The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government - Chapter 15

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)

From chapter 15:

IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE?
To think that one discrete reform will measurably change the system is like imagining that one could paint a pointillist picture from three inches away. One must step back and see the canvas whole, just as one must recognize that our economic system, approach to criminal justice, corporate privileges, and propensity to get into wars are not separate problems. They all spring from a complex of incentives in our system as it exists today. They will all have to be tackled if the country is to reverse the decay of its constitutionally established institutions and the transformation of its once-formidable manufacturing economy into a winner-take-all plutocracy. What follows are reforms that I believe could begin to stop the rot and put the United States back on track.

1. Eliminate private money from public elections.
2. Sensibly redeploy and downsize the military and intelligence complex.
3. Stay out of the Middle East.
4. Redirect the peace dividend to domestic infrastructure improvement.
5. Start enforcing our antitrust laws again.
6. Reform tax policy.
7. Reform immigration policy.
8. Adopt a single-payer health care system.
9. Abolish corporations’ personhood status, or else treat them exactly like persons.

What I have just suggested sounds utopian, even unworldly. But the United States has done more surprising things in its history. One of the most astonishing events of my life was the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe. The Wise Men of Washington, Bob Gates and the rest of his tribe, assumed it to be a well-functioning totalitarian system, cold as ice and unyielding as steel. Yet it crumbled not because of military force or violent revolution. The people who lived there and bore its burdens simply gave up believing in its myths. The United States is far better situated than the Soviet Union ever was, despite our many institutional flaws and the accretion of ideological myths that have impaired our ability to see the world as it is and live sensibly and peaceably within it. The path to a better America will come surprisingly easily when, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, we “disenthrall ourselves” from wornout myths and the fears that underlie them.

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