#YESBUT: We need to talk. We MUST vote. Sometimes we need to protest. But all are fatal distractions if we don’t address the root causes NOW.

Humanity Needs A Plan B. Humanity needs the DEMOS Project.

Coming off a week that words or emotion cannot pay due justice to, the iconic moment for America’s misery on Independence Day was set in Highland Park IL, with the arrest of yet another small man devoid of purpose other than to hate and destroy. The most remarkable fact of the arrest is that the heavily armed white assailant survived it. Unarmed Jayland Walker, shot 60 times by 8 police officers a few days earlier in Akron Ohio seems thus tragically unremarkable. Just another ‘shot for being black’ case. Maybe that’s the iconic image to burn into one’s mind as your momento for July 4, 2022.

But there are now so many images, outraged opinions, narratives, facts. Too many for sure to keep track of. That did not stop the punditry class, at least the pundits that I follow from centre right to centre left, of roiling in the greater tragedy that is now an ever-present American reality, to add more images, outraged opinions, narratives, facts. More noise.

A recent Gallup Poll reveals the depth of US despair. Only 38% of Americans now consider themselves ‘extremely proud’ to be an American - the lowest such finding since first asking the question in 2001. A Monmouth Poll today shows that 88% believe the United States is “on the wrong track”. Well of course they do. Of that 88%, half believe the election is a lie, and that all things done to protect a white minority from irrelevance - including violence - are now justifiable.

If half the population is feeling the aggrievement of the ignorant, and is increasingly sharing a propensity to trickery and violence to protect their ‘rights’, then I’m not sure how their neighbours can do anything but mirror the same concern, but obviously, for the opposite reason. So it’s untrue to me to say that 88% think the US is going the wrong way. Only 44% are. The other 56% are for the most part OK with the direction the US is going, but terrified of their neighbour.

Mitt Romney had a widely acclaimed article in the Atlantic this past weekend, offering a sobre voice of hope, but for a courageous and clever man, he today lacked for both. While tossing out that yes, for sure the MAGA folks are crazy, he then falls back into a false equivalency, blaming voices on the left and right for America’s not so-slow-walk to “cataclysm” if they don’t stop denying the path they are on. I believe he’s right but not for the reason he intends. There is a quickening pace to cataclysm, but it’s the crazy MAGA folks setting it (and yes, there are always enough people on the left saying intemperate things [mostly justified] that the rightwing media uses to justify whatever needs justifying and make their whataboutism retort).

The denial on the elite left is in not seeing seeing the pernicious and ubiquitous assault on democracy for the war that it is. A war where it is increasingly clear that through planning, subterfuge and purposeful help from actors foreign and domestic, the battle for democracy is not just starting, it is 2/3’s fought and the good guys are losing. They still don’t seem to understand that Roberts Rules of Order or the debating principles of the Cambridge Union don’t apply in a gunfight.

Romney also missteps as so many of my generation do, when he hangs his hope for the US and thus the world on the ‘great man’ theory. That what we really need is a Churchill or a Roosevelt to emerge, a ‘nice’ strongman with the balls, brains and character (for a certain gravitas is always helpful) to lead a grateful nation to safety and security. Of course it doesn’t work that way anymore, though better great people in the moment would certainly be helpful.

With respect, Romney and the pundits got it wrong. What’s happening in America isn’t just American. As the greatest nation on the planet, the greatest and richest prize with the most voracious media eco-system, it is only natural that this be where the malaise of a too-cynical ennui that is toxic to democracy is finding its roots. Here it is being nurtured and manipulated by many, and ignored by too many more. It is a phenomenon splitting every democracy into two societies, and fracturing the world into democratic and anti- democratic camps. Undoing decades of work, dearly wrought from centuries of history.

The reality everywhere is that the systems based on god’s and great men (and all of their ‘ism’s’) are simply not up to the challenge of leading the societies of today. Where most institutions exist to stand against time and change, most today in most civil societies are fading into dangerous irrelevance, because they are not agile enough to show the way, nor have the agency to remake themselves. We suddenly find ourselves with instruction manuals for our hospitals, our police forces, our schools, our legislatures - written decades or even centuries ago - that make no sense anymore. They don’t have application. More to the point, they actually impede the near future Age of Wonder that is imminent if we allow it to be.

Almost all that we all are doing is moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. Yes, we need to talk. Of course we MUST vote. And sometimes we need to protest, maybe even die. But all are existential distractions if we don’t address the root causes of systemic, global institutional and leadership insufficiency. And we need to do that now. Times up.

Democracy is not broken, but it is undeniably breaking. Very, very soon it will not be recognizable. When it is broken beyond repair, humanity will lose. It will lose its capacity to deal with all of the other existential issues that will define the lives of succeeding generations. Our leadership options might well be restricted to choosing between ‘nice’ autocrats like Saudi Arabia’s MBS (yes, the one who had the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi butchered in 2018) or evil ones like Vladimir Putin.

So what to do?

I believe that a new thing is required, something that is unique in human history. We have relied for too long on churches and governments and their consequent civil institutions to be the only models for mobilization and engagement. I believe that our newly connected world allows only now, for the first time, the connection, empowerment and mobilization of a systemic, global civic organization with the power, with all that that word entails, to reimagine the new leadership and the new institutions they will lead. To transform the world not through evangelization, but by it’s example. A movement that provides inspiration and hope to the majority of people NOT driven by ideology or orthodoxy. A movement that is informed by the legacy of our existing systems and institutions, but will never let those legacies define our future.

It’s time for the DEMOS Project If that sounds intriguing, then please checkout my other articles in the archive, but notably this one for those who ask, “yes, but HOW do you plan on doing this?” I believe that ‘we’ have the answer. Something that 1,000 of us, from 35+ countries, invested five years, 20,000 hours and $500,000 into. Basically we wrote the instruction manual for this new movement/organization. Our experience taught me that recruiting people to this cause is easy. There are scores of millions of disaffected centrists in the world that are aligned with the Tenets that we developed waiting to be mobilized. What we need is a historic level of funding to engage them.

The question is not, is the world’s citizenry waiting to be mobilized for this historic challenge, but rather, are those with means ready to make a new Age of Wonder real in our lifetimes?