The Concentration of Power

Since the beginning of organized societies power and leadership have been symbolized by Hierarchy intended to preserve power. The modern democracy is threatened by internal and external forces that wish to upend and topple it. A need and belief for control and a concentration of power by those that govern have overtaken our need for a balance with all institutions playing their roles in the Liberal Egalitarian order. Of course, the greatest example of this came on....

...January 6, 2021, a red-white-and-blue mob descended on the American Capitol in Washington, D.C., the most powerful symbol of democracy worldwide. A thin police line blocked the rioters, but the Proud Boys, a patriotic? group acting in quasi-military fashion, took the lead in muscling past, breaking the dam through which a deluge of approximately 10,000 protesters then flowed.

A police officer who sought to protect a door to the Capitol was pulled from the squad and brutally beaten with a hockey stick. Air Force veteran Ashli Babitt, a Trump supporter, was shot in the neck and died after trying to climb through a broken window close to the House of Representatives chamber. Officer Brian Sicknick was hit by chemical spray shot by a Trump supporter, collapsed that evening, and died the next day from a stroke. Three Trump supporters died from medical emergencies at the riot, and almost 140 officers were physically injured. About 800 made it into the Capitol building itself. The average pro-Trump protester at the Capitol Building that tragic day was not like the Proud Boys. However, they were typically middle-class, middle-aged, and geographically representative samples of America's counties. They believed they were standing up for liberty and the Constitution. They believed the election had been stolen, and they wanted to right that perceived wrong to democracy. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched the events at the Capitol, but each viewed and judged from their own perspectives, colored by the positions and identities to which they subscribed.

Democrats tended to be outraged. Many Republicans, aghast. Europeans, shocked. But some Republicans in America, whose industries had been shipped to China decades ago had voted for change. They had pinned their hopes on Donald Trump and believed a strong American president was needed to turn the tide of America's "industrial decline," might like many of the rioters have felt righteous or cathartic.

African-Americans and other people of color, who had lived experience of extra-legal police brutality, including that promoted by President Trump, might have felt a mix of fear and foreboding at the many current and former police and soldiers, now wearing civilian garb. They were mixing with rioters sporting Confederate and military paraphernalia and doing literal and symbolic violence to the nation's Capitol Building.

Having been influenced by years of Trump's attacks on the media as "enemies of the people," the mob turned against the press, destroying equipment and threatening reporters. One was manhandled and thrown over a wall. Pipe bombs were found at the respective national headquarters of the Republican and Democratic committees.

The European Union in Brussels is gradually absorbing the power of nation-states like France and Germany that have existed for hundreds of years. In Asia, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly powerful, with its leader Xi Jinping now "emperor for life" and attempting to push U.S. military forces out of the region. One of the causal arguments in this book is that the concentration of power acts as a ratchet. It concentrates when conditions are ripe, and force is applied.

The world will always have conflict but we must assure that the conflicts are balanced out and that everyone wins if we can create balance amongst all groups of nations.