Patriotism in an Era of Political Decline

The American Experiment is showing its age. After two centuries, the once radical and energetic idea of self-government, now seems tired and old. Today, a putrid rotting smell wafts across the entire process. To revive our politics, we will need some of the cleansing radical air of the founding.

In the early years of the farming republic, power was distributed across the states, and more importantly, across thousands of local governments. With industrialization, this once distributed system of government quickly became centralized in Washington DC. With this centralization came the decline and atrophy of local political organization and eventually the disappearance of the citizenry from politics.

As power transferred to DC, the modern practices of advertising and marketing, the technologies of television and more recently the internet, overwhelmed and crushed democratic political dialog and organization. Politics became controlled and defined by an increasingly degenerate, incompetent, and infinitely greedy elite.

Yet, in this era of political decline, the institutions of the old republic still remain. Across the country city councils, county boards, school districts, water districts all remain. They need to be revived. But in order to do that, we need to develop a new politics that looks not to DC as the fount of all things political, but in total opposition, the citizen participating in local institutions. We can revive political education, dialog, and organization based on these institutions. We can look at the great issues of our era, the environment, energy, technology and all the others, and build a politics not on what DC needs to do, but what we as citizens can do, revitalizing and evolving our local institutions to meet these challenges.

Doing this will necessitate, once again, breaking down established traditions and practices on the value of hierarchical political power, instead creating a new politics that understands the capabilities of a distributed networked political order, where local entities are connected, working together across large geographic areas.

There are of course massive centralized power structures, most specifically leviathan corporations, who dominate our present system and have zero willingness to change. In fact just the opposite, they look, as centralized power eternally does, to concentrate ever more power.

In 1997, the great American Richard Goodwin gave an excellent speech calling attention to the ever increasing power of the “forces of organized wealth”, which he correctly deemed the era’s greatest political challenge. Yet, in the last decades, regardless who has held office, these forces have gained ever more power. These circumstances will only be changed by an active and equally powerful force of citizens seeking to revive the moribund institutions of the republic, evolving them for a new era.

In 1775, when the American colonials took on the established centralized political and economic powers, they wrote,