To create fairness, our legal system and the federal government have grown increasingly complex. My question is whether the complexity has grown beyond too many people’s capacity to tolerate it.
Q: Can democracy survive in America?
A: (Spoiler) I don’t know. Can people tolerate this much complexity?
I begin with history and facts about our current system because if we don’t agree on the basic facts, we will never understand each other’s answers. We see that in the right-wing bubble: Consumers of right-wing news sources start from a different set of facts, which shortcircuits any meaningful discussion. I’ve observed that with consumers of mainstream news as well. Often we are working from different underlying facts. If I have my history and my facts wrong, my answers to questions will also be wrong.
So please bear with the preliminary discussion and make sure we’re on the same page with background (verifiable) facts.
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This book⤵️, which I’m reading on the recommendation of Karen Stenner, one of my favorite political psychologists, got me thinking about a new way to answer questions I get on social media.
Timeline from the book:
- 6 million years ago, humans diverged from chimpanzees.
- 11,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers shifted to agriculture.
People lived like villagers in family units and clans. They knew everyone around them, if not by name then by clan or family, and thus had a way to understand their relationship. It was rare to encounter a complete stranger.
- About 3,400 years ago, conditions in some areas allowed for surplus food production. This gave rise to population growth, which in turn necessitated state governments. Most people, though, still lived in small units and rarely traveled.
- Until recently, there remained large areas in the world beyond state control. Some traditional societies like that of the New Guinea Highlanders continued until a generation ago.
- Today, in some place places, people still live in traditional societies structured around a village or clan, but most of us live in a large complex society with millions of strangers.
In evolutionary terms, we were villagers until yesterday and our psyches and bodies remain adapted to village life.
Dispute Resolution and Criminal Punishment in Traditional v. Modern Societies
Because, in traditional societies, disputes arose between people who knew each other or knew something about each other, resolutions meant finding a way for people to continue living in close proximity. Establishing guilt or negligence was not the main goal. The goal was to re-establish relationships. Disputes were often resolved by all parties sitting down, perhaps with a mediator. Sometimes a resolution was done through payment. For example, if someone caused an accident that killed a child, the families might agree on compensation to achieve emotional reconciliation. This could happen quickly, even within a few days.
Occasionally reestablishing balance was done through revenge killings. If a person killed a member of a different clan, even if the killing was accidental, the injured clan would, in retaliation, kill a member of the killer’s clan. Unfortunately, retaliatory killings occasionally escalated into full wars.
(Today’s gang warfare and vigilante justice resemble traditional revenge killings.)
What worked in traditional societies does not scale to a society of millions. As governments grew more complex, bureaucrats and agencies were needed to administer rules and laws. In the United States today, if you bring a dispute to a court, your case will be decided by people who do not know you personally and will probably never see you again. The goal is not to restore relationships or achieve an outcome satisfying to the parties. The goal is to determine who is at fault and administer justice impartially.
The result is that, with modern litigation, both parties often feel like they lost. Rarely do both litigants walk away feeling satisfied with the resolution.
The United States until Yesterday
The colonies which later became the United States started out as a collection of small communities. At one point during the debates about what kind of country the United States should become, Thomas Jefferson suggested that the federal government should consist of a committee. His idea (and the idea of many others) was that a centralized government would infringe on individual liberty. For Jefferson, the way to maximize personal liberty was to keep the government small and localized. He envisioned self-governance as a localized community with a few wise statesmen writing the rules and resolving disputes.
The contradiction in Jefferson’s position was that self-governance was allowed only for white men. The laws they created permitted them to enslave others and maintain their own power. In fact, one reason Jefferson and other enslavers were opposed to a strong central government was they knew that a centralized federal government would try to outlaw slavery.
One way to view our history is as a struggle for outgroups to be included in “we the people.” Almost always the inclusions happened because the centralized government forced the local communities to include those groups. For example, as a result of the Civil War, a strengthened federal government outlawed slavery. The New Deal, which regulated business and commerce to make it harder for the rich and powerful to cheat, created regulatory agencies and further expanded the size, power, and complexity of the federal government. The Civil Rights movement brought more federal legislation: Laws against racial segregation, laws against voter suppression, and laws offering equal protection to women and minority communities, thereby again enlarging the size and increasing the complexity of the federal government.
Our current system is complicated by the fact that we have 51 separate jurisdictions (50 states and the federal government), each with its own laws. This fact alone confuses people who see discrepancies between, say, a punishment meted out in Texas and a punishment meted out somewhere else and think that the system is a failure. In fact, each jurisdiction has a different penal code, and states like Texas or Mississippi treat certain crimes differently than, say, California.
Until about 50 years ago—basically yesterday—all of our institutions (governor’s mansions, Congress, universities, industry) were, with rare exceptions, controlled by white men.
This is the newly elected US House of Representatives in 1939:
Here are 89 of the Democrats elected to the 119th House of Representatives:
On the left, you see the Republican intern class in 2016. On the right, you see the Democrats:
American Criminal Justice Until Yesterday
In 18th-century America (as elsewhere) criminal punishments were often cruel, including things like hanging, branding, and whipping. From Alexander Hamilton: The laws “partake of necessary severity . . .without exceptions.” Because there were no exceptions, justice could be meted out swiftly.
New England villages used stocks and pillories.
From the American Police Hall of Fame & Museum (edited and condensed):
Stocks and pillories were commonly set up in the town square. A major part of punishment in stocks and pillories was to publically humiliate people who committed crimes. As the offender sat in the stocks, the townspeople would often pelt them with rotten food, dead animals or stones while jeering, mocking, and ridiculing them.
The discomfort level in pillories was more severe than the leg stocks and oftentimes was used in conjunction with other punishments such as branding, whipping, or having an ear cut off.
Our modern criminal justice system took form after the Civil War when white supremacists found a way around the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment prohibited forced labor except in the case of punishment for crimes after conviction. Their solution: Convict lots of Black men, put them in prison, and then put them in chain gangs. It was super easy to put Black men in prison because states and local governments could pass whatever laws and criminal procedures they wanted. There were no limits on what police could do, so they often beat confessions out of innocent Black men.
Defendants were not given lawyers. If you couldn’t afford a lawyer, too bad. If the police wanted to stop and search you, they could. Juries were all white. Women were considered incompetent to testify in court—unless a white woman accused a Black man of a crime. Then, of course, she was taken at her word.
Criminal justice resembled a conveyor belt. A person could go swiftly from being accused of a crime to hanging from a tree.
Then along came Charles Hamilton Houston, his protégé Thurgood Marshall, Pauli Murray, and others who took it as their task to reform criminal procedures to create more fairness.
They understood that the law fell more heavily on Black men. Their idea was not to even things up by making it easier to inflict punishment on white people. Their idea was to make it harder to inflict punishment on anyone. They embraced jurist William Blackstone’s idea that it was better to let ten guilty people escape than to let one innocent person suffer.
Their goal was to turn a conveyor belt into an obstacle course. The idea was that more procedures, regulations, and checkpoints meant less chance an innocent person would be punished.
As a result of literally decades of work, reformers succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional to do things like beat confessions out of people, stop and search people without probable cause, and arrest people on a whim. Jurors can no longer be excluded on the basis of race, people without money are appointed lawyers, etc. (I know a bit about this because I wrote a biography of Thurgood Marshall):
Is there still a lot of injustice? Yes, of course. Does the law still fall more heavily on members of minority communities? Yes. But things that were once legal and commonplace are now illegal and rarer. Will there ever be perfect fairness? No. Our institutions are run by human beings all of whom are fallible and some of whom are not good people. All we can do is keep trying to push the needle toward more fairness.
As a result of turning a conveyor belt into an obstacle course, criminal procedure and criminal law have grown more complex. Criminal procedure is a full-semester law school course. The rules of evidence is another full-semester law school course.
The problem is obvious: Democracy requires a thoughtful, well-educated electorate, but even well-educated people are not equipped to understand the workings of the American legal system.
The Authoritarian Personality
Political psychologists, in an attempt to understand the rise of fascism in the 1930s, defined what they call the authoritarian personality, also called the anti-democratic personality.
Among other things, those with an authoritarian disposition are averse to complexity. In the words of political psychologist Karen Stenner, they prefer sameness and uniformity and have cognitive limitations. They are, to use her phrase, “simpleminded avoiders of complexity.”
Diversity is a form of complexity, which is why right-wing authoritarians reject it.
According to political psychologists, about a third of the population across cultures has this personality. Those with authoritarian personalities exist on both sides of the political spectrum. For more on the authoritarian personality, see this post.
Some of the Comments I received this week on Social Media
As a preliminary matter, I assume you are all familiar with my FAQ page. If you have not read it, please do so otherwise you will not understand my reaction to some of these comments. It’s here.
Some of the comments I received this week:
- “Brazilian law enforcement rounded up and arrested hundreds of protestors immediately after the insurrection. Two years later, the DOJ is still rounding up protestors. Brazil does it better.”
- “Merrick Garland wasted 2 years and allowed these criminals [by which he meant members of Congress] to run for re-election and continue their lies and crimes. They should have been arrested on April 21, 2021 the month after Garland was sworn in.”
- “What is taking the DOJ so long? Our system is hopelessly broken.”
These commenters believe that the faster people are arrested and prosecuted, the better. Essentially they want to return to a conveyor belt thereby unraveling the work of Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Pauli Murray, and others.
This one gets the history backward:
- “The Merrick Garland DOJ is mired in passivity and process that protects the powerful.”
In fact, the processes and procedures that slow everything down were put in place to protect vulnerable communities. A perhaps annoying consequence is that powerful white men also benefit from the same procedures.
This one also gets our history backward:
“Real democracy in the USA failed years ago.”
In fact, it was only in the past 70 years that the United States began moving, for the first time, toward a true multi-racial representative democracy. There are some influential accounts who see American history in this way: “All was well until about 50 years ago when the Republican Party went off the rails and the Democrats failed to do anything about it, and here we are.” In fact, what happened was that about 70 years ago, the people who now make up the Democratic coalition managed to push the nation toward a true democracy and they’ve encountered backlash and pushback ever since.
Here’s another:
- “The fact that Trump still hasn’t been arrested shows that Republicans can get away with everything, and the Republicans are laughing at us.”
That comment ignores the number of people in Trump’s orbit who have been prosecuted over the past 6 years and ignores the fact that almost 1,000 insurrectionists, including many of those who planned and carried out the attack, have been arrested and prosecuted. Very few people are following these trials. The problem, I fear, is that the process takes so long that people lose interest, stop paying attention, and therefore, as far as they are concerned, nothing is happening.
One event from this week was that the Trump Org, which was convicted of multiple counts of criminal fraud, was sentenced and fined $1.6 million dollars. Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, was sentenced to Rikers Island for 5 months.
The $1.6 million was the maximum allowable sentence under the New York penal code, and the 5 months was the result of a plea deal Weisselberg made with the prosecution. We don’t know whether the 5 months prison sentence was a good deal for the prosecution because we don’t know what Weisselberg gave up and we may never know: DA Bragg told us that the investigation into Trump himself is “ongoing.”
I received this comment after the sentence was announced:
- “The punishment was a slap on the wrist.”
Calling a $1.6 million fine and 5 months in a harsh prison a “slap on the wrist” is an exaggeration, but it illustrates that our current legal system, which is not intended to be satisfying, will never actually satisfy. This is why I keep warning the “there are never any consequences” people that the reason they feel like there are never any consequences is that consequences in our current system will likely not be harsh enough or swift enough to satisfy them.
The goal of our current legal system is not to leave people satisfied (as was often the goal in traditional societies), the goal is impartial administration of justice, which means the judge had to go by the maximum allowable sentence and, under our current rules, the prosecution is free to enter plea deals with defendants.
How about this one:
- “The one & only thing that’ll impress career criminal Trump, will be an orange jumpsuit worn in solitary confinement, cut off from any opportunity to incite gullible followers.”
There are rules governing when a person can be put into solitary confinement, and prisoners still retain their First Amendment rights. Prisoners are allowed visitors and therefore cannot be “cut off from any opportunity to incite gullible followers.” Inmates have written famous books and letters. Some political leaders have achieved more influence after being imprisoned.
I suggested that people furious over the sentence would really like to see Trump put into stocks and jeered in a public square. One person responded by saying:
- Honestly, that type of public humiliation might be completely appropriate for someone like Donald Trump.
I think he was joking, but I get it. There was something satisfying about seeing the wrongdoer immediately put into stocks so that you could jeer and throw rotten fruit at him. It’s crude and primitive, and allows us to purge our anger. One reader on Mastodon joked that we should at least try stocks with Trump “for the sake of the children.”
Some people seem to envision the criminal justice system as a hand that swoops down, gathers up every guilty person, and punishes them in a manner that is satisfying to those enraged by the crime. This would be impossible to achieve in a society scaled to millions. Even if we lived in a literal police state in which everything a person did was observed by a law enforcement officer, such a result would be impossible to achieve.
Here are two more:
- “This sentence demonstrates that our laws are written purely to protect the wealthy.”
- “The sentence was so light because the laws are written only from a perspective of privilege.”
These comments are illogical: If the laws were written purely to protect the wealthy, why are there laws against corporate fraud that allow for $1.6 million penalties and imprisonment? (Such laws did not exist before the New Deal. In the 19th century, it would have been literally impossible to prosecute the Trump Organization for this behavior.)
How about this one:
- The laws are unfair because Democratic Party is corrupt and in the pay of oligarchs.
That is a simple conspiracy theory that has much in common with the “deep state” and other conspiracy theories.
I responded to the person who told me this:
- Merrick Garland wasted 2 years and allowed these criminals to run for re-election and continue their lies and crimes. They should have been arrested on April 21, 2021 the month after Garland was sworn in.”
I asked him to read my FAQ page. He absolutely refused. In a response that included a few “LOLs,” he told me he doesn’t have to read anything I write because he knows for a fact I am wrong because he has a friend who is a federal prosecutor who told him so.
I worry most about the future of American democracy when I wonder if our current legal and political system has become so complex that has grown beyond many people’s capacity to tolerate it, including the people who want more fairness.
Question: Can Democracy survive in America?
Answer: I don’t know. Can enough people tolerate this much complexity?
The burden is on those of us who can tolerate complexity to find a way to communicate with those who can’t. I am not suggesting that we “reach out” to people in the right-wing bubble. I believe all we can do is organize and outvote them. For what I mean, see my To Do list. I suggest that the people who want democracy and fairness and are opposed to fascism must learn to accept and adapt to an increasingly complex world.
* * *
This is how JJ says “yes” when asked if he wants to go for a walk (sound on for the tapping of feet):
When I tested the video, he heard the recording, thought I was calling him, and came running. I guess I need to take him for another walk.
For a different take, I prefer the thoughts in The Dawn of Everything, which collects evidence that many societies were egalitarian and cooperative without the hierarchical King structure that Jared Diamond promotes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
I think humanity needs to think about these other models for society and not take it for granted that the top down hierarchical societies are the only ways we can (and have) structured ourselves.
“ The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. It relies on archaeological evidence to show that early societies were diverse and developed numerous political structures.” They are particularly annoyed with Jared Diamond’s theories.
Love your work though!
Interesting. I didn’t see too much hierarchical stuff in what I’ve read so far. The dispute resolution stuff Diamond talks about in traditional societies was not at all hierarchical. (I focused mostly on the legal dispute resolutions aspects).
Yes but then Diamond goes on to posit that to have larger societies, hierarchies form that result in top down controls, whereas the Wengrow and Graeber book say that this doesn’t actually play out that way in many large societies in the past, specifically they look at Cahokia, Teotihuacan and various other hybrid city forms such as the Olmec, Mayans and ancient Egypt. They posit that it is a myth that we must have centralized decision making to form states. And that we can continue dispute resolution using restorative justice methods even in groupings with many strangers.
I have read many of Jared Diamond’s book, but was blown away by the deeper evidence, complexity and thought in The Dawn of Everything. Worth a perusal.
The tragedy is that this Democracy hasn’t aged well. It’s like a car that badly needs a tune-up, and there are a couple simple remedies that would go a long way toward putting the old beast back in order and make it less prone to flying apart:
(Something Old) Eliminate the electoral college – it puts the thumb on the scale to an excessive degree, over-empowering exactly those folks who don’t care for complexity. The founders went to great lengths to protect minority interests (the US Senate is a result), but the EC was a compromise that nowadays effectively awards too much power to minority interests. Presidents should be elected by a simple majority, like governors and mayors.
(Something New) Widespread use of Ranked-choice (aka Instant Run-Off) voting would mean fewer extremists in politics. It requires the winner of an election to have actually garnered a majority of votes. It eliminates spoilers and the need to vote strategically. This means the winner will be someone broad-minded or congenial enough to appeal to the majority of constituents – another tell of someone who can handle complexity.
I love/am jealous of Jared Diamond (he embodies a path/knowledge direction I should’ve taken in college) and appreciate your walk through history. Even though I’m an old guy I had no idea how bad things were until very recently.
Thank you yet again Teri for your clear eyed explanation of our world. You and Heather Cox Richardson should be required reading for all Americans!
Hi Teri, I love your blog and all of your postings. And this particular blog is very thought-provoking. It *feels* as if our society is devolving, with social media and cable “news” rushing that right along. And the ability to apply critical thinking seems to be diminishing. I hope we can hang on to our republic and that something or someone will come along to steer us back in the right direction.
P.S. I love JJ’s enthusiasm!
I don’t think I agree with the premise: “To create fairness, our legal system and the federal government have grown increasingly complex.” It took a great deal of complexity to maintain the older segregated system, such as making up rules to decide who was Black, maintaining separate water fountains/benches/waiting rooms/movie theater sections/etc. Policing that separation by race in places like buses and trains. By eliminating many race-based rules, we have made this less complex. Second, the current federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, has emphasized more a less complex (and wrong) judicial reasoning process through Originalism. This is a faux simplicity. Third, there has been deregulation on the federal level of infrastructure such as trucking and airlines. Fourth, I wonder if you are confusing complexity with choices? For example, we now can send packages via the Postal Service, UPS, Fed Ex, etc. Fifth, in communications have been simplified through cellphones. One no long has to go searching for a pay phone, working through an operator, etc. Sixth, there is more than one kind of complexity. For example, the internal workings of computers are complex, but using them is easy. Seventh, I wonder if you’re confusing complexity with the historical tension in the US of centralization vs decentralization. There are about 15,000 school districts, 19,000 police departments, and 42,000 water utilities. Viewed from high above, these systems seem complex. But viewed from the user viewpoint, they’re simple and easy. I could go on, but I think you probably get the point.
Hi Kirk Evans ~ Something Old and Something New are great ideas for a tuneup!~!
Maybe we can tune up the system to run more fairly and transparently!~!
RCV !~!
Thank you for this information Colleen.
I will read The Dawn of Everything.
It seems to be a fact that the law, along with everything else in our society, is getting increasingly complex. It is less clear to me that complexity is a problem for democracy. This is because we humans have always had to deal with overwhelming incomprehensible complexity. The world has always been, and presumably always will be, too complex to understand. This is true both of the physical world and the social world. And so we constantly make little leaps of faith, maybe about the motivations of a god or gods, maybe about quantum physics or gravity or how electricity or germs or our bodies work, maybe about how social systems work. Our entire human lives are built on top of innumerable leaps of faith about the incomprehensible.
So complexity itself doesn’t seem to be the problem; we have always relied on leaps of faith to accept and ignore the complexity. As you point out, we are continuing a struggle to treat every person as equally valuable and deserving of society’s support. We have been making slow, steady, uneven progress in that struggle. In colonial times, pretty much all the immigrants from Europe believed that men were better than woman, white people better than poor people, rich people better than poor people, Christians better than heathens. Those wrong beliefs persist in many people to this day. But they are no longer a viable support for a society, rather they are a problem for the entire world. So rather than complexity, I would attribute much of the problem to the fact that our society is trying to substitute new leaps of faith (e.g. every person is equally valuable to society) for pernicious, outmoded beliefs.
The comments you quote do show a problem that is based in complexity, namely, the belief that simple solutions can address complex problems. An example of this kind of thinking is “that guy is a bad guy; just shoot him”. That kind of simple “solution” is pretty tempting at least some of the time, or as an initial reaction for most people. This is true both for the GOP and for the anti-GOP. But people of good will and sufficient education and thoughtfulness don’t stop with that initial reaction; they recognize that it is important to gather more information and consider implications and consequences of any action. I assume that this process of gathering information and considering repercussions was characteristic of members of simple human groups 10 thousand years ago just as it is today, and that has always been a mistake to shoot first, ask questions later.
As for the law, when most Americans believed in white privilege, in male privilege, in the privilege of wealth, the outcomes of the legal system made sense to them. Now, much of that privilege is still built into the day-to-day operation of the legal system, but it no longer makes sense to many people. For example, when prosecutors (as you point out) make decisions about who to prosecute based on the likelihood of winning, they take into account the inherent prejudice of privilege in our society; if they ignore that, they are likely to damage their win/loss ratio. And don’t even mention the habits of the police. Many Americans now see this as a problem.
I’m so grateful to have found you several years ago and have learned so much from reading your posts. I’ve also gotten involved in our democracy in ways I’d never considered before: becoming a poll worker and a poll monitor, joining our local League of Women Voters, writing postcards for political campaigns, attending candidate forums, and more. Thank you.
Teri, your ability and willingness to make complexity more accessible to all of us is something I’ll never take for granted. I always learn so much from your blog posts, and this was one of your best – which is saying a lot because I find them all to be outstanding. Thank you for sharing your gifts and knowledge with those of us who DO care about the survival of democracy but might have a harder time knowing exactly what to do about it. I’ve shared your “Things To Do” page far and wide, and now write postcards to voters regularly because of you. Think of how YOUR efforts alone have helped save our democracy. That’s no exaggeration, and it’s quite a legacy. Kudos. (And lots of treats, walks, and pats on the head for JJ.) ❤️
I hope your followers will go look at Karen Stenner’s work if they haven’t already. So grateful to you for bringing it to my attention! Her suggestion that we who want democracy need to understand the authoritarian personality is so much more insightful than many other discussions I’ve seen of “reaching out” to conservatives.
Those two simple remedies are two that I’ve come up with as well. My impression right now is that Something New, RCV, will be easier to achieve and that implementing RCV may become a necessary but insufficient path to achieving Something Old, eliminating the EC.
Are there interim steps to abolishing the Electoral College? Meaning, if states took action by doing X or Y, would these steps make it easier to achieve on a national level?
Thank you Teri!~!
You’re blog posts are my fav!~!
whoops
*your
I’m not sure it’s really about societal complexity. It’s much simpler to view humans as alike no matter their outward appearance. The common myths that assert some kind of hierarchy among humans create all sorts of fiction that breaks down easily.
All of the various forms of government can work well on a small scale – democracy being the most fair to the widest cross section of the population. The problems arise when the population grows too big, and like it or not, we really need to view the human population from a world perspective because environmentally, we’re all connected. We’re rapidly destroying our environment, and that’s only going to exacerbate our governmental issues. In that, the question isn’t really whether democracy can survive. The question is whether humans can survive the extinction event that we’ve triggered through our arrogance and disregard for the planet’s limited resources.
We’re one of the few species that could have used our intellectual capabilities to reach a sustainable steady state. Instead, we base our societies on infinite growth, and the planet cannot support that.
It’s tempting to think that people who tend to want immediate, often violent solutions to what they see as a criminal act by someone else, or to use conspiracy theories as explanations for events that they perceive as unjust are just not very bright or very well educated, or a combination of both. While it may seem “snooty” to characterize them thus, I can’t help doing it. It is impossible to say to a person who is authoritarian-sympathetic, “why don’t you read such and such or so and so?” You’re immediately suspect as a woke liberal who wants to destroy all that is good and fair about America, and what makes America great. Is the idea of keeping an open mind something your are born with, or that you are raised to have? Does the degree of your open mindedness go along with the degree of your intelligence–in other words are smart people more apt to be open minded?
Thanks for all your great work. And wondering if you have ever read “The Oppermans” by Lion Feuchtwanger. If not, you definitely should. Everyone should!
I don’t think that desire for simplicity is really the driving force. Authoritarians believe all kinds of complicated things. QAnon. Evangelical theology. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Dialectical Materialism. More of the kind every day from the Internet.
What you say about click bait is very true, but what they click on very often feeds them elaborate complexities. I think these complicated beliefs serve 2 main purposes: (1) Keep the rational part of their minds busy to keep it away from reality; (2) Justify their us-against-them emotions. It is those emotions that, I believe, are the real driving force.
What you say about evolution is to the point. For millions of years we lived in small communities, often at war with other small communities. People who were loyal to “us” and suspicious of “them” were favored by natural selection. We all have some of that in us, the authoritarians just more than average.
Thank you, as always, for your cogent, reasonable writing – I look forward every week to your newsletter. You keep me calm, patient and generally optimistic, and fill in holes in my understanding of current headlines.I’ve read a few of Diamond’s books, strictly as an armchair amateur, and found your thoughts very relatable. I don’t know that Diamond was promoting one type of society over another, my takeaway was more like yours, basically “no wonder people get so frustrated with government/laws/institutions, we humans haven’t been doing this for very long!” Human nature being what it is, (and I’ve read that statistic about 1/3 of any population leaning toward authoritarianism since January 6, 2021), I am somewhat surprised we are doing as well as we are!
Thanks again, I hope you and yours are well with this devastating weather hitting California, be well and safe!
Susan
Nope, I haven’t read it. Thanks for the recommendation.
We have occasionally gotten what looks like duck ponds in the backyard. We have a pump, and we pump the water out to the street. We live on a slight incline, so we are not flooding.
Can democracy survive? An important question is whether it ever meaningfully got off the ground. As Elie Mystal explores in his book Allow Me To Retort, Black people have not had real democracy here: first, no freedoms, from 1865-now, aggressive voter suppression, colonial times to 1964 was official legal segregation, and unequal application of the justice system ab initio to now, per statistics and vivid examples. Voter suppression efforts are on the rise. Engagement by informed voters remains anemic. It has always been a precarious experiment in a “republic, if you can keep it.” Can we? Have we ever really been trying?
I am not a fan of Eli Mystal, who I think simplifies and distorts. The idea that “we” have never been trying is an insult to the people who have dedicated their lives and moved the needle. I have had Elie Mystal readers tell me that things are no better for Black Americans now than in the 1930s which is so head-shakingly stupid I can only block those people, just as I block MAGA types.
If all Americans are included in that “we” I just don’t know what to say, other than read a biography of Thurgood Marshall, Susan B. Anthony, Pauli Murray and the thousands who dedicated their lives to moving the needle toward fairness.
The problem with Mystal’s baseless flamethrowing is if he is right, where do we go from here? Give up? I mean, if nobody has ever tried, what is the point? Just give in to authoritarianism because if what the great leaders have done in the past doesn’t count, nothing can ever count.
There. Rant over.
Good to hear – if sweet JJ is anything like my dear last dog, getting wet is intolerable!
Not the substance of your post at all, which I think is excellent, but while I was playing your clip of JJ, our dog Coco came in from the other room and—surprise!—we’re getting ready to go.
Funny because that happened to us as well. We played the clip a few times to make sure it was embedded in the blog post and each time JJ came running eager for a walk. He got several walks around the block because how can you say now that face and eager pitter patter of toenails on the floor as he comes careening around corner?
Happy to see Eli Mystal addressed. He gets away with a lot of bs that I find very frustrating (his shots at Garland for instance).
I enjoyed the history and perspective of the concept of ‘yesterday.’ I especially like the part about why the system became so complex–the roadblocks put into place to avoid convicting innocent people and slowing down the conveyor belt justice system.That part makes sense.
The issue I have with your premise is that democracy is at risk because people in your mentions make comments that demonstrate an impatience with and unwillingness to learn about our complicated legal system.
There is a subset of people on social media who enjoy acting superior and diminishing everything they don’t understand to simplistic cynical commentary to inflate their sense of superiority. They are not a reflection of society at large or of the health of our democracy. They are operating with their own set of facts meant to confirm their biases just like the Fox News crowd.
You are correct…the only remedy here is to out-organize and drive turnout to vote for people who are committed to inclusion and fairness. Yes, democracy can survive our complex legal system even in the face of the people calling for heads on spikes or whatever their version of satisfying justice is.
I genuinely appreciate that you and others spend your valuable time explaining this system to us lay folk.
Maybe I spend too much time addressing that nonsense on social media. That’s why I often thought Twitter tanking would be a good thing for democracy. So much harm is generated there.
As one who found myself frustrated by the seeming slow progress of the Garland DOJ. Snarky commentary became my outlet. After one snarky comment, you suggested I read your FAQs and I did. It did not eliminate my frustration entirely, but my understanding has improved and I have recommended your FAQs to others. Thank you for making that effort.
A Political Scientist friend suggested I read JD’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. I think I may like “The World Until Yesterday” as well.
As far as Democracy surviving, as long as we have talented people, like yourself, willing to make the effort to educate us, we have a chance.
Thank you, Teri.
I learned a lot from this. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
Dear Teri,
You are a dispassionate and logical lighthouse for me ( and many others), in the swirling and emotional sea of our society.
Really interesting look at the history of simplicity to complexity!
While I agree organizing and outvoting are really important, I’ve also been pretty convinced by pieces like this — https://upine.medium.com/time-to-solve-our-propaganda-problems-like-the-military-does-e97eda71ba7b — that adding counterpropaganda efforts to start piercing the right-wing fake news bubble is needed too…
Not sure if “complexity” is the right word, though it gets at the idea. One of the regular tropes in science fiction in (roughly) the middle of the 20th century was the idea that accelerating change in society would put pressure on people to keep up, adapt, and conform. The complaint that modern life sucks compared to the Good Old Days is as old as civilization, but I don’t think it’s ever inspired this level of irrational anger and aggression before (maybe the Luddites come close). What’s being rejected is change, not complexity, and a specific kind of change: the dominance of the white American male in American culture. It’s been weaponized on the Right and aimed at targets to blame, but that’s the engine driving us over a cliff.
The commenters lamenting the incompetence of the feckless coward Merrick Garland who Didn’t. Even. Try. are complaining that DOJ isn’t following the story beats of a Law and Order episode. If they’re not seeing a perp walk on TV then “nothing is happening”. It’s understandable, internet pundits have been calling the Republican Party a threat to democracy for years, and the Jan 6 committee (sort of) agrees with them. Well then, why isn’t somebody doing something, by which they mean why don’t I see evidence on TV or social media of “action”? That they don’t (care to) understand how (let alone why) the criminal justice system works isn’t a rejection of complexity, it’s a demand to see a comforting story that someone in charge (the hero/protagonist) is fighting for them. And “see” is literal. I think the real question is Can Democracy survive Social Media, since nothing is real until people see it on social media (and contrawise for Republicans, if they see it on social media then it is real). To get back to your opening, notice how “facts” have nothing to do with this process. It’s all storytelling, and we’re all sitting around the virtual fire listening to some story.
Wow. Well said and thoughtful. Thank you for writing and sharing this.
Thank you so much for your insights. I think you omitted “Houston,” the last name of Thurgood Marshall’s mentor.
I appreciate your viewpoint Teri, but as you probably know by now, it’s sometimes easier to proofread someone else’s writing than one’s own (well, at least for me). The pic you have currently labeled 119th House of Representatives… well, perhaps it might really be the Congress begun which is the 118th. https://www.house.gov/
I’ll say this, I get it. It’s all very complex. Complicated, too. But mostly complex. Being alive on earth is complex, period. Add in all this other stuff and our nervous systems either shut down or explode. We go into survival mode. So I agree with you (on most things you say, actually) but for sure on this point: the future of humanity depends on whether or not we can tolerate the complexity and I would add, the paradox. I’m eating a nice dinner while another woman is being beaten to death. Tolerate, and act to make a difference in the all of us. Thank you for your commitment to stating facts, for your insightful wisdom based on informed opinion, and for your capacity for the complexity of it all.
Teri, This is very thoughtful and gets at some important things, but I disagree at key points. First, the history of humanity you outline, based on Diamond is far too over-simplified. It’s been convincingly refuted (in my opinion) by David Graeber (an anthropologist) and David Wengrow (an archaeologist) in their book *The Dawn of Everything* (2020). Basically, humans have had complex societies since the end of the last ice age, at least. There are remains of cities well over 10,000 years ago, and many types of foraging peoples had large food surpluses long before systematic farming took hold. (think of the fishing peoples of the Pacific Northwest and other prime coastal fishing places). People have organized themselves differently, sometimes in more egalitarian ways, and other times in more authoritarian ways. Some civilizations have lasted for 3000 years or more, and some of those were relatively egalitarian.
Complexity is a problem for us. But in large part it’s because that the regime is totally global-no place is exempt from the idea of the sovereignty of nation states, for instance–there’s no real outside, where someone or some group can retreat to and be exempt from our global order. This is something that was not the case before European colonialism. So we have to live together with diversity shoved together in a common polity, there’s no real opting out. So that adds complexity.
But what I see is not so much too much complexity, but a system that is stressed and pushed to the point that it’s losing resilience. There’s less and less buy in to our institutions overall. (I’m a clergyman & academic, and I’ve watched participation in churches become less and less over the past 50 years,, not because of less “belief” –whatever that means–but because of exhaustion and decline in trust. And lots of that decline in trust is due to churches doing untrustworthy things, but those things increase as the system is stretched and clergy & laity alike become more desperate for dramatic solutions to worsening problems). A lot of the lack of buy in is due to the excessive valorization of competition and of excessive wealth–making our whole society into a big ponzi scheme where happiness is equated with being a billionaire, but only less than a tenth of a percent (maybe a thousandth of a percent) can achieve that plateau. So dissatisfaction is baked in. And to get back to your observation of what you get hit with on social media, that dissatisfaction begets constant impatience. (Ironically, the two most unhappy men I can think of in public life are Donald Trump and Elon Musk–the people at the pinnacle of what we have over-valorized).
We do have a crisis of democracy, but I think the complexity would be less of a problem if we addressed the issue of what our dysfunctional values have created. If the temperature of competition and push to win via increasing wealth inequality were turned down, the stresses brought about by complexity would be less impossible to deal with.
Thanks again for your thoughtful reflections and sharing your knowledge of our legal system.
well dang. I guess by the time I got around to including pictures I was a bit tired.
To be clear, I’m firmly on the side of well-informed, constructive engagement, perseverance, and optimism, and I appreciate your perspective, experience, and commitment to seeing our nation’s situation through a lens of facts (often complex and subtle) rather than incendiary bombast (however appealingly flashy, simplistic, jingoïstic, and memorable). Nobody ever succeeded by quitting. I hope for a democracy that fulfills America’s promise that all are created equal.
Thank you for your easy to read guide to the complicated process that is democracy. The needle has moved and not just in the USA. In Australia it was not that long ago that we did not recognise indigenous people as being human, a wife was regarded as a chattel to be listed on a husbands list of things he owned, my sister was not allow to open a bank account with my father’s and later her husband’s ok, three of us had great difficulty buying property since one partner was a woman. Etc. Changed now.
The elephant in the room however, seems to be increasing complexity means exponentially increasing cost so poor people can’t afford to take action in eg civil cases. And the demand for legal aid for criminal cases exceeds government set budgets. A simple civil court case in Australia cost me 1000s. I dread to think the cost in the USA.
I am now of the opinion that every country should get rid of whatever is taught in, say, 11th grade and give everyone the first year of law school. It can be watered down. The only thing that makes law school hard is the way it’s done.
A legal education should be standard.
Well, I can dream, right?
I think the issue is not so much complexity but rather trust. Today’s USA is a bit more complicated than the one I grew up in (1960s – 70s), but what’s markedly different is the lack of trust in today’s USA. “The Fourth Turning” talks about this to some degree – the generation that came thru the Depression and WW2 had high levels of comity, because everyone was going thru the same national crisis together. After the crisis is over, comity declines as people once again pursue their own thing.
What has changed is the internet and the nature of information the public receives. Journalism was a serious endeavor, and gatekeepers like Walter Cronkite didn’t pollute the public space with rivers of propaganda. I meet people today who don’t trust any of the media – true nihilists. And so from a time when everyone was more or less operating from the same set of facts, “and progress was inevitable” we have a country hopelessly divided, can’t even agree on basic reality, and founder before the problems that beset us.
Complexity is a good starting point, it’s a good way to understand the kinds of things Diamond talks about, and it’s not hard to identify the simpletons around us who recoil at the modern world. But really the deeper issue is trust.
Jerrod Diamond right or wrong is kind of off-topic, but here are some thoughts anyway 🙂
“humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia” is based on archeological findings of monument structures that certainly must have required complex organization.
“but decentralized” is a leap of faith, because centralization or decentralization did not leave any physical evidence — until there were written records. Common sense says that building big monuments must have required more centralization than hunting-gathering, but the details are unknowable — until written records show up. When they do show up, they record lots of centralization, hierarchy, etc.
So, insofar as we have evidence, complex and decentralized did not go together.
Thomas Jefferson was prescient when he said “”An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” I believe the educational system is a part of our difficulties dealing with the complexity in our system of government and our system of laws. As a former educator yourself, what are your thoughts about this? As always, your blog is terrific.
I think that’s an excellent idea, other than the ideology of who’s teaching the class could make a huge difference in the understanding of the law. But yes, some basic understanding could prove to be beneficial to the public.
I don’t just want a class. I want a full-year curriculum with different teachers. 🙂
The complexity of our society requires citizens be *both* an amateur lawyer (per your suggestion), *and* an amateur accountant (in case you ever have to deal with medical bills — you will). Probably combined with enough stats to distinguish median from mean and instruction on impostor syndrome and its flip side.
That’s probably a lot, but I think such training would go a long way toward understanding the way our society works.
Actually, my current electric bill is beyond cursory examination. It’s my fault for having an EV and solar. 🙁 Not entirely clear accounting would help.
“Our current system is complicated by the fact that we have 51 separate jurisdictions (50 states and the federal government), each with its own laws.”
Several more: territorial governments, plus some sort of weirdo hybrid for DC.
We need to eliminate these oddities for all citizens living under the control and authority of the USA. That would include proper representation in the House and Senate. That would likely mean reworking how the Senate gets chosen, e.g. districts that do not align with state boundaries. (Sometimes I am also known as Don Quixote.)
“All we can do is keep trying to push the needle toward more fairness.”
You present an excellent case for that here. Thank you.
“These commenters believe that the faster people are arrested and prosecuted, the better.”
Please consider the possibility that the thinking is, “justice delayed is justice denied” and they may be thinking about all the criming that happened in 2016 that was never brought to justice. Theoretically, there may be acts in furtherance of those crimes, but that is looking pretty dubious. Those crimes can be viewed as enabling the later crimes, perhaps by giving the perps a sense of invulnerability. The so far abeyed justice has, almost certainly, let to a House caucus influenced, if not directed, by insurrectionist Congresscritters.
“I suggested that people furious over the sentence would really like to see Trump put into stocks and jeered in a public square.”
I’m good with that. 😀 (but, yes, I’m also saying so in jest.)
Again, thank you. Regards, – B
I address the “justice delayed justice denied” error in my FAQs. It’s a distortion of that phrase’s meaning.
Here, I’m really referring to hypothetical “others” who see delayed justice as allowing perps to effectively get off scot-free, or for the perps to feel like they are doing so. The latter leading them to continue pursuing their anti-democratic and anti-Democratic agenda. Given that it resulted in the crazies being able to take over the House, it’s fair to say that it resulted in an injury that cannot be redressed — even if the result is not legally cognizable as a result of the illegal activity. 🙁
[now off my chest, too.]
I’m liking your thinking. It goes one level deeper on the complexity of what Terri’s explaining. (Pun intended)
Gives me more information to mull over with my need to find explanation for chaotic illogical behavior.
Thank you.
Teri, I am continually grateful for your insight and your encouragement about how to keep democracy, and how to keep it strong and healthy. I deeply appreciate your ongoing explanations and examples of how our justice system works. Per this particular post, I can certainly see how “One theory is that such conspiracy theories arise because our world has become too complex for” those who cannot tolerate complexity.
My sense is that the volume and speed at which information flows are also major contributors. Think of the Lucy episode, where Lucy & Ethel are wrapping chocolates. Wrapping an individual chocolate is not very complex, but when the conveyor speeds up, the task becomes impossible.
Lies and conspiracy theories are not really new, but the speed at which they can now propagate has increased, probably exponentially. This 5-min video gives a sense of how much the speed and volume of information has accelerated, especially since the Internet arrived. And the video is even 8+ years old, so the numbers quoted are higher now than then. https://youtu.be/PcZg51Il9no
In addition to your very fine list of Things to Do to strengthen democracy, I would also recommend these two books as resources for additional ideas for you and your readers.
– Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change — Eitan Hersh
– How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion — David McRaney
As an elder gay, I am outraged–outraged!–by your post. How dare you include a picture of 1939 swearing-in of the House of Representatives without noting that the Speaker in said picture is the long-suffering father of Talullah Bankhead, legendary actress, flouter of societal conventions, and sexual outlaw. [Thank you for continuing to inject sanity into an extremely fraught discussion, Teri.]
It is the central question because if we boil down the good ideas in the Constitution that encouraged some level of compromise governance they are:
1) Fair, free elections
2) A checked and balanced triparite government
3) Rule of law
4) Freedom of speech
But, to honor the Martin Luther King on this day, “The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, the above were too limited for social harmony so we have been striving toward, at least vaguely toward:
1) Fair, free, accessible elections with majority rule and minorities protected.
2) The checking and balancing of all organized selfish powers so their interests are not imposed on the rest of us so that inclusive compromise governance is possible
3) The equal application of fair law and equal opportunity.
4) The use of evidence-based self-correcting science, journalism, and education in driving public policy and reporting corruption.
Democracy is on a spectrum. To the extent that insitutions create mechanisms that fulfill the above civic principles we have peace and fairness. So, by that measure yes, we have been a striving democracy. But, an ineffective one, vaguely aware of its central values and unprepared to be offensive in the battle against the authoritarianism of..
1) Little or no central authority over states no matter if a PARTY in those states choose to violate human rights, civil, voting rights or protect corporate privilege.
2) Embrace of and exaggeration of the purpose of the second clause of the second amendment and demonization of government at the detriment of the first amendment and safety of the public.
3) The belief that unregulated capitalism is a civic principle and that an absolute “free market” exists that responds to changes in the socioeconomic impacts better than any federal monetary policy.
4) An entitlement to pseudoscience and misinformation media as basis of driving policy; and a race and culture heritage narrative that whitewashes the actual history of domination and slavery.
which aims for the benefit of:
1) One party authoritarians 2) gun cult anarchists and christo-fascists 3) irresponsible libertarians, corporation and shareholders 4) white Christian nationalists and conspiracy-cults.
We need to be less reactive and shape the battlefield toward our values. Being able to rattle them off without heistation would be a start. Remember, tolerating intolerance is self-defeating. We will never succeed without have clarified exactly what we are pledging allegiance to.
Kirk – the problem with trying to eliminate the Electoral College (your Something Old remedy) is that amending the Constitution takes 2/3 of each house of Congress plus 3/4 of the state legislatures. That means that you either need the support of a whole lot of elected Republican officials for your proposal, or you need to have the Republican party implode the way the Whigs did in the 1850s to the point that they would no longer be a significant political factor. In the current political environment, in which both parties tend to agree that the Electoral College currently favors Republicans, it will be nearly impossible to get that Republican support.
That has not always been the case. If John Kerry had gotten another 120,000 votes in Ohio in the 2004 election, he would have won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. If that had happened, both parties would have lost a recent election due to the Electoral College, and bipartisan support might have developed for eliminating the EC, since neither party could be sure which side would benefit from doing so. As parties and electoral coalitions realign over time, it may be that some day those kind of conditions will recur and it may become possible to eliminate the EC then. But to the degree that much of the current debate is implicitly motivated by Democratic frustration over the (correct) perception that the EC currently favors Republicans, that same perception makes it nearly impossible to get the political support from Republicans needed to change it.
The same analysis applies to a lesser extent to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, the principal workaround that has been proposed, given the difficulty of amending the Constitution. While it doesn’t require the same level of support from elected officials as amending the Constitution would, the states that have joined so far lean Democratic, and it is unlikely that it can reach the necessary electoral vote threshold without support from at least some major Republican-leaning states, which it is unlikely to get as long as they think the EC favors Republicans. It also has other problems of its own. Its constitutionality is at least debateable and might not be upheld by the courts. There could also be significant problems determining the winner of the popular vote in a close election if not every state supports the idea of the compact. Right now, every state is responsible for running its own presidential election and its own recounts based on how close the vote is in that state. Trying to do a national recount when some states are not close and opposed to using the national popular vote to determine the winner could be a nightmare. North Dakota has already proposed a law that would prohibit disclosing its popular vote total prior to the meeting of the electors in an effort to resist the Compact should it go into effect, although that law got watered down before passage.
So although abolishing the Electoral College may be simple to describe as a goal, it is not at all simple to achieve.
Twitter is weird because in addition to the harm, it allows people to find your insights.
We have a party devoted to the destruction of our democracy and clearly, there are millions of voters intent on this as well.
Even if these criticisms of Jerrod Diamond are correct, they don’t change the fact that the great majority of our ancestors over millions of years lived in small groups of closely related individuals. Evolution favored people who were adapted to that kind of life. Which means that *we* are adapted to that kind of life.
Hi Teri, thanks again for an excellent blog post. I also enjoy reading the comments. I agree with some of the commenters that David Graeber’s book “The Dawn of Everything” is an important book. However, I think “Debt” is the must read by him.
Also thanks for your book recommendations in this post.
An interesting aside: my daughter and I were talking about blood feuds a few weeks ago. She is married to a Macedonian and blood feuds still happen their. This is what she said – If one of my distant relatives did something to another clan and they took revenge by hurting one of my children— you better believe I would go in their “guns a blazin” .
I have been thinking a lot about your question re complexity. I think you are correct. In my experience, throughout my career, I have encountered many that never saw any reason to change. A “This is the way we have always done it” mentality. I have also encountered many who think that their *simple* solution would solve the problem. My concern is that if 1/3rd of the human population is Authoritarian in nature, that means that 1/3rd of our institutions tasked with addressing issues of a complex future are authoritarian in nature. This is not necessarily a bad thing unless this minority can alter laws to claim the power of these institutions. I hope I am making sense with what I’m trying to say.
One last thing, I plan to read your book on Marshall, and I assume you addressed this in it. I am curious as to your views on Marbury.
I am ambivalent on Marbury. One one hand, it’s the greatest power grab of all time, right? I think the Supreme Court needs reform. Marbury plus only 9 justices given how much our country has grown gives SCOTUS too much power.
I’m grateful for your thoughtful posts here, Teri. I feel impatient at times and it is helpful to hear that far-too-swift justice has historically been unjust (up until very recently). I mean, I have known this myself, but it is helpful to hear it (I mean, read it) repeated.
Consequences will come. And perhaps hardly anyone will be satisfied, but they will come.
Many consequences already have. Lots of people are in prison, lost their law licenses, Trump is no longer in the White House, and that’s all in addition to the investigations that are ongoing.
So many interesting ideas here…
I have often thought as the fundamental political battle being between the “lizard brain” and the “enlightened self interest brain”.
The lizard brain wants immediate satisfaction, and lives in fear (of crime, people who look different, etc). There are always politicians who will appeal to the lizard brain, because the payoff (to the politician) is clear and immediate: lots of support.
Meanwhile the enlightened self interest brain will always struggle to be heard. But we are lucky that the world and life is such that enlightened self interest produces, ultimately, a society that more people want to live in. In other words, if you educate people and give them access to healthcare which keeps them healthy, then they can thrive. The payoff is less immediate than the payoff to the lizard brain, but it is much greater. Luckily.
I view it as a tortoise and hare kind of thing. The hare gets the headlines and the oohs and ahhs, but the tortoise wins the race.
It’s a lot easier to appeal to lizard brains. I have often felt frustrated by how much easier the rage merchants have it.
But then, when I was defense lawyer I often felt like the prosecutors had it easier as well.
I keep taking the hard jobs.
Actually I think I may add your comment and my response to this week’s blog post.
Maybe I’ve missed it somewhere in all of your posts, I’m a slow reader, and it’s just not possible to get through all of it, but I have got a question that I’d really like to see the answer to, and I truly respect your thoughts and opinions.
What I can’t figure out is why a single voter can get a prison sentence for casting an illegal vote, but an entire slate of fake electors can seemingly go scot-free. If we can stop individual voters from casting ballots, even some of them through honest mistakes, how can a planned conspiracy be seemingly overlooked? Isn’t it a more fundamental attack on democracy, to try to throw out the election results of millions of voters?
Yes, I dealt with this.
First, “Seemingly go free” is because there is an ongoing investigation. Complex crimes take longer to investigate and prosecute. Not all wrongdoing is a crime and not all crimes are prosecuted.
Second, as far “a single voter” case, we have 51 separate jurisdictions, each with different laws and penalties (51 states + the federal criminal system.)
States have a lot of autonomy in what they criminalize. Federal courts are guided by the sentencing guidelines, which were put in place to get rid of sentencing disparities across federal courts.
So you will see a headline, “LOOK AT THIS POOR WOMAN WHO WENT TO PRISON FOR SHOPLIFTING (say, something happened in Texas) WHILE THIS PERSON GOT A PRISON FOR A FINANCIAL CRIME (say, in Delaware).
Your question is exactly why I wrote this blog post: Has the United States’ legal and political system grown in complexity beyond the ability of most people to tolerate it?”
If so, the entire system will collapse, and trust me, if the entire legal system collapses, things will get much worse.
https://terikanefield.com/can-democracy-survive-in-america/
Then we have an outrage meltdown over the fact that Delaware and Texas are different states with different criminal codes.
If you haven’t read them yet, read these two FAQ pages:
https://terikanefield.com/all-new-doj-investigation-faqs/
https://terikanefield.com/frequently-asserted-rage-inducing-simplifications/
Just found this excellent website and thoughtful, carefully reasoned posts! On the matter of US democracy’s complexity and high tolerance cost, I suggest that learning basics of psychoanalytical theory could help, specifically the architecture of prejudices, over and above “the authoritarian mindset.” The late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s books, THE ANATOMY OF PREJUDICES, and CHILDISM: CONFRONTING PREJUDICE AGAINST CHILDREN get at motivations for group domination. Martha Nussbaum’s new book, JUSTICE FOR ANIMALS: OUR COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY, also helps by asking us to think of ourselves as members of the animal kingdom rather than possessors of animals.
Thank you for the book suggestions!