Where Does It Go?

Anyone can be disturbed by the state of America.  Most people are dismayed at the gridlock and ineffectiveness of government.  Everyone except the donors and the recipients are outraged at the outsize effect of money on the political system.  The military and intelligence forces seem to alternate between spying, torture, and civilian drone casualties.  Corporate greed seems to be unchanged by the recent Great Recession.  Every time someone is killed by the police, mass riots get larger and more violent, whether or not the police were justified in their work.  The socially conservative among us also aren't shy about pointing out the continual slide of morality in the nation.

Democracy and capitalism have a great deal of upsides to them.  Democracy, at least theoretically, gives the people a voice and establishes numerous checks and balances against abuses of power.  Capitalism allows for the accumulation of wealth unlike any other system and encourages competition, innovation, and rewards success.  However, the systems themselves, if unchecked, can have harmful consequences.  They both need to be held tight within a society that values the good of all rather than self-interest, the doing of what is right rather than what is expedient, and the respecting of minority voice rather than the unlimited rule of the majority.

It's not hard to see the rise of the "protest" age of America.  Everyone has something to protest - for/against gay rights, the potential abuses of police power, corruption in government, and so forth.  Our incredible connectedness makes this possible, and our tendency toward argument and anger makes it increasingly vitriolic.  Whether our indignation is aroused by the idiocy of some store clerk or a government action we disagree with, we're all-too-ready to fight back in some way.  Some level of this is valuable - without standing up for something and against something else, we'll never move forward, and that store clerk will never improve.  Taken to the extreme, however, we continually see riots in the street.

The world is moving toward revolution.  The Arab Spring may have only been a precursor to a larger worldwide movement.  However, whereas the popular uprisings in these Middle Eastern and African nations were largely unsuccessful, the next round may be successful.  Many people in democracies feel increasingly fed up with their governments.  Some people believe that people in governments that tend toward censorship, such as China, North Korea, Turkey, and others are on the road toward revolution as well.  Can these governments continue to hold power by controlling the media?  Can democracies survive the increasingly bitter divisions within their populations?

Thinking specifically of the United States, it seems to me that the nation is approaching a crossroads.  Either the political system will have to unite behind a charismatic statesman (as sometimes happens in wartime as well), or the increasingly divided people could eventually come to the need of revolution.  I also wonder what other system of government would be effective other than democracy.  Sometimes I'm fascinated by the thought of an open-source experiment in constitution-making.  If the people of the United States were, through some massive online process, to write a new constitution, what would it look like?

We can't underestimate the significance of the Internet for democracy and capitalism.  I think it's possible that we'll look back in 50 years and see that the advent of the Internet was the force that created a new system of government.  On one hand, Internet makes it possible to reduce the distance between the government and the people in the representative system, but the founders of our republican democratic system were wise to create the distance because there's no way that the entire citizenry could be informed enough or wise enough to vote on everything.  We need to ask the question, however, whether our elected representatives are informed enough or wise enough.

Taken as a whole, the democratic system largely invented in the 1780s for the fledgling new United States of America has not evolved significantly in the past three hundred years.  It's worth asking whether the accelerating pace of human and technological development necessitates some substantial new evolutions in democracy.  For example, what if the lower house of the bicameral system were abolished in favor of a new method of frequent referendums and voting by all people?  I'm no political scientist, but it'd be interesting to see such conversations play out.

The people are starting to stir for something.  Why do people riot?  Because they feel unheard any other way.  The Occupy movement wanted to bring a change, but it wasn't entirely clear what change they wanted.  Both are changing the conversation, however.  The upcoming Presidential election is very interesting - we're developing into a three-party state (Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party) which I'm actually not entirely opposed to.  A viable third party could be a very interesting addition to our governmental system.  Regardless, the two most "interesting" candidates right now, and two of the most rapidly-ascending, are Trump and Sanders, who also happen to perhaps be the most "extreme" in either direction.  What are the people saying?  Where are we as a nation going?