“All is fair in love and war.” This cliché implies that people can suspend the law or the rules in special circumstances.
Can they? Really?
The saying is a little over a century-and-a-half old, but the idea of comparing love and war is a couple centuries older still. Miguel deCervantes made the comparison in 1604 in “Don Quixote” when he wrote, “Love and war are all one. … It is lawful to use sleights and stratagems to … attain the wished end.”
It’s another way of believing that in certain highly-charged situations, such as at the Democratic National Committee, any method of achieving your objective is justifiable. In other words, any conduct is permissible in certain circumstances.
I am brought to these questions by the anger and outrage of Bernie supporters over the favoring of Hillary over Sanders by the DNC. “Not fair!” they charged and then marched out of the Democratic Convention after Mrs. Clinton was nominated.
Was the DNC’s thumb on the Democratic Party scales favoring Hillary “unfair?” Carol Levers, a 69-year-old California delegate to the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, explained to the New York Times, “We are tired of corruption. The media and the DNC colluded to block Bernie Sanders so he wouldn’t be seen. We need to hit the reset button.”
“Politicians are not popes,” opines Gil Troy in a July 27 New York Times article, “Tell Me Again, Why Should a Party Leader Be Above Politics?”
Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal, is the editor, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fred Israel, of “History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-2008” (fourth edition).
Troy believes that former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz “just lost her job for doing it. Good leaders protect their party’s interest fiercely,” Troy writes, “as Wasserman Schultz did in opposing a candidate who spent decades boasting of his disdain for her party.” However, Troy notes, “Today, with primaries empowering party members, not bosses, DNC chairs are supposed to be neutral, but few pull it off.”
Like many millions of other Americans, I have discovered in my later years that much of the history I was taught as a kid was either inadvertently incomplete or, in many cases, deliberately fudged. Depending upon what part of the country you lived in, accurate information about the American Indian, slavery, evolution, capitalism and the separation of church and state, etc., was edited to reflect prevailing moral and political beliefs.
It was in my eighth-grade civics class that I was taught how America’s political process worked. (Is civics even taught any more?)
About how we the people — probably the most important three words in the Preamble to our Constitution — clearly established that America was to be a nation defined and formed by its people, not a monarch, not a dictator, but the people.
My civics lessons have been upended by the reality that only the upper reaches of we the people determine what America is today. Yes, we do have free speech and the right to vote. That said, voting does not necessarily make government responsive to the will of the majority, as in the case of the Supreme Court decision to end the vote recounts of the Bush-Gore 2000 presidential election.
Under certain other circumstances, the general electorate has been able to place restraints on the actions of the wealthy elites or to decide which elites will have the greatest influence on policy. There is a greater possibility of this happening when there are disagreements within the higher circles of wealth and influence as seen today with the Koch Brothers, who are disavowing Trump.
Contrary to this pluralistic possibility, Professor G. William Domhoff, of University of California at Santa Cruz’s sociology department, demonstrates how rule by the wealthy few works despite free speech, regular elections and organized opposition. I highly recommend Domhoff’s website — “Who Rules America” at www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica for a greater elaboration on this subject.
Domhoff lists the following as his reasons for why the wealthy rule.
“The rich” coalesce into a social upper-class that has developed institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an upper-class worldview and newly wealthy people are assimilated.
Members of this upper-class control corporations, which have been the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United States for upwards of 150 years now.
There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which members of the upper-class and hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper-class shape policy debates in the United States.
Members of the upper-class, with the help of their high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the federal government in Washington, D. C.
The rich and corporate leaders nonetheless claim to be relatively powerless.
Working people have less power than in many other democratic countries.
This is, in large part, what Sanders’ campaign against income inequality pledged to take on. But he was denied the top of the ticket by an establishment Democratic Party holding other values.
And this is why Carol Levers and millions of other Bernie supporters are tired of corruption and “want to hit the reset button.”
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls. He invites comments and dialogue at john01370@gmail.com.