October 1, 2024
Dear Friends,
As I reflect on the upcoming presidential election, I find hope in the potential of unfolding events sparked by Donald J. Trump. We have a long way to go, but without Donald, it is unlikely that the potential breakthrough of a Kamala Harris presidency now at hand would have been possible.
I was born in 1937, at the end of the Great Depression. My close-knit extended family was staunchly Republican and aligned with conservative values of family, community, and nature. Then, as now, both Democratic and Republican parties claimed to be committed to the wellbeing of the people. I transitioned from an Eisenhower Republican to a Kennedy Democrat in 1960. I have since aligned ever more closely with the Democratic Party.
In truth, both parties have throughout my lifetime been largely captive to the wealthy interests that fund their campaigns. And wealthy interests continue to dominate society’s most powerful institutions, including those of government, business, communications, finance, education, and religion. On top of this, Trump has given us an all-powerful and unaccountable Supreme court lacking ethical boundaries and aligned with the interests of the billionaire class.
Through no intention of his own, Donald J. Trump, seems to be bringing together principled members of both the Democratic and Republican parties to oppose him. I am hopeful that this may be setting the stage for a serious and long overdue conversation about political reforms consistent with the deep global cultural transformation now unfolding.
–-David Korten
Thank You, Donald
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
David Korten | October 1, 2024
We are coming up on what may be the most consequential election in U.S. history. One contestant is an intelligent thoughtful, caring, middle-aged, multiracial woman with demonstrated experience in and commitment to law enforcement and dedicated to collaborative multiracial democratic self-rule to secure the wellbeing of the living Earth and all its people. The other contestant is an aging racist, sexist, narcissistic, convicted felon who has made clear his intention to rule as a dictator dedicated to advancing his personal self-interest, punishing his enemies, and eliminating future elections.
We are in the midst of a profound reordering of politics in the United States. The growing numbers of influential Republican politicians pledging their support for Harris in this election gives me hope that Harris will win and embrace the opportunity to work with the principled Republicans to create a better future for all while transforming our political institutions and rebuilding a principled Republican party dedicated to the common good.
The unfolding political realignment is reflected in the little noticed but readily evident forces at play in the 2024 Republican and Democratic national conventions. When watching the Republican convention, you could see that the people there were mostly white, male, and older. The mood, while it had plenty of cheering, was dominated by anger accented by Donald Trump’s long, rambling closing speech railing against his enemies.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
The Democratic convention presented a stark contrast. What we saw there was a crowd representing this country’s wondrous diversity. It included presentations by several Republicans so appalled by Donald Trump that they crossed over party lines to join with the Democrats to support the election of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as U.S. President and Vice President. They joined in a joyful celebration of diversity and the future it is ours to create together.
As I was pondering the contrast between the two conventions, I came across an extraordinary Pew Research Center report from 2019 on “How people around the world view diversity in their countries.” It was based on surveys conducted in 27 countries that had become home to more than half of the world’s international migrants over the previous 20 years. Though not everyone recognized the growing diversity of their own country, 69% of respondents did.
The more striking finding was that of those who recognized the increase in diversity, 45% favored it. Only 23% opposed it. A majority opposed greater diversity in only 4 countries—Italy, Hungary, Russia, and Greece. In the United States 61% favored growing diversity, while only 17% opposed it.
We have no earlier data, and the Pew Research Center has not updated its 2019 findings. So, we cannot be certain of the trends. What the existing data suggests is truly extraordinary in this time of deep conflict sparked by humanity’s national, racial, cultural, and religious diversity. Despite these conflicts, as a people, we are coming to value and welcome our diversity as a source of beneficial strength and creativity. This welcoming is observed most strongly in the young and the more highly educated.
In the United States, research programs in educational institutions are playing an important role by studying the distinctive contributions of different cultures to our human understanding of ourselves and our potential. These findings are then communicated through educational programs to build further appreciation among young Americans for the beneficial role that diversity plays as we move towards a viable human future.
This would be a good time to deal with our contradictions. We Americans—both Trumpers and non-Trumpers—promote ourselves to the world as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yet we hardly qualify. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, we have nearly 25 percent of its prison population. Though Blacks make up only 13.40% of the total U.S. population, they account for nearly 40% of our prisoners.
Perhaps our greatest contradiction relates to inequality. Overall, 37.9 million Americans are living below the poverty line. This includes 7.7 percent of non-Hispanic Whites and 17 percent of Blacks.
We are encouraged to focus our attention on the injustice of the racial divide, which is clearly serious. But this is a diversion of attention from the yet deeper injustice. In 2023 there were 735 billionaires in the United States. Nine of them had financial assets that totaled more than 100 billion. The richest was Elon Musk with $251 billion—a truly obscene excess.
We are long overdue in recognizing the extreme injustice of an economy in which a few possess the power and privilege of billions of dollars in financial assets while others—irrespective of diversity characteristics—struggle to survive on incomes below the poverty line. Our priority should be a society in which there are no such extremes of wealth and poverty. No one should be below the poverty line. And no one should have a $1 billion, especially when so many are struggling to survive.
We have urgent need in the United States for civil discussion and debate in search of the significant political reforms required to achieve a true one person one vote democracy aligned with the true interests of all our country’s people and beyond. In our rapidly evolving world, it requires that we go forward with appreciation for the rapidly unfolding opportunity created by the convergence of our human diversity and interdependence.
I am greatly encouraged by the coming together of Democrats and Republicans in support of Kamala Harris. Donald Trump sought absolute personal control of the Republican Party and the destruction of the Democratic Party. In the process, he energized the Democratic Party and created an alliance among responsible Democrats and Republicans devoted to defeating him and working together to transform the political institutions that made Trump’s authoritarian dreams a threat to the entire world.
We have come a very long way from our founding as a “democracy” that made slavery legal and limited the vote to white male property owners. Trump has provided us all an essential wakeup call by alerting us to how dangerously limited our existing political system continues to be.
In so doing, Trump has badly crippled the Republican Party. We cannot go forward as a one-party—or even a two-party democracy. We need a sharing of power among multiple parties bringing a diversity of voices to the table as we move forward together to the Ecological Civilization on which a viable human future depends.
This is our time to join in rebuilding the Republican party within a multiparty system that fulfills our long-unfulfilled dream of the United States as a true democracy dedicated to the celebration of our growing diversity.
Noteworthy…
The reference, above, to the Pew Research Center’s report, “How People Around the World View Diversity in Their Countries,” bears repeating. It is part of a larger report, “A Changing World: Global Views on Diversity, Gender Equality, Family Life, and the Importance of Religion,” examining the stark contrasts among nations. We invite our readers to consider the position of the U.S. in these rankings.
“We Need a New Global Measure for Poverty.” Max Roser, founder of Our World in Data, writes for this NYTimes opinion piece: “Entire nations have largely left the deep poverty of the past behind. To keep us moving in the right direction, we have to make global poverty more visible by finding a better way to measure it.”
One more item, hot off the press: On September 30, the NYTimes published their editorial opinion, “The Only Patriotic Choice for President.” Explore this gift article, which you can read without a subscription.
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From the Book Shelf…
“Humans are a choice-making species of many possibilities. This truth is demonstrated by the immense diversity of cultures and institutions humans have created and lived by during the span of our existence. We have demonstrated our ability to cooperate, care, and share. We have demonstrated our ability to compete, kill, and exploit. What defines our distinctive nature is our ability to make shared cultural and institutional choices that in turn shape our individual and collective relationships and common future. The happiest among us are most often those who have become most adept at cooperating to care. and share. We now face our ultimate choice.”
From “Ecological Civilization: From Emergency to Emergence,” page 3.
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