Tag Archives: Democracy

What Unites Us and What Divides Us

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In Honor of Flag Day, Sunday, June 14, 2026

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog , June 12, 2026.
Created September 16, 2022

The 30 by 34 foot Star Spangled Banner Flag that inspired the lyrics below when it flew above Fort McHenry in the 1814 Battle of Baltimore. It is on permanent display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Please allow me, courtesy of Wikipedia, to begin with all of the stanzas of Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner, including the fifth stanza added by Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior in 1861. For I believe that these lines most truly express what unites US:

“O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

When our land is illumined with Liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strike a blow at her glory,
Down, down with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchained, who our birthright have gained,
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.”

Would you be surprised if any American would object to anything said in the Star Spangled Banner? The song has conveyed our bravery, our love for liberty, and that we acknowledge our protection by God. Well, yes, that last part about God, at least three out of ten Americans today would say “Whoa!” to that one. In fact each of the two political parties in the US are led by people who claim that God is on their side, and they’re nowadays likely to claim that the opposition is not aligned with the Almighty. So far, then, we are divided by our disagreement as to whether God is on the side of Republicans or Democrats.

How silly. Any Being worthy of being called God would not choose sides among Her children. And if my Theory of the Conscious Universe happens to be right, we are made out of Her, and represent Her, with what we think of as our self actually being The One Self, combining all opposites, all deviations, all avatars, all of us.

But from the standpoint of this article, so far, we have identified one factor (God) which has been used divisively lately. Let’s continue the analysis.

Freedom, Liberty, Individual Agency without unnatural restrictions. We all want that, right? I don’t hear any objections. Freedom is something we all want.

Willingness to fight and die for what we believe in. Troublemaking as it is, yes, it is in the core of our being, here on the continent that revolted from the old ways. We have always been fighters. Balancing that with also being better diplomats – in the class with Franklin and Jefferson – might be a good thing.

In the era of Locke and Montesquieu, imagining what the optimal organization of government might be, Jefferson and other Founding Fathers became impressed by the way the Native Americans governed themselves via a “stacked-government” model, giving tribes autonomy yet coming together as a federation of tribes for accomplishing larger missions, such as increasing sediment yields to the Delaware River basin. This idea became known as federalism. We still practice it today. We fought a Civil War over it, and that system’s inability to agree on a slavery policy. States’ Rights are a second factor dividing us. Or is it?

There is no question as to the power of the States today. It is an established fact. So long as there is true unrigged, unobstructed, unweighted voting by all, if someone does not like what the voters decided, they can move to another State. Although there is talk of changing the Constitution, States’ Rights are in no visible danger, so far as I can see. If it’s a factor that seems to be dividing us, we ought to agree publicly that we are not actually divided on that one point. What we may actually be disagreeing about are the ways in which free voting needs to be protected for the benefit of all citizens.

And we might also benefit from similarly scrutinizing what else appears to be dividing us, because in many cases we shall emerge from the process with a more specific set of disagreements, smaller and more controllable than the general animosity would suggest. If we can speak civilly to one another about such matters again I predict we will find that there is much less disagreement on specifics, and once we do that, our minds can creatively collaborate to find a synthesis in those areas of true dispute. We owe it to ourselves to attempt this and to doggedly pursue the process, point by point, until at least the hypnotized part of the divisiveness goes away.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, son of the poet and physician of the same name who added the final stanza to the National Anthem, the son being the most famous of the Supreme Court Justices, and an intellectual thought leader who, a Republican, influenced progressives such as FDR. His 1881 Common Law is the history and logic of how the law evolved. According to History.com:

“He emphasized both that the ‘life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience’ and that the law develops according to the ‘felt necessities of the time’ rather than according to any set of deductive premises.”

Thus doth the Law rest upon “the felt necessities of the time”.

That would be worrisome if our necessities are always changing. But they are always the same, or they wouldn’t be necessities in the first place. We shall always want our freedom, and most of us would want our equality. But there that equality thing – that’s a third divisive item (after God and States’ Rights). Or is it?

It’s possible to think “I myself must be treated like an equal by everyone” and at the same time say “but I work hard for my money, and I don’t want one of my equals to be a person who gets a handout out of the money I pay for taxes”.

Transfer payments are definitely a divisive factor. I first wrote about that in my 20s, suggesting that we invest in developing people with our transfer payments, with an eye toward gradually reducing the need for transfer payments.

If not the best answer, at least it suggests that we might get creative.

Those divisiveness factors we’re reviewing – God, liberty, equality, free speech (the latter item covered below) – are not meant to be an exhaustive list, so please think further and identify other causes of division.

Please do use this method of speaking civilly and peeling the onion to find where true disagreement lies (if it is there at all) and to try for solution directions to take together.

So far, the list has been pretty rational and cognitive. How about that larger part of ourselves? The subconscious, emotional, non-rational part that makes 95% of our decisions, according to Harvard don Gerald Zaltman?

The possibly biggest divisiveness factor is not a rational thing. It’s more of an animal-instinctive feeling: “These people are not for me at all.” Right now, that’s how we are sorting ourselves into these two groups (Red and Blue), while the rest of us are trying to bring us all back to the table as citizens of the USA.

Metacognition, which humans apparently do better than the other species, although the jury’s still out, is the art and science of watching what is going on in your own mind and inner theatre of feelings, and understanding the why of it. Here’s how metacognition applies to this situation.

We can actually turn the tide on this divisiveness thing by catching and neutering that automatic response of being repelled by a perceived “Other” group. Hold that automatic response with your will and your mind, like a dangerous squirming toad, and inspect it. What did it feel like? Who did it remind you of? When in life did you start to feel that way?

Don’t accept the feeling of being repelled by a person. It’s more of an alarm signal about you than about that other person. Meditate on what it is in you. In less than a week, you shall definitely have a deep intuition about it.

Who said, “I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.”

It was Abraham Lincoln.

We are all in this together and are collectively losing the game. This shocks game theorists. Why would there be just losers? How could that even be?

The weaponry stacked around is certainly enough to make this a dead planet.

Wasn’t WWII bad enough?

We have to accept each other.

We need to be able to cooperate or none of us may survive.

Give up the “bad guy” idea. (Don’t stop incarcerating criminals convicted by due process of law, whether seditionists, murderers, rapists, or whatever. No one should be exempt from such accountability to justice. It’s more useful to think of them as being psychologically diseased/unbalanced than as “bad guys”. The “bad guys” construct triggers autonomic emotional reactions that are pragmatically obstructive to solution finding. We can think more effectively and creatively without that construct.)

Then we can easily talk the rest of this out so that each tribe can be satisfied. But not if we can’t talk to each other without negative emotion flaring up. Master your selves. Talk civilly and respectfully to all.

Free Speech, the Right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, became a divisive factor when the enormous megaphone called the Internet happened.

We felt that we were given license to say anything we pleased, true or false, whether it would hurt someone else’s feelings or not. Not all of us activated that. But many tens of millions got into it as if they had been holding it in since kindergarten. And they are now a bit stuck in it. If they try to back out of it too gracelessly they will be attacked from all sides.

The people are still walking around in rage. Stop avoiding them. They need help. Have infinite patience. They will be blessed by it. You will be blessed by it. Use this post as a study guide to prepare for such meetings with your own ideas about what are the divisive factors and how can we peel each one away like an onion so that we can see reality together, agree on what we see at that moment, or do further research on any areas in which we cannot agree. But always civilly in recognition of the seriousness of the situation in which we had all better be on one side, the side of the human race, or we are quite literally doomed.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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How Do We Protect Our Elections and Voting Rights At The Same Time?

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created May 21, 2026

The question of non-citizen voting in U.S. elections is a major point of public discussion. Extensive data, recent state-level audits, and nonpartisan research show that verified cases of non-citizen voting are vanishingly rare, representing a minute fraction of a percent of overall votes cast.

When state election officials conduct extensive audits using federal immigration databases (like SAVE) and Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records, the initial lists of “suspected” non-citizens routinely shrink drastically upon investigation. This is usually because the data relies on outdated status reports (e.g., individuals who were green card holders when they got their driver’s license but have since become naturalized U.S. citizens).

The Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) and recent state reports provide the following official figures:

Note: “Potential” or “Suspected” means the individuals were flagged for review; subsequent checks usually reveal many are actually naturalized citizens who simply haven’t updated their DMV profile.

The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a national database tracking verified instances of voter fraud. Going back to the year 2000, their database documents fewer than 100 cases of non-citizen voting across the entire country. Given that hundreds of millions of ballots have been cast in that timeframe, the percentage is statistically close to 0%.

A landmark study by the Brennan Center analyzed 42 jurisdictions during the 2016 presidential election (tabulating 23.5 million votes). Election officials referred only 30 cases of suspected non-citizen voting for investigation—amounting to 0.0001% of the votes.

Why It Happens (When It Does)

Data shows that the microscopic number of non-citizens who do successfully register or vote are almost exclusively Lawful Permanent Residents (green card holders) rather than undocumented immigrants. These cases are usually driven by administrative errors (such as being automatically prompted to register while getting a driver’s license) or honest confusion about eligibility rules, rather than intentional fraud.

Recent data from major polling operations, including the comprehensive PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll and federal tracking data, outlines where the public stands:

High Bipartisan Support for Specific Stricter Laws

When polled on specific legislative proposals—such as photo voter ID mandates or proof-of-citizenship requirements—supermajorities of Americans consistently voice support.

  • Voter ID Requirements: Between 81% and 84% of Americans support requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote. This includes roughly 95%–98% of Republicans, 79%–84% of independents, and 67%–70% of Democrats.
  • Proof of Citizenship: Approximately 75% to 83% of Americans favor requiring proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote for the first time.
  • The SAVE America Act: A White House data release tracking public sentiment on federal election security legislation shows 71% overall support for tighter federal restrictions on voter registration eligibility, including half of rank-and-file Democrats.

Fraud vs. Access: The Public Divide

Despite broad consensus on IDs, the public splits significantly when asked about the core philosophy governing election laws. The Marist Poll reveals a sharp divide over whether the priority should be stopping fraud or maximizing turnout:

  • The Primary Concern: 59% of Americans believe it is more important to ensure that everyone who wants to vote is able to do so. Conversely, 41% say the bigger concern should be ensuring no one votes who is ineligible.
  • Partisan Splits: This question is highly polarized. 70% of Republicans prioritize stopping ineligible voters, while 86% of Democrats and 53% of Independents prioritize maximizing voter access.

Perceived Threats to Elections

When Americans are asked to name the single biggest threat to safe and secure elections, voter fraud ranks high, but it shares the spotlight with other anxieties:

  • 33% cite voter fraud as the top threat.
  • 26% cite misleading information (including concerns about AI-generated misinformation).
  • 24% cite voter suppression (worrying that strict laws will turn away eligible voters).

Notably, 57% of Republicans view voter fraud as the top threat, whereas 41% of Democrats view voter suppression as the primary threat, and a plurality of independents worry most about misinformation.

In summary, the percentage of Americans who want stricter laws depends heavily on how the question is asked. If asked about voter ID and citizenship verification, support sits overwhelmingly at 75% to 84%. However, if asked whether tightening laws to prevent fraud is more important than protecting voter access, only about 41% of the country prioritizes fraud prevention above all else.

When forced to weigh election security against voter access, a clear majority of Americans prioritize ensuring that eligible voters are not locked out of the system.

According to the comprehensive PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll on Election Security:

  • 59% of Americans state that their primary concern is making sure that everyone who wants to vote is able to do so.
  • This concern is heavily driven by partisan lines: 86% of Democrats and 53% of Independents prioritize maximizing voter access over stopping potential fraud.

Fear of Voters Being Turned Away

Anxieties regarding specific voting rights being taken away or restricted at the ballot box have hit a multi-year high:

  • 58% of Americans believe it is likely that people will show up to the polls only to be told they are not eligible to vote.
  • This represents a striking 16-percentage-point jump from when the same question was asked in 2020. Among Democrats, this fear rises to 74%.

Concern Over Gerrymandering and Vote Dilution

While broad polling generally measures “gerrymandering” through the lens of overall trust in the political process, the sentiment that the system is being rigged to minimize the effect of certain votes is incredibly widespread.

  • Threats to Democracy: In the February 2026 Marist Poll, 78% of Americans stated that they believe U.S. democracy is “in jeopardy” or “under serious threat.”
  • The “Voter Suppression” Threat: When asked to isolate the single largest threat to a safe and fair election, 24% of Americans specifically point to voter suppression (the intentional restriction of voting access).
  • Lack of Confidence in Fair Elections: Driven heavily by the ongoing “arms race” of mid-decade redistricting across states like California, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia, public confidence that state/local governments will run fair and accurate elections dropped to two-thirds (66%)—a 10-percentage-point decrease from late 2024.

Data tracking from organizations like the Pew Research Center confirms that large majorities of Americans intuitively favor electoral fairness and believe that extreme partisan gerrymandering actively undermines confidence in whether their individual vote actually matters.

What do these facts tell us? Despite the incidence of voter fraud being close to zero, 41% of us want stricter laws preventing it, outweighing in their minds the risk of citizen voting being made so much more difficult or diluted that “one person, one vote” no longer applies, and minority rule can take over America.

How can we explain this?

Possibility #1: 41% of us are racists.

Possibility #2: 41% of us are unaware of the near-zero factual threat of voter fraud to date.

Possibility #3: 41% of us simply want the Republicans to win, regardless of the issues or consequences.

Possibility #4: 41% of us fear the perceived weakness of the Democrats more than they fear anything else.

Possibility #5: 41% of us fear that the elections are going to be rigged from now on, because of the actions now being taken by the government, and they want stricter anti-fraud laws to protect us against that. (However, the laws that we need to prevent that are not being strengthened, in fact the weakening of voter rights strengthens that.)

Possibility #6: all of the above to varying degrees. This is the likely real answer.

What should we all do?

  1. Take action to make sure the facts about voter fraud statistics are known by as many people as possible. We can all do this in social media. Let’s make social media socially a positive force for a change.
  2. If you do not see yourself as weak, run for office, or help someone you see as strong and wise run for office. Socrates and George Washington agreed that wise and morally strong people must be willing to accept the role of governing, even if they would prefer to do something else with their lives. Unfortunately, the public votes for strong over wise, so if you are in any way involved in politics or are willing to become involved now that our country needs all of us to become more involved, and you are a combat veteran or simply a strong person, hear and take the call now.

Happy Memorial Day Remember and Honor May 25, 2026

Love to all,
Bill

 

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How AI Might Help Shape a Better Future for American Politics

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created March 6, 2026

I’ve been asking AI a lot of questions lately about the American Revolution. I can see it like a movie now. Sort of like the original 1960 Ocean’s Eleven, when we see how the gang comes together like iron filings around a magnetic story arc.

In the real his-and-her-story (formerly known as his story, i.e., history), John Adams got religion first, around 1765, PO’ed by the Stamp Act and Taxation Without Representation.

George Washington, always methodical, gradually shifted his attitude over a period of years, 1769–1774, in increasing indignation against the British treatment of Americans as inferior. The major stimuli included trade restrictions and the Coercive Acts. But there was also a personal matter. He had joined the British Army, and because he was American, he was given the rank of Brevet Captain instead of full Captain. Apparently, his mother had rankled him all his young life with put-downs, which made him extra sensitive in his adult life to treatment like that.

Thomas Jefferson was drawn into the revolutionary mindset ~1774 (the turning point year, as we shall see in a moment) by the issues of infringement on natural rights and self-governance.

Alexander Hamilton joined the movement in 1774, spurred by political unrest in New York and the Continental Congress.

Benjamin Franklin was the last of this group to join. He spent decades in London trying to bridge the gap between the colonies and the Crown. He truly believed the British Empire could be saved. The turning point was the “Hutchinson Letters Affair” (1774), where he was publicly humiliated by British officials. He realized reconciliation was impossible and sailed home in March 1775, arriving in Philadelphia just after the battles of Lexington and Concord, ready to serve the rebellion.

Thomas Paine joined the American revolutionary movement upon arriving in Philadelphia from England on November 30, 1774. Recommended by Franklin, Paine quickly immersed himself in colonial politics, publishing his influential, pro-independence pamphlet Common Sense on January 10, 1776, which galvanized support for the revolution.

The American Revolution was primarily influenced by Enlightenment philosophers, most notably John Locke, whose theories on natural rights (life, liberty, property) and the social contract directly shaped the Declaration of Independence. Other key influences included Montesquieu (separation of powers), Rousseau (popular sovereignty), and Thomas Paine (republicanism). Most of the Founders themselves also wrote brilliant philosophical treatises. If we had leaders today who were as creative in thinking about the future, we would probably not be in the current mess.

Enter AI.

The USA is a representative democracy, and this worked for almost 250 years, but it is showing signs of wear. The necessity for representatives was obvious all this time because there was no way for all of us to vote every day on every big and little decision and still get anything else done, like producing goods and services, inventing things, defending the nation, etc.

AI does change this. It would be possible for each of us to tell AI everything we want government to do and not do, every day, as the spirit moves us. AI could combine all this input from ~325 million people, knowing which ones are adults and eligible to vote, which ones are citizens but minors, which ones are immigrants not eligible to vote. AI could provide summaries of what We, The People want continuously to the government at all levels, as well as to the press and to educators and back to all of us.

This would seem to be a highly probable eventuality at some point. It might start very soon as unofficial experimentation and perhaps as a more constructive channeling of the shouting match we call social media.

This would use a lot of computing power and have a high carbon footprint and possibly lead to some breakthroughs in clean energy sources.

Rooting out biases in AI and the need for continuous fact checking would be crucial in such a system.

Bad actors would focus on political cybermanipulation. Good agents of the Justice and Intel systems would work to keep them from ruining a good thing.

But wait! How would this be better than polling? Doesn’t polling serve this function already?

Polling is limited to the ideas which are already on the table. The AI method would pick up creative new ideas even if only one person came up with them. In fact the national governmental AI should not be a single AI but a collegial team of AIs looking at the same data from many viewpoints, some looking for new ideas, some fact checking, some looking for historical precedents, and so on.

Polling has another problem of representativeness. The response rate to polling is typically under 10%, suggesting a very large nonresponse bias. Pew and other sources taken together suggest that something like 87% of Americans use social media, implying a willingness to key in at least a few words every now and then. The AI scenario envisioned here would be voice driven rather than requiring keystrokes, which would also be an option. In order to maximize engagement, the government could offer modest tax rebates based of the degree of contribution to the ideas of the nation.

We would still need representatives and the rest of government at all levels to carry out the wishes of the people. In fact, the mess we are in now is only slightly the result of imperfections in the system the Founders designed, and a much larger factor is the imperfections of the people in that system.

If we elected people who were of good character, devoted to the good of the many, more of us would vote.

“Using data from the University of Florida Election Lab, a new analysis by the Environmental Voter Project shows that 85.9 million eligible voters skipped the 2024 general election, far surpassing the 76.8 million ballots cast for Donald Trump or the 74.3 million for Kamala Harris.

If “Did Not Vote” had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump’s 175 and Harris’s 98.” This quote from the Environmental Voter Project website.

The party system was not included in the U.S. Constitution. It actually started as a result of the greatly differing visions of Hamilton and Jefferson. Hamilton wanted a strong federal government and industrial development in order to make the U.S.A. a major world power. Jefferson wanted more of an agrarian distributed nation. Hamilton’s views spawned the Federalist Party, and Jefferson’s gave birth to the Republican Democratic Party. The two men, although at odds ideologically, were able to work together and make deals such as the one which created the first national bank and led to what is today the Fed.

The Party system today is essential to get Presidential candidates to be known to the public, a costly affair because advertising is not free. In the future, it is conceivable that a different system might emerge in which the media charge nothing for political advertising (which would increase the cost of advertising to all the other categories by less than 3%).

Schools ought to bring back civics classes and inspire some students to become dedicated public servants motivated by non-ego, non-money, and non-power motivations. People who are of that ilk who want to run for office ought to be lifted up by even the small set of early supporters they find. Social media provides a way for the bubble up from grassroots method to be potentially viable. If the product (the candidate) is authentic enough and of high character, a noble human being like the Founders, for all their human flaws, he or she will go viral. The new mayor of New York is an example of what can happen (I do not know enough to say anything pro or con about his character; time will tell, let’s give him a fair chance), but he did rise rather rapidly from obscurity.

Times look dark when creativity has not been fully leveraged yet. There are more possible outcome scenarios than appear to be on the table based on the loud megaphones of the two parties and limited time each day for creative thought and imagination. AI and HI (Human Intelligence) together in harmony can overcome all messes.

Umberto Eco Deeply Understood and Cared

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog:  July 26, 2024

Umberto Eco at his home.*

The Italian novelist, essayist, deep thinker Umberto Eco won first prize in a Fascist essay contest when he was ten years old. He was a product of his culture: Mussolini’s Italy was all he ever knew up until that point. That was reality. Fascism was his way of life, although not consciously. He had no inkling of other worlds then. The year was 1942.

Less than a year later on the morning of April 27, 1943 he learned from a radio broadcast that “Fascism had collapsed and Mussolini had been arrested.” (Five Moral Pieces) He ran out and looked at the headlines on the suddenly large numbers of newspapers and saw that political parties that must have existed in secret were all coming out. Until that moment he had believed that every country had just one party and in Italy it was the Fascist party.

“My God, I had never read words like ‘freedom’ or ‘dictatorship’ in all my life. By virtue of these words, I was reborn as a free Western man.”

Eco having been conditioned as a Fascist was released from that condition by outside forces and uplifted. He became a teacher, philosopher, scientist, best-selling novelist.

His concept of semiotics permits us to read the signs in all things since all things may be interpreted as signs in themselves. We all constantly create signs, both intentionally and without conscious intent. This was his unique perspective on the nature of reality.

In Five Moral Pieces he dissects fascism in its broader sense (i.e. not limited to Italy’s version) into a specific set of attributes. This is relevant because he was a person born into fascism and took it for granted as part of life. He experienced liberation by the Allies and the transformation of the way of life. His mind changed and he much preferred the new social contract and its freedoms. He realized himself as a passionate supporter of diversity.

Eco provides the following list of clues to help humanity detect fascism:

  1. “The cult of tradition“. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur.
  2. “The rejection of modernism“, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity.
  3. “The cult of action for action’s sake“, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
  4. “Disagreement is treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action.
  5. “Fear of difference“, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
  6. “Appeal to a frustrated middle class“, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
  7. “Obsession with a plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson‘s book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
  8. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak“. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
  9. “Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” because “life is permanent warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight.
  10. “Contempt for the weak“, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
  11. “Everybody is educated to become a hero“, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death.
  12. “Machismo“, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”.
  13. “Selective populism” – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people”.
  14. “Newspeak” – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

Thanks to Wikipedia for distilling these attributes, which saved me time; I have condensed the Wikipedia listing.

Eco published his essay on this subject in 1995. On July 11, 2024, another great writer and thinker, David Brooks wrote an essay in The New York Times aimed at understanding why America today is not repelled by the idea of authoritarianism. His conclusion is that, until the 1960s, America had a balance between reason and religion which, while disagreeing on one level, agreed upon the moral and ethical grounds for conduct. Then, starting in the 1960s, America began to become less religious, and reason and science on their own did not present as compelling a case for upholding idealistic values:

“At the same time, science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together. By 1981, in the famous first passage of his book “After Virtue,” the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued that we had inherited fragments of moral ideas, not a coherent moral system to give form to a communal life, not a solid set of moral foundations to use to settle disputes. Moral reasoning, he wrote, had been reduced to “emotivism.” If it feels right, do it. In 1987, Allan Bloom released his megaselling “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that moral relativism had become the dominant ethos of the era.”

“In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension, and with it the culture that had long held a diverse nation together. By the 21st century it became clear that Americans were no longer disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. [James Davison] Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism — the belief in nothing. As he puts it, ‘If there is little or no common political ground today, it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.’”

“Was there anything that would fill this void of meaning? Was there anything that could give people a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose? It turns out there was: identity politics. People on the right and the left began to identify themselves within a particular kind of moral story. This is the story in which my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors. For people who feel they are floating in a moral and social vacuum, this story provides a moral landscape — there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition. By expressing my rage, I will earn your attention and respect.”

“The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers. If our beliefs are defined by our identities and not individual reason and personal experience, then different Americans are living in different universes and there is no point in trying to engage in deliberative democracy. You just have to crush them. You have to grab power and control of the institutions and shove your answers down everybody else’s throats.”

“In this climate, Hunter argues, ‘the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.’ Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state.”

“The task, then, is to build a new cultural consensus that is democratic but also morally coherent. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.”

I agree with Brooks that America, and the human race, needs and deserves a reason to value liberty, equality, justice, democracy, and differences of opinion. I don’t necessarily agree with his proposed solution of waiting for religious progressives to convince the masses of a modern social gospel. We need a solution now. My proposed solution is for the media to provide broad coverage to the idea that science cannot rule out the possibility that the universe is a single consciousness, the same consciousness that each of us thinks of as “myself”. Once there is near-universal realization that this is a real possibility, all of the moral compunctions required by religion return as the only logical course of action if we are all universally connected. It was aimed at this end that I wrote A Theory Of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” and made the ten-minute video Connectedness.

I am convinced by my own experiences that the truth is we are all parts of the greatest adventure that could ever exist, and we all benefit by win/win thinking and action. This is diametrically opposed to the zeitgeist of the present day. My research finds that this concept of who we are and what the universe truly is, appeals to all factions in the political spectrum. This scientific lens also supports the claims of the great religions, that their founders and saints received knowledge from a higher source, and even explains how “miracles” might have actually happened. This scientific and spiritual picture of reality can be the glue that puts us back together. We don’t have to prematurely accept it as scientifically proven until it is, but we can popularize the notion as a leading possible explanation for the nature of reality. The more this idea is exposed open-mindedly in the media the more likely we are to survive as a species.

Carpe diem!

My best to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

*Image source: Aubrey, CC BY-SA 1.0 resized <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0>, via Wikimedia Commons