How We Can Prevent The Cutting Down Of The Tree Of Democracy
Subscribe Today!
So many things are happening that are changing norms and expectations, especially in our current political climate. We see these things slowly chipping away the tree of democracy every day. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the big D of democracy in America, how it is being cut down, and how to prevent its destruction. When people try to hold onto things from the past and monopolize our democracy, we move farther away from its true essence—which is about inclusion. Bill and Tom go further and provide examples, tapping into the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the censure of Paul Gosar, the impassioned speech of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more. Join them as they search for Democracy's healing truth.
---
Watch the episode here
How We Can Prevent The Cutting Down Of The Tree Of Democracy
Welcome back to the show. Bill, we have been talking for a while now about the subject that I think is time to bring it out to our audience. We were talking about cutting down the tree of democracy and, eventually, how to prevent it. I think we both see an awful lot of communication out there in our elected representatives that every day, it seems like there is something new, and it breaks another norm or expectation that has existed. We see things that are treading dangerously close to harming democracy overall.
We will talk about this in this episode. It may be a recurring theme in some upcoming episodes as we talk about things that might be chipping away or cutting at that tree of democracy. I have a departure planned for us on this, but I want to give you an opportunity. Is there something about this that you would like to say before we get into maybe something specific?
It reminds me of the story, The Giving Tree, where the tree gives. The little kid grows up, but he keeps coming back to the tree, and the tree keeps giving him things. The tree is like, “Here are my leaves. Here are my branches. Here are my small branches. Here are my larger branches. Here is my stock,” and all of a sudden, the tree has left with the stump.
It is all he’s got left, so how do you grow something in water versus how do you use it until it is completely gone and all you are is an old person sitting on a stump? The nice part of The Giving Tree is the tree and the kid’s life span match each other, but when it comes to a thing like a planet, a nation, or an ideal, it doesn’t go like that.
It’s got to go beyond just one lifetime. There is no monopoly on length in which a nation or a group of ideals last. We have got several hundreds of the complete civilizations that have come and gone, like Aztec, Egyptian, Roman Empire, time of the Greeks, or the English Empire. We have got time and human beings. Democracy is one that is passing through. It is almost like you can set all the different belief structures right next to each other and dress them up in costumes, and there would be the Statue of Liberty or Uncle Sam sitting in at the end and going like, “Who’s going to be the next thing that’s coming after democracy?”
It’s a little weird to talk about, but we do. There is a group of human beings that like to keep things the same. They want to have kings and queens. They want to be in the civil war. They want to have an experience of having a fundamentalist religion be a part of the political makeup, and they want their place to have those kinds of beliefs and systems only. That is one of those things that can cut down the tree of democracy because democracy is more about the inclusion of multiple ideals and beliefs rather than just a handful or one ideal and belief.
As soon as somebody says, “This is a Christian nation is founded on Christian principles,” all of a sudden, it goes in that direction because there have been many of the founding fathers that did not have that as a part of it. That is a good place to start. We have a tree, four different kinds of axes, and we can start chopping it down anytime you want. You have read some things about this too.
There are many things that have happened that we can point to. What I want to start with is something I have read. It starts to get at what is chopping away at the tree of democracy. In April 2021, Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight.com, which represents the number of electors in the electoral colleges, noted that of the 293 Republicans who were serving in the Senate and House on January 20th, 2017, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration when he first became president. A full 132 or 45% of those Republicans are either no longer in Congress or have announced their retirement or resignation at this point, and they’re under pressure from former President Donald Trump.
The party continues to radicalize with Firebrands like Lauren Boebert from Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, Matt Gaetz from Florida, and Paul Gosar, gaining a lot of influence. Here is where we get at the tree of democracy getting chipped away. Republican leadership has refused to call out Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. You have probably seen in the news what she had said for her Islamophobic statements.
Her colleague Representative Ilhan Omar of the Democrat from Minnesota is suggesting she was a terrorist. This is right on the heels of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican from California, for his support for Representative Paul Gosar, the Republican from Arizona, after he released the video of that anime showing him killing Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and also taking swings at President Joe Biden.
What this indicates is that Kevin McCarthy has lost control of his caucus or is afraid of it, or both. This is, I think, a really important thing to talk about the tree of democracy starting to be chopped down. We were in a two-party system still in the United States. If you’ve got a party where its leaders can't stand up for a certain set of ideals and say something is wrong, even though not illegal, they censured Paul Gosar. Clearly, the House said, “This kind of behavior is not acceptable.”
If you have somebody like Kevin McCarthy, who was the leader of his party that has no ability to control his caucus or doesn’t want to, we have sunk to a new low in this country. Being a Republican is more about a loyalty test to being a Republican than it is being loyal to the big A that you and I talk about of America, or the big D of democracy. In this case, it’s the tree of democracy. That is what I wanted to share with you and start to talk about.
I appreciate that. We have all kinds of rules and laws about violence in the workplace. We have all kinds of guidelines and things that say, “Here is acceptable behavior and here are things that are not acceptable.” Freedom of speech is you get to say anything you want at any time to anyone fully, but it is not that because there used to be social norms that say, “We were not going to tolerate that language in this company, this House, or these things.” There used to be some sense of what respectful and accepting language looks like. If you are going to argue, you need to pick words and phrases that are going to make your point and still be respectful to the other side.
A lot of name-callings have now moved to the front of the list because name-calling will get more eyeballs than respectful communication between colleagues. We can see the problem with labels and diagnoses in name-calling because it is damaging the person, the democracy, and the ability to have a civil discussion about what it means to be in the loyal opposition and what it means to fight for these values that we stand for. That is one of those axes that we have got to set down. Stop labeling and stop the name-calling. Don’t use those marketing tools. You’ve got to get your message to stick in a different way than just calling a person a name, calling them a terrorist, or demonstrating physical and violent thoughts about the person.
I thought it was interesting. If our audience hasn’t heard it or seen it, but I know you have, there was a very impassioned and I thought quite free from the rhetoric of speech from the House Floor by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was before Paul Gosar was censured where she said something that was very telling. She said, “When did it become acceptable for a member of Congress or a Representative to the United States to say that violent hate speech is acceptable as long as that Representative claims a lack of meaning?”
I thought that was very well told. She said that they would put out this video showing one Representative of Congress killing another. That’s what’s depicted in the video, then the Representative said, “This doesn’t mean what you think it means. I didn’t mean that.” It's like the Inigo Montoya defense. The Representative then claims a lack of meaning, even though on its face, it depicts that. It shows where we have devolved to in one big way within our Representative. It is not about the ideals of a party or ideals for America. It is about winning.
The next question is what to do about it. Could she have done something differently? Was there a place to a reparative narrative, at the same time, doing an honest narrative?
She was doing scary honesty and calling it out for what it really is, which oftentimes, we have said that the facts don’t matter if it doesn’t stick. I thought her speech was very well done, but it didn’t stick as much as the animated video.
The animated video got more play and people are like, “What was the kerfuffle about?” Others would be like, “She said something nice.” It should be that, but it’s too late because the message came out in a stick at the level of violence that he has towards another person in Congress. Human beings have violent thoughts about each other.
We feel angry, and we want to think that violence towards another person is going to help us feel better, but it doesn’t. It creates a temporary relief of the anger that we have, then immediately after that, there is a rapid decline of payoff. It’s like, “I beat that enemy, but I’m still facing these fifteen others.” What good was that? You are going to be thinking, “Could there have been a different way than I did which might not have been as costly?”
The outrage only gets you so far is what I’m hearing from you.
It’s a very quick-burning fire. It’s like putting a newspaper in a bonfire. It’s up and gone right away. That is what anger does. It doesn’t last long. Even in war, the way to get to a person is to talk to the person and ask them to stop shooting you. People think, “That doesn’t work. You got to shoot the person,” but no. You can ask them.
It’s like, “How about if we skip this whole violence against each other? We’re up for this, and we’re here at this point. It looks like we’re here for this, but we’d really like this other thing to take place. Why don’t we talk about it and not kill each other? How about that?” As we learned in Iraq, that worked better. They stopped killing us by getting them to work, providing money and stability, and getting it to work better.
What could Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have done differently in that speech to make something stick better to get the point across that this is not acceptable behavior for a member of Congress?
It is going to be unsettling for people to hear this, but it is empathy and compassion for the person that put that video out. She should be like, “Congressman Paul Gosar, it’s clear that you don’t like me. You don’t like the ideals that I stand for. I’m guessing you’re feeling pretty angry and furious to put out such a video. The people that are watching the video and then having humor about that don’t extend respect to me as a fellow American.”
“Even though, at this moment, I am going to choose to extend respect to you. You were elected by your people to represent them. Is this what they want to hear from you? Is this your best messaging about what you’re going to do for them in your district? What I’m choosing to do in my district is to be able to provide funding wealth for all middle-class, even in your state of Arizona.”
“I want to vote for your constituents to get them the things they need to better their world. It seems like you’re communicating a message of anger and violence because I’m doing that. I’m trying to make America better, but it seems like you’re in pain because your belief is that Democrats spend too much. How about if we’re trying to repair things that are long-lasting and need to be repaired? How about if we find common ground between the two of us?”
“Instead of sending violence to each other, why don’t you co-sponsor a bill with me about something that is going to work for your district? Why don’t you try that instead of the video? We might find that I’ll be willing to listen to you. How about collaboration and cooperation instead of trying to score points with the fringe and the people in your party that is taking shots at me? You might find that it might be more like a statesman. We might have tried that path.”
By doing that, she would be more of the adult in the room. She’s got to be twenty years younger than him. That’s got to make him look really bad without saying, “Representative Paul Gosar, you are a bad person.”
It’s like the whole anime thing. Even in the anime world, the way the world is set up is very anti-democratic or very fascist. The whole anime world is not something that you want to be a part of, and to make her or Joe Biden the big monster they’re attacking and doing that to democracy. They’re saying that this way of thinking is junky, and then meanwhile, it’s a head-shaker because we do so many things that are community-oriented that the Republicans want to keep.
Firemen, policemen, civil servants, local government, we’re funding all kinds of “socialist/communist kind of things” of what is good for the collective view, but most people don’t know that there needs to be a very kind handshake between capitalism and socialism. They need to handshake with each other to make our system work best, not to have the two of them fight with each other. That is completely not in any narrative that I have seen at all because those two narratives need to help each other.
Free speech is all over the place. People are going to burn leaders and effigy, but that’s common people or the average people. For one Representative of Congress to propagate a message of him killing another member of Congress, that crossed the line. It takes me back to the Kathy Griffin controversy during Donald Trump’s administration where she’s a comedian, and she tried to make a joke of holding Donald Trump’s severed head up and took a photograph with it. She was just a comedian, and look what happened to her. Her career pretty much ended at that point because that was too far.
All of a sudden, a member of Congress does pretty much the same thing. He didn’t kill the president, but he did swing swords at the president. I still wonder if Paul Gosar got a visit from the Secret Service. Anybody who makes any threat veiled or otherwise against the president, I’m sure they get a visit from the national security apparatus of this country.
They want to make sure that the threat is not something that’s real or that’s going to grow, and they will prosecute that. The notice that the line that they went and tested was it’s okay to go after this person, but they didn’t go all the way after having him fight and win a battle with Joe Biden. They didn’t do that in the anime because that would have brought that next level. How can you let somebody get away with that? The answer is we can’t let people get away with or not have some civil norms about how we talk and express things to each other inside certain settings.
Inside other settings where you’re in your private place of being in your house, you can be furious and threaten people. Americans allow people to talk to each other pretty violently in a lot of ways, but then there’s domestic violence that goes into that direction, then there are people screaming at each other and parents screaming at their kids. A lot of that is pretty junky language that people use towards each other. Without some constraint, it becomes very difficult.
There are some interesting ironies or contradictions because Congress has its own set of rules. In some cases, we find there really aren’t a lot of rules for our elected representatives where if you worked at any company of a certain size that has policies that are in alignment with the law, you’re an employee and you put out an anime video about killing another employee of the company, you would be fired on the spot and be out of the company. There would be no hearing or due process. They would just fire you.
It would not be congressmen speaking in Congress on your behalf, which there were congressmen that speaking on Paul Gosar’s behalf. They were arguing it's free speech, but this is a workplace issue.
It is a workplace issue, but there are other issues too. What was shocking to me about this whole episode is that the Leader of the Republican caucus in the House, Kevin McCarthy, couldn’t bring himself to say that what Paul Gosar did was wrong. Only two Republicans in the House of Representatives voted with the Democrats to censure Paul Gosar.
That was Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and that probably comes as no great surprise to a lot of people because they are the two Republicans that are trying to fight for, dare I say, truth and seeking truth with what happened on January 6, 2021, being members of the select committee in the House. I think that when we get to this point where our elected representatives can’t agree on things that are acceptable and not, or what’s right and wrong, at least at some level, that tree of democracy is getting chopped at pretty damn good.
I think that you’re swirling around the thing that’s needed to be talked about, which is how there’s misinformation about your rights as an American. It’s the misinformation that you can say and do anything you want. It clicks to another thing that can work towards that violence that shows up, which is like the Old Testament justice. It’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Does that mean that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets to make an anime video about killing Paul Gosar now? Where would the outrage be if she had done that thing because he had violence towards her, and it’s just fair that she gets to do a violent video towards him?
That’s one way to look at it.
That’s what fairness says. Fairness says equal. It says, “You do something bad. I get to do something bad to you.” That is where the race to the bottom is.
It’s like two wrongs make a right. Is that what we are doing now?
That’s right. There we go. Is that what we’re doing now or are we going to do that? She did not go to that place. She just said, “Here is where we are. Are we going to do this in this House? When would it be okay to do this, and when would it be okay not to speak up?” The challenge there is that many voters don’t have time. They’re so busy working, keeping their head above water, making money, and struggling in the middle class or the lower middle class. All they need are moments of doubt and skepticism about the other person and that my site is winning because they said this funny/violent thing towards the person that I’ve been taught not to like.
It’s the person. It is not the values, ideals, or what the person is doing for me because an infrastructure bill that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to vote for is going to help people that don’t like her. They’re going to benefit from her vote, even to say in an unsettling way, the person they elected is voting against that bill. Therefore, it’s against the people that it’s going to help the most in their own district.
It’s very unsettling that our perception is one of those branches, limbs, or trunks. That is getting cut down because all we need is doubt and skepticism about the other team that they’re doing something wrong by voting on an overdue spending bill that we needed to do sometime around years ago. We’re years behind on that. We’ve been living off our great-great-grandparents and the wealthy of that generations tax burden of 70%, 80%, and 90% in order to build such a wonderful infrastructure that we didn’t have in place to take a freeway from one side of the nation to the other side of the nation so we could get around and not take forever to get there.
That’s all Dwight Eisenhower, which was a Republican, did. It was to build the infrastructure that was needed in order to get from one side of the nation, to free those cities in the Midwest, so they could travel and get to someplace. It’s a little unsettling that it takes a little bit of perspective, and that’s one of the things that truth really struggles with.
Truth is not just a point of view. It’s also the perspective of many points of view. We see a part of the truth, so we don’t get our brains isolated in our blinders or in our identity of, “The Republican person that I voted for voted for their right.” It is not what’s right for us locally and what’s right for the nation, so it is very important to see what it is.
This is going to be an even more unsettling bill that we are so far through the looking glass, and this tribal almost team sports behavior is going on in our elected representatives in Washington. There was a Republican representative Congress from Alabama who, after that infrastructure bill was passed, tweeted about all the money coming back to Alabama because of this infrastructure bill that’s going to repair bridges, roads, and how wonderful it was. He was touting it as an achievement of success, and then he voted against it. It’s unbelievable.
What you were saying about what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could have said from the floor about cooperation and collaboration rings true, but it seems now in Washington, nothing gets passed that’s truly bi-partisan. They get one or two Republicans to cross the aisle and vote with the Democrats, and they call bi-partisan. To me, that’s barely bi-partisan. The country would very much appreciate representatives who voted for things they need that are going to help their constituents in their districts, even if you have to cooperate with someone from the other team. Now, that’s viewed as toxic in our nation.
The money won’t allow them to do it. You can’t vote with the people because you have got to vote for where you can raise the most money with. That’s the way you’ve got to talk. You’ve got to talk about where the primary donor is funding you. That’s where you’ve got to talk, whether it’s a corporation or an individual.
Our system of money then has corrupted our political or governing dynamic and made it nearly impossible for our representatives to cooperate.
They can and they used to vote across all the time when the money was involved, but as soon as the money got involved, they got them free of that but it also handcuffed them to spend most of their time going to fundraisers to fundraise for the next election to keep themselves in office. That is something that’s very unsettling. We have got to watch how our language is used because the way we were speaking and thinking about politics and holding our nation together the way we were doing it is not supporting our way of being more collaborative, more cooperative, and more compassionate to each other.
Look at the issue of homelessness and say, “We don’t need that here in the United States because we’re rich enough to cover homelessness. Here are some steps we can take in order to do that. Here’s what we need about hunger. We do not need to be hungry here. We have plenty of food being thrown out. We make a lot of food.”
It doesn’t mean to make it and throw it out. Make it, sell it, take the rest of it, feed the other people that need the food, help them relieve the burden, and take away food scarcity. You take away food scarcity, you don’t have people feeling worried and scared, and they feel more confident about their next day because they know there are food around. Let’s face the things we can face. We don’t need those things.
It seems the money in our system is another thing that’s chopping away at the tree of democracy. It’s preventing, it seems, collaboration and cooperation from taking place, and even if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had spoken from the podium the way you suggested, it would have been a message that stuck much better.
That’s what we need. We need messages that stick, and that then all of a sudden helps her and help the system look at what is wrong and then able to create a new point of view. The next time you and I visit, we can go down this path of how to be more powerful and use passion instead of anger when we were speaking about things because that’s the thing that’s going to allow stuff to stick more rather than using images and messages of violence. They don’t stick well.
That sounds good. We need more messages to stick, that’s for sure.
More to come, Tom. Thanks, everybody, for reading.
Thanks, Bill.
Important Links:
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://billstierle.com/podcast/
