The tide does not lift the little boats as it does the big boats, when the big boats have helicopters fueled by workers' blood and sweat for lift off into mega wealth and privilege. What about liberty and justice? Can they both exist in a complex culture such as ours? I suspect that liberty is a product of human negotiation and justice a product of a moral, yea spiritual, code. Government is charged with making possible the power of negotiation and affirming the making of justice.
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The nineteenth-century party politician's simplistic civic lesson provoked my middle-age onset paranoia. My health-forced retirement had made possible the 'leisure' to travel to various theme parks of consciousness. Some of my trips were pleasurable and some were downright horrifying. This journey was to a scary place in my inner world. In but a few heart beats, a mystical journey time of memory and imagination can create a dimension of exploration.
Fascism is a political system that can easily seduce a half-practiced democracy. If there is an imbalance in the equity of strength between ideas, force, and numbers, democracy can quickly become a mockery. With little more than 50 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, representative government can be hijacked. It seems that is the case in the early twenty-first century. Elitist ideas and unrestrained wealth can crush individual liberty…or worse. Money can perpetrate any 'big lie.' That combination can 'fool some of the people some of the time' and fool them for a generation, a lifetime, or several generations!
An honest consideration of antebellum slavery can serve as a model of that evil circumstance. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, et al., the icons of American independence, lamented slavery's embarrassing existence in the great American experience of liberty and self-government. But personal moral feelings and spiritually informed ideals of humanitarianism and justice did not change a culture or economic system that depended on slavery's existence. Slavery was the foundation of young America's emergence in world trade and power. The prevailing 'big lie' then was that while slavery was bad, it was necessary for the stability of the nation, the slaves' best interest, and the economy. Yes, slaves were humans, but they had no claim on liberty. Such was the moral hypocrisy of a nation…and a world.
It took a flawed hack politician and corporate lawyer from Illinois, who saw slavery's destruction as a contributing element in the saving of the federal union, to dismantle the vital 'peculiar institution' that had been so important to America's economic growth. Ideas of free labor and the cut throat competition of the emerging Industrial Age were also factors. The 'fringe and fanatic' abolitionist voices articulated freedom for slaves, but Grant's white and black armies in blue had the numbers and the North the instruments purchased by Yankee dollars and bonds to make the ideal reality.