a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

No one has to wait for the help of future historians to see that the last fifty years of world history have been the Boom years, the years of unprecedentedly explosive growth in human population and — for some of the humans—unprecedentedly explosive growth in material prosperity. The human population has leapt from around 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion and the global economy is estimated to be about 80 times bigger now. A century of preparation made this shocking growth spurt possible, and there is an agreed upon name for that century: “The Industrial Revolution.” During the last fifty years, the prevailing economic system of that Revolution, Capitalism, has been able to make the increasingly prosperous part of the human race, which has actually shrunk as a portion of the overall population, able to rule politically (mostly through nation-states) over every other part –and over the earth and all other living beings on it. Read more

America’s original independent government, as every school child knows (one hopes…), was set up so that two key “checks and balances” would keep it in lawful harmony. Way ahead of the science of ecology, the Founding Fathers thought like political ecologists, understanding that if too much decision-making accumulated at any place in the governmental system the principle of equality that animated the whole would be lost. If it was to be a system of, by and for the people, no group of the people –not even “the majority” in an election– should ever emerge as the rulers or the directors. Sometimes, the people would have to put up an army and be led by a general, as the colonists had been led by General Washington in their war for independence; but when General Washington was elected the first President, he became not a ruler–like the English king recently defeated–but a leader for a time, checked and balanced by a legislature and a judiciary, and called upon to respect state governments while he led the national government. Each state government, too, would have a three-branch internal balance comparable to the federal government’s. Read more

The great social movements of 20th century America were movements for inclusion of excluded groups into political life, citizenship.  The two exemplary movements were Abolitionism, which brought voting rights to the former slaves, and Women’s Suffrage, which brought voting rights to women in the 1920s. Each extended the rights promised in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to people who had been left out of the basic covenant “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  In the post-WWII period, the Civil Rights Movement and the  Women’s Liberation Movement (“second wave feminism”) each took a second step: to achieve specific laws that would assure equality beyond the political and electoral domain, and particularly in private enterprises and in private spaces, from clubs to schools and  universities, from places of employment to religious institutions. Civil rights followed from political rights. Read more

Four decades its been now since Richard Nixon’s November, 1969 Inaugural address, in which he appealed to “the better angels of our nature” to listen to each other rather than shouting past one another. He was alluding, of course, to Lincoln’s Inaugural  on the eve of the Civil War in 1861, in which the President, in a mood of deep sadness, made a last appeal for Union. But Nixon’s rhetorical strategy was to imply that the anti-war protestors gathering on the mall of the Washington Monument to shout at him were potential Secessionists. In retrospect, though, we can see him –not any of them–as the progenitor of a new line of Secessionists. Read more