This Time We Must Learn the Lesson

American democracy was designed from the first to protect the people from the very attitudes and consequent criminality of the self-styled Aristocrats who now have been foolishly (and to no small extent criminally) entrusted with our government.

We the people must not only struggle to overcome the present distress of our vulnerable and threatened democracy as we have done so many times before, but we must learn at last the lesson of this moment as we have not managed in living memory to do before.

We failed to learn the lesson of the attempted corporate-militarist coup against FDR. We failed to learn the lesson of the long night of McCarthyism. We failed to learn the lesson of the pardoned criminality of Nixon. We failed to learn the lesson of the feel-good celebrity gangersterism of Reagan. And we have failed so far to learn the lessons of this moment, the culmination and quintessence of thirty years of Movement Conservatism, from the Contract on America and the faux Impeachment to the post-9/11 dismantlement of American freedom in the name of "freedom."

The lessons are so basic they can practically be bumper stickered:

Never entrust governance to people who loudly and proudly announce their hostility to the very idea of good governance. Never entrust democracy to people who loudly and proudly announce their hostility to the very people who are democracy. Never entrust the American Dream to those who identify that dream with a scam, a cheat, or an easy score. Never entrust social administration to those who believe they can have their cake (a society that works) and eat it, too (deregulation without end and tax cuts without end). And never turn your back on a war criminal or a war profiteer.

Perhaps the people-powered education, agitation, and organization of digital networks and peer-to-peer democracy will be the lightning flash, the bolt from out of the blue that overcomes the ancient inertia of incumbency and stupid self-regard and unleashes at last the long restrained promise of democracy in America and around the world.