Trumpism is an abomination — and science proves it

Source: Raw Story · Bias: Far Left

Summary

FCC Chairman and apparent Goebbels fanboy Brendan Carr is suggesting the radio and TV broadcasters he regulates should begin airing more “pro-America” content. What he means, of course, is pro-Trump.This illustrates a much larger reality: Republicans want a top-down, hierarchical political and economic system. Democrats want a bottom-up system with maximum participation and broad sharing of society’s wealth. Who is right?Donald Trump just went on a rant about economics, oil, and Iran that has massive implications for the future of our nation. At the same time, a new study was published about how people lived in Mesoamerica before the European conquest that shows as many as half of all those ancient societies lived democratically and had a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth.It seems like these are separate, disconnected stories, but they’re not. And the tale they both tell gives us a major insight into the future of America, for better or worse, depending on the political decisions we make between now and November.The stakes are getting higher every day, and it’s critical that we all understand how cultural and political evolution and world history led us to this dangerous and opportune moment.We tend to think of economies and political systems as separate things, but in reality they’re deeply intertwined. Both either can be fragile or resilient, and that fragility or resilience most often depends on their relationship to each other.Resilience is the ability of a governmental system or an economy to weather stresses without “breaking.” It’s the key to understanding everything that’s happening today in both politics and economics.One of the best and most widely cited analyses of the difference in resilience between democracy and autocracy, for example, is the paper by Wolfgang Merkel & Anna Lührmann titled Resilience of democracies: responses to illiberal and authoritarian challenges published in the peer-reviewed journal Democratization.Noting that, “Illiberalism and authoritarianism have become major threats to democracy across the world,” they point out that:“The more democracies are resilient on all four levels of the political system (political community, institutions, actors, citizens) the less vulnerable they turn out to be in the present and future.”As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution.And America’s Founders — having actually seen it being lived out by Native people — believed in it. Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all wrote about their experiences with the “Indians” extensively, and the lessons they learned from them that made their way into our Constitution.From Putin’s disastrous attack on Ukraine to the governments of Iran and Afghanistan being controlled entirely by a small subset of religious men, we see the calamitous consequences of rule by the few.Thus, we find that democracy — a system of decision- and rule-making that most efficiently encompasses the collective wisdom of the group — is a survival system every bit as important as technology, science, and economics.Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”And we get there through voting.This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.It got him into a fight with the Declaration’s main editor, John Adams, who thought it should say “the Christian God,” but Jefferson prevailed. His deist friends like George Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Ben Franklin knew what he meant: nature and “God” interpenetrated each other, and they saw the result of that in the democracy — the balancing systems that produced ecological resilience — played out in nature.And, I discovered when researching my book, Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.But was he right? Is nature actually democratic?Biologists Tim Roper and L.

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Trumpism is an abomination — and science proves it
Raw Story

Trumpism is an abomination — and science proves it

Far Left

FCC Chairman and apparent Goebbels fanboy Brendan Carr is suggesting the radio and TV broadcasters he regulates should begin airing more “pro-America” content. What he means, of course, is pro-Trump.This illustrates a much larger reality: Republicans want a top-down, hierarchical political and economic system. Democrats want a bottom-up system with maximum participation and broad sharing of society’s wealth. Who is right?Donald Trump just went on a rant about economics, oil, and Iran that has massive implications for the future of our nation. At the same time, a new study was published about how people lived in Mesoamerica before the European conquest that shows as many as half of all those ancient societies lived democratically and had a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth.It seems like these are separate, disconnected stories, but they’re not. And the tale they both tell gives us a major insight into the future of America, for better or worse, depending on the political decisions we make between now and November.The stakes are getting higher every day, and it’s critical that we all understand how cultural and political evolution and world history led us to this dangerous and opportune moment.We tend to think of economies and political systems as separate things, but in reality they’re deeply intertwined. Both either can be fragile or resilient, and that fragility or resilience most often depends on their relationship to each other.Resilience is the ability of a governmental system or an economy to weather stresses without “breaking.” It’s the key to understanding everything that’s happening today in both politics and economics.One of the best and most widely cited analyses of the difference in resilience between democracy and autocracy, for example, is the paper by Wolfgang Merkel & Anna Lührmann titled Resilience of democracies: responses to illiberal and authoritarian challenges published in the peer-reviewed journal Democratization.Noting that, “Illiberalism and authoritarianism have become major threats to democracy across the world,” they point out that:“The more democracies are resilient on all four levels of the political system (political community, institutions, actors, citizens) the less vulnerable they turn out to be in the present and future.”As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution.And America’s Founders — having actually seen it being lived out by Native people — believed in it. Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all wrote about their experiences with the “Indians” extensively, and the lessons they learned from them that made their way into our Constitution.From Putin’s disastrous attack on Ukraine to the governments of Iran and Afghanistan being controlled entirely by a small subset of religious men, we see the calamitous consequences of rule by the few.Thus, we find that democracy — a system of decision- and rule-making that most efficiently encompasses the collective wisdom of the group — is a survival system every bit as important as technology, science, and economics.Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”And we get there through voting.This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.It got him into a fight with the Declaration’s main editor, John Adams, who thought it should say “the Christian God,” but Jefferson prevailed. His deist friends like George Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Ben Franklin knew what he meant: nature and “God” interpenetrated each other, and they saw the result of that in the democracy — the balancing systems that produced ecological resilience — played out in nature.And, I discovered when researching my book, Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.But was he right? Is nature actually democratic?Biologists Tim Roper and L.

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