"Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea from Ancient Athens to our World" Author James Miller

As I read, I am increasingly impressed by this book, an important reason being its relevance to my experience at Procter & Gamble as a unique institution. 

 

In a short 250 or so pages, Miller makes it clear to my satisfaction that the efforts that have been made to put in place “pure democracy,” meaning that theoretically every person is involved in a decision, has too often led to perverse outcomes.

 

While democracy is said to have been operative in ancient Athens, and it was to a degree, the fact remained that a large percentage of the population in so-called democratic Athens were slaves.  Many could not vote.  Those that could vote, were very involved as individuals.  But history shows we have been unable to take that to scale.

The success and failure and the tension that rests within each attempt at democracy has been impacted by many human tendencies and instincts:  the desire for power, for money; the inherent conviction by most people, that some people (meaning “we”) are better than others. 

 

The creation of our own Constitution in 1781 reflected the inherent distrust of the capacity of ordinary citizens to make decisions.  There was the belief that had been reflected in previous political arrangements that decisions need to be made by a “meritorious elite who would govern on behalf of all, with a dispassionate regard for the common good.”

 

Of course, what people view as the “common good” has varied and always will vary.  Therein lies the source of conflict.

 

Communism, brought to reality by the 1917 Revolution in Russia, was premised on the idea that everyone is equal and should have a say in what the government should do.  It didn’t take long for that to devolve into Lenin’s and other leaders’ deciding that they needed to decide what was right for the common people.  Greed and the quest for power took over.  The same thing happened in the French Revolution.  It started as quest for everyone to be involved in decision-making; it quickly descended into chaos and then the creation of an autocratic dictatorship. 

 

We see these same instincts in our own democracy today.  Differences in what people see as the common good.  The drive by officeholders to stay in office. 

 

Robespierre centuries ago captured the reality in addressing the Convention debating the French Constitution.  The challenge faced by every great legislator, he declared, is to “give to government the force necessary to have citizens always respect the rights of citizens and to do it in such a manner that government is never able to violate these rights itself.”  Rarely had this challenge been met, Robespierre said, because history was generally a story of “government devouring (individual) sovereignty” and of the rich exploiting the poor. 

 

This deep-seeded conviction that the “common man” is not able to decide individually or in the aggregate what the right thing to do is has been prevalent throughout history, to this very day.  Walter Lippmann wrote almost 100 years ago, “The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs.  He does not know how to direct public affairs.  He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen.”  As a result, the common interests, he concludes, “can be managed only by a specialized class,”  by informed commentators (like Lippmann himself, in Lippmann’s haughty opinion) with an in-depth knowledge of the facts pertinent to formulating reasonable public policies.  This attitude, driven by self-interest yet, to some degree, the recognition of reality has been the governing force in the development of political systems everywhere over time. 

 

Joseph Schumpeter, in the 1940s, said it only a bit differently:  “Democracy in modern societies like America, as it has come to actually exist, involves voters selecting the least objectionable of the available candidates chosen by rival political priorities to rule over them.”  Here again, this greatly oversimplified view of reality captures an uncomfortable degree of truth. 

 

 

Certainly it has been proven that it is unrealistic and undesirable to attempt to rule totally by consensus.  Ultimately, there needs to be a structure of decision-making.  That is true in business and it’s true in political life, but at the same time, I insist, that it is possible for business or government to reflect, if not perfectly, largely the common good. 

 

Our experience with participatory democracy teaches the limits of any regime of consensus, which risks silencing disagreements over alternatives that are important to debate openly, I believe.  I believe modern institutions can do more to appeal to an engaged people’s capacity for reflection and collective deliberation.  As one American philosopher wrote, “We sometimes expect too little” from our democracies “precisely because” we prematurely give up on an “aspirational theory,” one that realistically faces the question “of whether more can realistically be expected.” 

 

I believe this line of thought permeates the Purpose of Procter & Gamble.  It recognizes the need for balance in the stakeholders whom we serve and in how we carry out the responsibility we have to these stakeholders.  It does this with the humility of recognizing while we won’t ever achieve perfection, we can and must continue to learn how to do better.

 

I return, as Miller does and as I always have, to Vaclav Havel who, as much or more than any other philosopher, guides my thinking.  He posits that the view that democracy “is chiefly the manipulation of power and public opinion and that morality has no place in it” means the unacceptable loss of “the idea that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience and responsibility—with no guns, no lust for power, no political wheeling and dealing.”

 

When Havel wrote his essay in 1991in “Summer Meditations,” he was overseeing Czechoslovakia’s reformation as its first freely elected president.  “I am convinced,” he remarked, “that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is—regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist—humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual and cultural.”  “The best laws and best conceived democratic mechanisms will not in themselves guarantee the legality or freedom or human rights—anything in short, for which they were intended—if they are not underpinned by certain human and social values.”  He concludes as I do:  “I feel that the dormant good will in people needs to be stirred.  People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently and help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”

 

It is the Culture and the Purpose built on this type of conviction that has made Procter & Gamble the company I admire and love.  May it always be so.

The Past Repeats Itself--The Second Coming of the Klu Klux Klan--Its Echoing Today

 

Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the Ku Klux Klan:  The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition reveals a piece of history I had little known.  I write about it because of its striking similarity to much of what we see today.

  

At its heart, the success of the second KKK during the decade of the 1920s was based on grievance: a feeling of being looked down on by the so-called “elite” and the power of being part of an anointed group seeing itself committed to patriotism and America in its purest form.  In modern parlance, committed to Making America Great Again.

 

The suspicion of intellectuals and elites was vividly conveyed.  The Imperial Wizard, the leader of the Klan, declared proudly:  “We are demanding a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized but entirely unspoiled and not De-Americanized every citizen of the old stop.”

The book reveals the crowd-pleasing spectacles the KKK held, similar to the Trump rallies today.

 

As today, the Klan used criticism of their movement as “more evidence of victimization.” 

 

Their animus toward and fear of immigrants echoes what we see today in the far right movement.  As one Klan article iterated:  “Strange, shoddy has lately crept into the loom on which we weave our destiny…ominous statistics proclaim the persistent development of the parasite mass within our domain—our political system is clogged with foreign bodies.”

 

What is most remarkable about this statement is that it appeared not only in Klan publications but in McClure’s Magazine-- a popular mainstream monthly known for its progressive era muckraking, publishing Mark Twain, Lincoln, Steffens and Jack London, among other distinguished writers.

 

So why you might ask, haven’t we heard more about the second Klan?  Partly, because it faded quickly over a period of only about ten years. 

The reasons for its demise, writes Gordon,  include the heavy involvement of its leadership in corruption and scandal.  People also finally got tired of the rituals and bombast.

 In truth, the leaders brought themselves down. 

Turning to today, will Donald Trump and his far right MAGA supporters bring themselves down?  Not so far, despite the innumerable scandals. Particularly as far as Trump is concerned, it would be hard to conceive of more, but so far they haven't brought him down or significantly undercut the loyalty of his still large base. 

However, it is worth remembering that the second KKK movement did not dissipate overnight.  Indeed at its peak in the mid to late 1920s,  Governors from many states and mayors from many major cities remained open, proud members of the Klan. They played a major role in denying the democratic nomination in 1924 to Al Smith, a Catholic, following their strong, viral, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish fervor. 

As I say, it took a decade but the American people finally woke up to what was happening, as they also did 70 years ago in finally turning aside the crude and malicious assertions of the once-very popular Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

While I may be too optimistic I believe that provided we continue to push back against the demagoguery of Donald Trump and his congressional supporters,  truth will out and we will find our way back closer as we have before to the essence of what our Nation stands for at our best.

 

The Israeli and Palestinian Conflict--Looking Back Fourteen Years

Yesterday, the Israeli Parliament (KNESSET) passed a major piece of legislation which will limit the Supreme Court of Israel from overruling legislation created by the KNESSET on the basis of its “reasonableness.”  It’s striking how differently this is being received: it is being bitterly opposed in Israel by a large portion of the population. Throngs of protestors continued to gather in Israel yesterday following the ruling.

Here in the U.S. it is being viewed very differently by the New York Times and, on the other hand, the Wall Street Journal.

 

The Times’ columnists, including Nick Kristof and Thomas Friedman, declaim it as “ushering in a precarious new era, defining a nationwide protest movement.”

 

In striking, but to me not surprising, contrast, the Wall Street Journal describes the reaction as a “panic attack.”  It describes the media and political response to the ruling as “overwrought” and asserts that, “It probably won’t make as much difference as either side claims.”

 

Who am I to judge what difference it will make in time?  Much depends on what happens next. What I am certain of is that quite apart from this legislation Netanyahu and his conservative colleagues are continuing to advance a condition of apartheid as evidenced by the continued expansion of settlements on the West Bank and their inhuman treatment of Palestinians, not only on the West Bank but in Jerusalem.

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As I write this I am drawn back in time.I am struck by how what I see happening now was previewed in notes that I took on a trip to Israel fourteen years ago which I made with a fellow P&G retiree and dear friend, Fuad Kuraytem, and my daughter-in-law Maggie. 

 

The date is October 15, 2009.  Thanks to Eason Jordan, who was accompanying us on this part of the trip and had served as the former head of CNN International, we had a private meeting with then-Prime Minister Netanyahu.  Here are excerpts from my notes which I dictated at the time.

 

“The meeting clearly evidenced Netanyahu’s ‘commanding presence, articulateness and ability to make his case.’” 

 

“He was excited to hear that my Chairmanship at Disney followed that of George Mitchell, who is now the U.S.’s chief negotiator in the Middle East and who I know has been very frustrated by Netanyahu’s entrenched position on expanding the settlements.  I asked him about these (settlements), noting that they were a roadblock in negotiations.  He responded immediately (and vehemently), saying:  he did not feel they were the real issue.  That, he said, was the Palestinians’ unwillingness to agree to a sovereign nation on agreed borders.  (In fact, this had been agreed by Arafat years earlier.)  

He (Netanyahu) went on to make the case that the land had really belonged to both religions over time (conveniently ignoring the reality that this area had been consigned to Palestinians and that the Jewish settlements occupied only about 3% of the land area when the Jewish state was formed).   He also conveniently side-stepped the fact that the settlers are occupying choice areas and non-contiguous sections of the West Bank, making a unified Palestinian state ‘impossible.’”

 

“In the end, he indicated that he had made a proposal to the U.S. that he felt would resolve this issue.  I have no idea what that might be yet.  I hope it is meaningful", I wrote at the time. 

It wasn't meaningful.

 

As I review these notes, 14 years after my visit, it is clear that Netanyahu’s mindset and actions have not changed. He continues to pursue policies that in any honest reading of the word, boil down to "apartheid".  They must change if the long-sought peace is to be obtained and justice is to prevail. 

  

A Chilling and Dangerous Assault on Truth

Read this and you will hear echoes from 200 years ago of slave owners' absurd justifications for slavery in the history to be taught today per recently published standards by the Department of Education of Florida.

If you are like me, you will find it hard to believe. This assault on truth must be turned back.

This week, the Florida State Board of Education approved new standards for Black history, which requires students learn that slaves “developed skills” that could be “applied for their personal benefit.” And when teaching about mob violence against the Black community, such as the Tulsa massacre, teachers must note the “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Wars of Choice; Wars of Necessity--"Looking for the Good War"

 

• LOOKING FOR THE GOOD WAR:  AMERICAN AMNESIA AND THE VIOLENT PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS BY ELIZABETH D. SAMET

   

  There is a great deal I like in this book.

   

  I gained many new insights and affirmation of what I knew before:

   

  1.      The sentimentalized memorialization of the Civil War aimed at bringing White people (Unions and Confederates) together, leaving the newly freed blacks suffering the blight of Jim Crow--so well documented by Historian, David Blight.

   

  2.      Fresh for me was how the myth of the Civil War was perpetuated by films in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly the Westerns.  They signaled moral equivalency for each side, failing to recognize that one side (the South) had undertaken war to preserve the enslavement of people. 

   

  3.      Samet underscores the reality that “war is hell.”  Soldiers enter it with a mixture of motives, by no means all noble.  We have tended to glorify World War II through the work of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg.  Yet, in drawing this out, she undercuts and fails to do justice to the reality that there are some “good wars,” ones that are a necessity in the evil they seek to end. 

   

  I have long believed that there are wars of choice, wars that could have been avoided and some wars that could not.  World War II is a war that couldn’t have been avoided, not unless one goes back to the antecedents for Hitler and deny his existence.  I don’t think the Civil War could have been avoided either, not with the dichotomy of beliefs on slavery.  The Spanish-American War was, I believe, a war of choice.  So was Vietnam, in hindsight, misbegotten.  And the same is true of Iraq.

   

  You can’t read this book without thinking about the war underway right now between Russia and Ukraine, supported by the U.S. and the European Union.  Was this war avoidable?  Historians will study and debate this forever.  I think it might have been avoided if one goes back to the decisions that might have been made at the turn of the century.  While it was a narrow window, I believe there was the possibility that, with more foresight and courageous, imaginative leadership, a Pan-European security arrangement, including Russia, could have been put in place.  Whether it would have lasted forever no one can know.  But I think at that point in time, Putin was open to such an arrangement. 

   

  By the time we reached 2014, however, having had the expansion of NATO, including the prospective inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO and, importantly, the increasing paranoia of Putin that the West was out to surround him, with enough circumstantial evidence to prove the case, the risk of war was high.  Yet, individual agency still existed, in the person of Vladimir Putin.  I suspect that many other Russian leaders would have reached the same decision he did, but not all.  His belief that Ukraine was part of Russia, something he came to believe in more and more, might not have driven another leader as it drove him to what I believe will be recorded as one of the worst decisions by a leader of a major country in history.

   

  “We are where we are,” now as we  tritely even if accurately say. But there is an great lesson to be learned in this for the future.  Boiled down, it amounts to doing one’s best to see the world as a potential adversary sees it.  We didn’t do that with Russia.  We failed to consider at the turn of the century what would be in the long-term interest of the U.S., Europe, Russia and the world.  We saw the world almost entirely through our lens.

   

  
  

   

  Other insights: 

   

  1.      Our quick 100-day victory in the first Gulf War allowed us to kick the Vietnam syndrome of having failed.  Positive confidence-affirming signals returned and a sense of hubris came with them.

   

  2.      The attack of September 11, 2001 drew on analogies with Hitler which drove us to a flawed war on terrorism, which led us to the misbegotten decision to invade Iraq.

   

  3. Putin's decision to invade Ukraine was clearly a war of "choice" from his standpoint yet a war of "necessity" for the Ukrainians and their western allies. 

  
  

  There is an aspect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that is especially tragic.  And that is that, even as the Ukrainians rightly view themselves as an independent nation, and are fighting valiantly to protect their independence,  it is also a civil war in Ukraine.  Countless Russian soldiers are fighting, trying to kill men and women who are extensions of their own families.  There are human dimensions here that only time will expose, even as they are being carried out in blood as I write this. 

   

  It’s hard to imagine the conflicted feelings—the horror—felt by a Russian soldier who thought he was going to Belarus for exercises and found himself invading Ukraine to kill someone who could be a friend or relative. 

   

  Many of the Shakespearian plays which Samet cites were about civil wars in England.  The agony of those wars is being mirrored in Ukraine in ways that will eventually be written about in history and literature.

   

  4.    Samet refers often to my favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr.   He brought a cautionary reading to history.  Beware, “if virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its limits.”

   

  Niebuhr believed that this risk had poisoned the evolution of Communism in the 1950s.  And it’s fair to say it has affected us, too, in the United States in our own history.  In fact, it is endemic to human nature.  Moral complacency and superiority can come to easily justify doubtful means to achieve ostensibly virtuous ends. 

   

  American innocence—the faith in the essential virtue of our society that makes any critique evidence of ill-will--is more than cautionary.  It’s a warning.  Yet, we must not allow this to bring us to a position of ultimate relativism.  We must recognize that there are truths to be honored, nowhere better summarized than in the words of our Declaration of Independence:  “All men are created equal.”

   

  All of this is a reminder of what I’ve seen in the lives of everyone, including myself.  We are curious compounds of good and evil.  Stubborn idealism comes at a price:  namely, an intolerance of complexity, compromise and ambiguity.  Yet, again, we cannot allow this to leave us awash in the foggy no-man’s land of relativism.

   

  5.     Robert McNamara’s The Fog of War is worthy of comment.  McNamara’s story illustrates “the slipperiness of beginnings and ends, the refusal of war to stand still long enough to be shaped into a coherent story; the ambient fog obscures causes and consequences as well as ends and means.”

   

  5.      Today, Samet asserts, we celebrate the veteran of World War II as almost an archetype of stoic humility rather than a readily identifiable individual.  Samet castigates this in a way that I strongly disagree with.  For there are values, even if not always present, even if sometimes simplified in their motivation, revealed by the best of what happened in World War II. The celebration of loyalty, of courage, of sacrifice, of seeking freedom over tyranny.  I find the celebration of  these and other values to be a good thing so long as it not romanticized and sentimentalized to the point of disguising the reality that war is hell. 

   

  6.      The sentimental memorialization of the Civil War, with its invidious impact on race relations, continued well into the 20^th century.  In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt unveiled a statue of Robert E. Lee.  His speech tapped into the popular interpretation of the Civil War and Lee.  It also acclaimed Lee as not only a “great leader of men and a great General,” but also as “one of the greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.”  Roosevelt’s position may have been anchored in a genuine belief, but I doubt it.  It certainly was anchored in his need to get the Southern vote to win the presidency.

   

  7.      Frederick Douglass foresaw in his 1875 speech what the reconciliation for the White race through the romanticization of the Civil War meant as he plaintively asked:  “When this great White race has renewed its fallacy of patriotism and float back into its accustomed channels, the question for us:  In what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people?  What tendencies will spring out of it?”

   

  Let me conclude as Samet concludes with timeless words from Lincoln.  She draws on his speech of 1838.  Lincoln was meditating on the theme of “the perpetuation of our political institutions.”  He did so, as he writes, with “a curious mixture of respect and impatience.”  The respect grew from his celebrating the importance and influence of the men who had created this country.  A few were still around.  They may have seemed to be “giant oaks,” but they were not giants, only men.  Heroes for their own time but not for all time.

  “In his remarks, Lincoln respected the past without being paralyzed by it.  He understood the ways in which improvement must temper veneration and reason moderate passion. He recognized that only truth could conquer the dangerous distortions of myths,” Samet eloquently writes. 

   

  And so Lincoln returns to what we find in the Declaration of Independence:   “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

   

  That is what we were fighting for in World War II and achieved.

   

  That is what the Ukrainians are fighting for at this moment.  It is inspiring.  It is not to be forgotten, not ever, and I doubt if it ever will be.  However, I hope in time we will also seek to understand what led to this war and what we can draw from this understanding that might allow us to avoid a similar war in the future. This is an extremely relevant hope today in constructing a relationship with China which does not result in a competitive relationship morphing into an existential conflict that could lead to war.

  
  

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The Ever Present Threat of Fascism



Jason Stanley has written a still very timely book: How Fascism Works:  The Politics of Us and Them.

One reviewer described it this way:  “No single book is as relevant to the present moment".  

That it seems to me is a fair description.  Stanley wrote it in 2018 in the midst of Trump’s administration.  But the factors which he so eloquently cites that are accounting for a rebirth of fascism, not just in the U.S. but in other countries including Hungary and Poland, are neither new nor did they end with Trump’s departure.  As Stanley writes, “A moral of this book is that fascism is not a new threat but rather a permanent temptation.”  In fact, it’s been with us to one degree or another throughout our history, surfacing to higher levels at times of the inequality and pressure on the majority group that feels it’s being displaced by some new contaminating group.

 

Stanley meticulously dissects several elements that combine to form the foundation for fascism’s appeal.  They include the mythic past, propaganda which at its worst turns into denying the existence of truth, anti-intellectual, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, the appeal to law and order, capitalizing on sexual anxiety and citing large cities and urban elites as the source of contamination.

 

The America First movement led by Charles Lindbergh was the public face of pro-fascist sentiment in the U.S. as the ‘30s went on.

 

The particular danger of fascist politics comes from the particular way it dehumanizes segments of the population.  Genocides and campaigns of ethnic cleansing are regularly proceeded by the kind of political tactics we have seen in Myanmar, Nazi Germany, Serbia and the Deep South under Jim Crow.

We must be aware of, confront and counter this ever present danger of dehumanizing others. We must remember: Every Counts, always.

 

 

My Overriding Concern About the Supreme Court Decision on Race-Conscious Admissions

To be clear, I am very concerned that the recent Supreme Court decision will make it significantly more difficult to achieve the racial diversity which is so important to achieving the positive  learning environment which diversity, including racial diversity, has been shown to provide. 

But this is not my only concern.I am deeply worried that this decision will be interpreted incorrectly and cynically  presented by many as validating and justifying the unfounded and counter-factual assertion that racism and racial inequities no longer exist. They will therefore argue that there is no justification for special programs and initiatives to address what are undeniably self-evident, significant racially defined and influenced systemic gaps in education, health care, employment, work place practices, police actions, application of prison sentences, housing, lending practices and more. 

Those of us who recognize that the perverse effects of racist influenced polices, attitudes and cultures are still with us, even if not always motivated today by conscious racism, must redouble our commitment to achieve racial justice. We know that significant racial inequities arising from policies and cultures-- some of the past, some still with us--demand continued intentional action and intervention and measured assessment of progress if we are to have justice for all and enjoy the manifold benefits a diverse society offers.