The creative people in the United States of America, who have achieved economic success with their ideas, work with the representatives of the democratic republic to build the culture of the country and cooperate with the bureaucracy towards the goal of building a better country. But, as the public finds itself with access to more communication channels they are challenging these two groups, the creative industries and the bureaucracy, in public discourse and on the streets. Those who have the power to build a strong America, work against even their own personal interests by ignoring or suppressing the voices of these people.
While the exact definition of whose voices are the voices of the United States is mutable, the country continues, from its inception, to include more people from various backgrounds in that definition. The Constitution of the United States of America, the three branches of government, and the determined if not alway agreeable or even beneficent relation between all the parties that work towards interpreting the constitution create this progress towards inclusivity. The people of the nation rely upon these efforts to build a country that was, continues to be (even within this era of doubt), and can still be a beacon for the world.
Article IV of the constitution and the first amendment provide the country with a representative republican democracy and the ability for the people to peacefully assemble and have their voices heard. In 1937, the Supreme Court of the United Sates of America ruled that state governments may not violate the constitutional right of peaceable assembly.
(https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/55/de-jonge-v-oregon)
The first amendment is currently being ignored in many parts of the country. While some protestors may be violent, thus temporarily forfeiting their right at that moment, and some officers may instigate violence to justify the use of force and supersede the right of peaceful assembly, the leaders of the country cannot deny the effects of state power in suppressing the rights given to the people by documents the states have agreed are the basis of their existences. The states must concede that, even if peaceful assembly is not being violently dispersed, constant police activity on the streets and in the air of the nation has the effect of discouraging assembly and denies the people their rights through intimidation.
In a similar manner, the creative individuals currently defending their need for open debate use their intelligence and influence to intimidate people who have the same need for open debate but lack the ability to impact the country with their words. This intimidation may not be explicit, but the leaders of the culture have access to power, resources, and lawmakers that, at the very least, implicitly intimidates those who would criticize them. These scions of thought who resonate with the public imagination, the academic cutting edge, and the corporate innovation cycle, influence culture with greater effect than most people who have not achieved this recognition. In the United Sates, this recognition is rewarded with money, and this reward (among other motivations) encourages people to seek creative accomplishments that will further influence the culture.
Conversely, the people are attempting to influence the culture through mundane communication and peaceful assembly. The people are speaking about and protesting a lack of equity for diverse communities, violent attacks upon and the killings of marginalized people, and exclusion from a workforce that receives sufficient pay to sustain healthy lives to list a few issues. As the people address their grievances with society, many concerns come to light about the current cultural content because it has formed the society as it existed in the recent past and as it exists today. Those who have created the culture have reinforced or created some of the aspects of society causing concerns. People in need of change want these concerning elements of society to be improved. To create that change the people criticize the society with their words and actions. This criticism has noticeable impact in the 21st century due to social media, and the criticism prompts the curators of culture to bemoan the paucity of support that once, not too long ago, propelled them into the upper echelons of the world.
These influential, creative, and sometimes popular individuals are subjects of headlines that the media needs to keep viewers interested in their content. This advantageous access to the media aggravates the conflict between the culture creators and those seeking to advance the culture towards more equitable ends: when the creators voice their complaints the media (social or otherwise) starts to churn upwards rising their voices to the top, and the voices of the people speaking to correct injustice are dampened, and their suffering continues to be ignored.
Rather than opening their eyes and ears, those with the power to change the laws and demand their just application, shout still further that we cannot abandon our current cultural icons and listen to the public because the abandonment attitude restricts open debate. To some, the people must participate in the current culture and pay the required fees to bring its voices to their ears. Otherwise, fewer people will be interested in working towards success in the various creative realms, the culture will stagnate, and the grand experiment will fail to achieved its destiny.
When all this discussion is contained within the electronic frontier, the internet being an addition to this frontier not its genesis, the forces protecting the culture are less obvious. However, when state oppression subjects fear, death, and mayhem on the people and forces them to bring their grievances to the streets, the ferocity of cultural enforcement becomes tangible. Law enforcement is used to maintain the peace and forgets about or ignores the first amendment’s right to peaceful assembly. The authorities create a constant tension and fear between themselves and the public. The people are unable to shape the public discourse, which worsens this state of discord. When the tensions mount to anxiety and some of those without voices, decide to make themselves heard through other means, the authorities silence them. While authorities do cooperate with each other, this silencing is not always a coordinated effort. The natures of the state and law enforcement ensures that those who speak in opposition to their current forms will, at the very least, be looked at with suspicion. If someone making their grievances public belongs to a marginalized group, a lack of consequences for unlawful enforcement coupled with few options for marginalized group to seek justice or retribution will embolden officers to suppress suspicious activity independent of any direct orders.
However, the hierarchies of the nation do cooperate with law enforcement when they protect law enforcement and penalize the public for exercising their rights. This support for the law is given in order that just law enforcement has confidence that it will be protected when dealing with social ills. To the country’s detriment, the upper echelons of society tend towards forgiving officers’ atrocities at the expense of increasing public confidence in the institutions of the state.
Likewise, those same hierarchies defend creative voices with the similar intention of protecting the interests of creative people in pursuing their purposes. In this case, rather than the destruction of social ills, the interests being protected are the creation of social culture. The states’ remorseless support for the creation of culture and the policing of people harmed by the culture combine to create an degenerative hegemony. This hegemonic control perpetuates culture that supports it and suppresses or kills voices that oppose it.
But, hegemony is a byproduct of bureaucracy not the goal of democracy. In a republic the people exercise democratic power by investing that power in individuals. Those individuals have access to state wealth in order to enact the will of the people. To accomplish this, governments hire bureaucrats, the people who work in the offices of government around the country, to administrate programs and ensure the will of the people is achieved. These government employees create policies, regulations, and other documents in an attempt to build a system that can exist into the future. At its best, this forward momentum creates a good country. To ensure the efforts to build a good nation are consistent, new government workers can refer to the documents that have already been produced to understand their roles. This documentation determines the power of government employees within the offices of government because it determines what can and cannot be achieved within the workplace, and this power coupled with a concept of statehood tends towards hegemony.
The constitution freed some people from regal hegemony. The framers were keenly aware of this tendency for power to accumulate and invested the public with rights to ensure that any unwanted government activity could be brought to the attention of the authorities, who, with their republican representative ethos, would enact the will of the people to ensure that the habits of bureaucrats to centralize power would be balanced by the ability of that centralization to address the concerns of the people and not the concerns of the government.
At this moment the democratic process of the United Sates is attempting to assert its original intent within communities that were not included in its original idea of the people. This has resulted in state violence and public violence, arguments between those who create culture and those who consume culture, and conflict between the people who determine social standards and those who want to live their lives as they see fit.
Astoundingly, those who have been rewarded for their successful creativity and have had chances to build upon or alter the culture now look askew at the public who would like to do the same for themselves but lack influential voices. These fortune citizens’ words demonstrate a lack of empathy and self-awareness. Surely these creative people know the exhilaration of having their works recognized and have felt the power that recognition brings them? Why else would they speak so loudly when they are criticized? This outcry against cancel culture is unlikely to be the amateur pain of criticism. These professionals will have dealt with and developed techniques to handle criticism by now. More likely, their current defence is prompted by a fear that their recognition, influence, and monetary rewards will be lessened. To display empathy, these folks could recall their initial success and use their creative powers to imagine what it would be like for more people to have that success and its necessary exhilaration and influence.
Instead, they have retreated within the walls that prosperity has allowed them to build and cower there behind the institutions of authority. They ignore the pleas of people who want to participate in building a country based on a constitution that balances the need for government and the needs of the people. They are risking those walls and the safe communities that exist within them. Even if ivory towers weather these changes and rich communities maintain their characters the ability to cooperate with other people within states and across state lines will be severely diminished because trust within the country has been and continues to be diminished.
Trust is essential to teamwork, and the United States’ love of sport is a sure sign that the country understands the role teamwork plays in maintaining a strong nation. A team that trusts each other can move and react at speeds far greater then those who need to verify everything their partners are saying. In this 21st century the country needs to be able to trust itself and its people. If those who speak for the culture cannot also speak for the people and those who protect the culture cannot also protect the people, then trust becomes a foolish proposition. Instead, everyone must work with a suspicion mind, and the progress that will be made must be made at a pace that is too slow for the challenges we face in these times.
While those who create for the culture actively support the need for open debate, they could at the same time step slightly aside and invite the voices of the people onto the stage giving them a chance to participate within influential circles. Those who can change the culture can defend themselves, the principles of open debate, and advocate for the public interest. By spending some time looking at the people’s perspectives and taking advantage of the free thought they are championing, they could user their time to listen and perform a patriotic service by sacrificing some of their creative process. They can use their considerable abilities to understand what the people are saying, and this understanding will build empathy that can help reforge the bonds of trust that have been broken. But, this empathy cannot be created without first listening to the grievances of the people.
To listen to the people is a necessary component of republican democracy, and, in the United States of America, it is a right agreed to by all the states within the union. However, until those with the power to speak to the public, the people who create popular, academic, and corporate culture, are willing to listen to the public, then those who represent the public will feel confident that they too can continue to ignore them. Now, in this time, to myopically focus on the elite’s need for free thought and open discussion while ignoring or, worse yet, condemning the public’s same needs ensures the democratic process will continue to suffer, in the public sphere and on the streets, and with it the entirety of the people it represents.