What Threatens America - Channels for Addressing Grievances

I want to devote some thought to how we address grievances here in America.  I wanted to start, first, with the follow up to some of the issues I've posted about before.  In Flint, Michigan a couple of lawsuits are in progress as we speak, the Governor has issues a public apology and vowed to drink the water himself.  It's still an ongoing topic, not something I would say is done by any means, but things are being done to address the grievance. 

In Ferguson, Missouri even though the specific officer involved was not indicted the federal Dept of Justice investigated the police department and determined that it had engaged in misconduct against the citizens of Ferguson.  Again, this is still an ongoing issue...and there are people who think not enough was done (and others who think too much was done).  I'm not trying to judge how it was addressed, so much as pointing out that various groups are trying to address it.

So it sounds good, right?  We have grievances, they're being addressed, nothing to worry about?

Except that these specific instances are also examples of deeper underlying grievances.  Racial differences.  Class tension.  Elitism.  Leadership that fails to address a problem before it blows up into a full-blown crisis.  (This last one is not the best point, since who knows how many situations were addressed before they became a crisis?)

Note that I said "racial differences" instead of "racism".  That's because the different opinions about incidents like this reflect different cultures as well as actual racism.  "Law-abiding" primarily white citizens who support and respect law enforcement (and I count myself and most everyone I know in this category) have a hard time understanding why people - people who used to get arrested for loitering and other minor offenses in order to force them to work on various projects; who saw law enforcement bring out dogs and hoses against men, women and children - don't trust the police.  Are some of these incidents truly about criminal behavior?  Or is some of it because an officer doesn't feel they are given the respect due as a representative of the law?

Yet I actually want to focus more on class grievances - in part because that is what Trump appears to be tapping into.  I've seen article after article over the last decade that has talked about the shrinking of the middle class.  Stagnant wages.  Greater disparity in income.  We know this is happening.  You have to be living under a rock to be unaware of this...

And yet nothing serious is being done.  During the Great Depression we had the Public Works Administration, during the Great Recession we had austerity.  We have respected economists saying we actually should have had even more stimulus, we have article after article talking about our aging infrastructure...and none of it seems to translate into actual policy changes. 

I read economic articles talking about 'recovery', how the companies who were bailed out during the financial crisis were able to pay everything back, how things are better...yet none of it seems to trickle down to the average person.  Getting by is just as much of a struggle now than it was 8 years ago.  (and then we get articles saying "we need consumer spending to grow the economy", and I have to laugh.  Where do you think the consumers get the money to spend?  They're tapped out...they're going to keep being tapped out until debts are paid off or wages grow.)

I can get into nitty gritty details more at a later time, I kind of wanted to point out a few other things first.

A few years ago a study showed that the collective preferences of ordinary citizens has almost no effect on policy, whereas the collective preferences of our wealthiest citizens have a much greater impact. 

In other words - the wealthy don't seem to care about the struggles of the everyone else, and they're the ones who actually make policy. 

This is a pretty massive and difficult topic, so I'll probably post some more later.

What Threatens America - Internal Cleavage Points

So how does my previous post tie into the threats facing America today?


The concepts of grievances, how grievances are addressed, and insurgencies apply to much of our current political world.  We just (mostly) have agreed by certain rules that prevent it from turning into actual war.  It's interesting how political commentary will use some of the same terms, except it'll be a "political insurgency" that gets played out in votes and rallies.


So - grievances, ways to have those grievances addressed, and leadership.


You have to remember what Europe was like back when America was colonized...this was at the height of Europe's religious wars.   The Thirty Years War was just one example.  Many people immigrated to the United States to get away from it all, and most accepted a live and let live approach.  Or tried to...that's why we created a Bill of Rights.  It helps set clear limitations on what the government can do, so that people don't get forced to worship in some other religion, or get stomped on for speaking their minds.


Our history is a bit more troubled than that, of course.  The anti-Catholic history of the United States is really a rather interesting example, especially given how much attitudes have changed since then.  Consider Maryland's state history, or anti-immigration attitudes towards the Irish and Italians, or the campaign worries about JFK's Catholicism.


Anyways.  There's been intolerance, prejudice, and widespread support for laws against one group or another.  There's been violence, lynch mobs and riots.  There's been civil unrest.  In short, some sectors of our society have grievances. And yet it's not, generally, been a clear case of one entire group against another. 


The Civil War was not a slave rebellion against white rulers.  There were abolitionists fighting for the end of slavery, Unionists who were still prejudiced against blacks but didn't want the country to disintegrate, and various other motivators.  And so the Civil War was more white vs. white with support from former slaves.  In a sense, you could say that the grievances were being addressed...slowly, painfully, and not always well.  Yet they were addressed well enough that people kept trying to make the system work.


Our tradition of civil liberties and our Bill of Rights means that there are people who will support a group that isn't their own.  And that's good, because our political fights are less about one ethnic or religious group fighting another, and more about what laws are in keeping with our evolving social norms...particularly with regards to civil rights.  The schooling a naturalized citizen has to go through means many are even more familiar with our history and rights than our own native-born citizens...and many accept the beliefs laid out in the Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights as their own.


This, btw, is something people don't always understand.  We have a long and ugly racial history, and it looks like a pretty obvious cleavage point.  (In the right - or wrong - environment, it could be).  And so enemies like al Qaeda try to weaken us by inciting racial conflict.  And just as al Qaeda may have incited violence in Iraq by bombing the al-Askari mosque, we have people in the States who launch attacks hoping to start a race war in the US.


To bring this back to threats facing us today - we are not at the point where we're going to have a race war.  Yet.  Thank God we're not!  There are definitely grievances tied to racial issues, but so far we're addressing them through accepted channels.


There are other grievances, though...grievances tied class issues, the shrinking of the middle class, globalization, economic change, etc.  Since I'm keeping this at a more general level I won't get into the specifics of those grievances, just pointing out that they exist.  And that it's when accepted channels for grievances fail that you really have to worry.  Which brings me to my next topic.


(to be continued)

What Threatens America - Some Background Info

I promised specifics, what we can do to hasten or halt a decline, what specifically is threatening America today.  But my first attempt was still too broad, and I have to narrow this down to something reasonable.  (I don't want to get stuck postulating and philosophizing on a grand scale, not right now.)


So I'll think I'll start with terrorism, actually.  One of my classes asked a question I still sometimes think over - what's the difference between terrorism and an insurgency?  This isn't the age old "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" type of statement, though I do believe there's a difference between the two.  (Terrorism is, in some ways, a tactic.  They deliberately target civilians in an attempt to create terror).  This question is less about the tactical differences and more about what the difference is between the two, when both can involve violent attempts to overthrow a government.


Every society has it's tensions.  Every. Single. One.  That's part of why it's such a miscalculation to assume the 'enemy other' is somehow monolithic and perfect.  (Communist China and Communist Russia had cleavage points.  China itself is hardly monolithic, though I'm sort of ashamed to admit it took a while before I realized that.  It's not just the Uighurs to the west, either.)


How a society resolves those tensions has a lot to do with whether it's a success or failure.  When we talked about what creates an insurgency (as opposed to a terrorist), there were a couple of elements required.  There had to be grievances felt by the population, those grievances were not being addressed through accepted channels, and there had to be leadership for the insurgency.  Kind of reminds me of the fire triangle, actually.  Grievances are the fuel.  The inability to address those grievances through accepted channels is the oxidizing agent...and leadership adds the heat (obviously, different leaders can take the insurgency in different directions...away from violence and towards civil rights, for example.  Or away from terrorist tactics and more towards military and government targets).


So the difference between a terrorist and an insurgent may have something to do with the success (or failure) of their efforts.  A terrorist is basically operating from weakness.  There aren't really enough of them to act in a conventional way...so they do these dramatic acts in order to gain attention to their cause, provoke a counter-reaction, and recruit more people.  Sometimes the government forces add more oxygen to the fight, like France in Algeria.  Rounding up the innocent in an attempt to get a small portion of the guilty led to the radicalization of people who were previously neutral, and created more support for Algerian independence.


When a group reaches the limit of their support, they're faced with a choice - accept that they don't have the support they need?   Accept, basically, that they've lost?  Or decide that their goal is too important to give up on now, and to push on.  This is when a proto-insurgency may move more towards terrorism.  Let's say they don't have enough support, refuse to give up, and thus resort to dramatic and violent attacks.  (And so the dividing line between one and the other is fluid, and throughout history an organization may change from one to the other and back again.)


The founding basis for our democracy is that we had a system that allowed grievances to be addressed through accepted channels.  Don't like what you see?  Vote.  Feel like your needs aren't being addressed?  Vote.  Have a grievance?  Vote.


Your ability to make a difference is not guaranteed.  Not everyone will agree with you, and you may lose an election or ballot proposition.  But there's always next election, next year.  And if you're tapping into a real cause, more and more people will be persuaded.  (Without disruptive and painful things like insurgencies and terrorists.)