If you want a new nation, write a new Constitution

It seems increasingly clear to me that the first American Republic has failed and that we need to look forward to the second or, at the very least, to a transformation of the American Republic as profound as that of the New Deal.

Now, people have despaired many times. The Civil War certainly seemed like an irretrievable failure, yet somehow we pulled together and went on. The Great Depression seemed as if the capitalist system as a whole was unsalvageable, yet we salvaged it and re-wrote the social contract. Those terrible days of the 1960s, when we lived under the nuclear shadow and national leaders were being cut down seemed as though they would end in chaos.

So, it is not events alone that determine when a system fails. It is something inherent in the system itself. Just as a person can be terribly wounded, yet survive because of the will to live, a nation must have a will to live. Nations can exist for a time on the imperial hunger, a will to dominate and feast on the wealth produced by others. Unless they care about truth and about including all their members in their decisions, however, they inevitably make bad decisions, inflict the consequences on the weaker members, and fragment as more and more people start to understand that they are disposable.

That’s our history over the last ten years. Most Americans–even those not occupying– realize that they are regarded by the elites as pieces of trash. Fewer and fewer Americans believe that they enjoy the very spare list of human rights enumerated in the Constitution. Half of us don’t vote, and many of us who do believe that our concerns are not heard above the din of the Koch brothers and the corporations.

There is a movement in Congress to write a constitutional amendment to reduce the power of money in politics. I believe this is too narrowly focused. The problem with elections is equalizing the power of the voices of the people. It’s fine by me if Exxon has a voice. I just want it to be about as loud as my own. So we have to address the whole crooked system: from poll taxes and the exclusion of prisoners from voting to a media controlled by a hundred people to the power of corporate money.

I propose the following language:

“The right of the people to be accurately informed on issues pertinent to selecting representatives to government being essential to maintaining freedom and prosperity, elections shall afford all candidates access to means of communication adequate to discuss issues with their prospective constituents, shall forbid the use of concentrated wealth to corrupt elections, and shall require that all persons shall be able to vote.”

I think that the existing system will have to collapse to create an opening for a new one. But I would be happy to be proven wrong. But whether the first Republic is ending, or simply being transformed, we need to have a vision–a positive vision– of what we want. It is this vision of the “America that will be,” as Langston Hughes called it, that amounts to our national will to live. If we fail to dream, darker forces will have the opening they have always wanted.