring and electing. him. He was smart enough to gain the majority leadership and to convince the block of southern senators to give a few small steps toward equity. But he realized to accomplish his goal of a complete overhaul towards an equitable society and a complete enfranchisement to total equity could not be done incrementally but only by a complete overhaul. I totally agreed. I was idealistic in the sense I believed an overhaul was the only possible solution. I still do. But I understand now the impossibility of an overhaul. I understand the deluding principles upon which democracy was founded and why it can never succeed to satisfy the innate need of the human for both freedom and community.. Freedom cannot exist apart from community and an equitable community. Individual freedom can only exist where the survival of the community requires the community to recognize equitable value in each member’s role in the community.
While every individual wishes for freedom within his community, the failure of Johnson’s reforms had multiple reasons for their failure, in both his policies in America and his concepts for fighting the VietNam war were an attempt to coerce people to be free. And that is kind of weird. If freedom is the natural state of human communities and a natural longing of our genetic heritage, forcing it upon people too abruptly made some feel less free and as if they were being tyrannized to be free. On the other hand, Johnson was less successful than FDR because he did nothing to alter the command structure that had created the imbalance in the first place while Roosevelt directly challenged that structure but failed to defeat the controversy that it aroused until the second world war more or less pulled everyone (more or less) together. Johnson somehow thought equal opportunity meant everyone could succeed within the same system that denied everyone equal opportunity. To grant freedom to individuals the structural foundation that denies those freedoms have to be broken down.
I really admire your scholarship Ken. You have put a lot of thought and effort into cultural anthropology and ancient history. It was a joy reading.
Lyndon Johnson did push through some of the most important legislature from the 20th Century. His biggest mistake was Vietnam. I couldn't vote in 1964, but I campaigned for Johnson, I took my kids to meet him at Mather Air Force Base as he departed on Air Force One. Having been active in Civil Rights I applauded his legislation. Then came his actions in Vietnam. I despised those actions, I despised the draft, I despised what we did to Vietnam and the Vietnamese. And, I admit there was another problem - he was southern. He spoke with that southern twang. He did things, like picking his beagle up by the ears that "nice people" didn't do. He showed his scars from gall bladder surgery that "nice people" didn't do. In retrospect I have apologized for my prejudicial attitude toward his boorish behavior and recognized all the good he did. But in 1968, I was full out campaigning for Bobby (RFK)