Is our democracy a commons?

More and more I've been trying to figure out how we ended up with the individual former President Carter has referred to as an #IllegitimatePresident. There are more and more books being written about those who voted for the current POTUS. I've read, among others, Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, Sarah Smarsh's Heartland, and Jedediah Purdy's This Land Is Our Land. I've also read several reviews and essays similar to the Los Angeles Review of Books TERMINAL WHITENESS. Each of the books and authors strikes me as having greater or lessor elements of truth, with none offering a preponderance of it. I have a strong sense that there are deeper seated issues involved, waiting to be unearthed by a root cause analysis.

I've not yet read Elinor Ostrum's Governing the Commons, but recently came across a very useful graphic of the fundamental principles involved. It seems to me that one of the problems we're grappling with is that our democracy is, essentially, a commons, but we aren't governing it as such. Does that make any sense to you? I hope so. It seems to me that we have chosen, more and more over the past several election cycles, to let politics and politicians erode our strong group identity and understanding of purpose; to destroy our sense of fair distribution of costs and benefits; to minimize fair and inclusive decision making; while avoiding sanctions etc. We may have brought ourselves to the point that we need to do a major reset or else forego the ideals that were intended to underly this United States of America. Doesn't it seem to you that we have drifted quite far from fast and fair conflict resolution, to the point that nothing ever is resolved?

What Kind of Times Are These

By Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

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