The limits we're placing on ourselves, the self-governed

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I want to take a stab at discussing an important consideration for the qualifications we accept in our leaders.

With the emergence of the Tea Party, many voters embraced a preference for what the media has called "outsiders," or people who have had little to no prior experience or formal education to prepare them for service in our governance. From the outset, I've viewed this as a blatant representation of the lack of awareness and understanding many voters have about our governance — how it works, what the consequences are for mismanagement, and its impacts across the various settings of its influence (domestically, locally, globally, strategically, legally, economically, etc.).

Too often voters, either guided by media or other influences in their lives, hone in on a single or a limited setting where they have a higher awareness of government's impacts, such as the economy. By limiting themselves to that awareness of limited processes and impacts of governance, they assume a sort of personal expertise about that topic that now is fed and nurtured by pretty much all social media via the algorithms used to keep us engaged and generate profits for corporations. Rather than the more holistic and systemic understanding of governance that we're supposed to get via our education systems, voters who "specialize" in this way lose any sense of our governance's integration of the interests of individuals with those of the community writ large.

I say all this as I point to the Freedom Caucus of the U.S. House, whose members not only carry the Tea Party banner but who also disproportionately represent those with sole or primarily business administration education. Notably, Mark Meadows — President Donald Trump's fourth chief of staff and main advocate in Congress — earned an associate degree in business administration and worked in real-estate development like Trump.

How does an education in business administration relate to preparation for leadership in our governance? While these elected members are educated in systems that exist for profit, our governance has an entirely different mission and imperative. How do people whose understanding of systems of profit understand our systems of governance, the Constitution and what exactly the oath they take to uphold it entails?

Corporations and American business have cultivated a consumerist culture in the U.S. over my lifetime, and I have noted this rise as engagement with governance and civic matters has decreased.

The detachment from the war in Afghanistan by the U.S. populace was a pinnacle of this shift to individual awareness of the economy, the cost and availability of consumables and one's personal comfort in daily life from the collective civic life of the country. It daily feels like the vital link between individuals and the community of the republic as expressed through our collective governance is deeply broken; we no longer consider ourselves stakeholders, but are now shareholders in something that must return to us some measure of gain for our attention to it. We Americans have adopted a transactional relationship to our own self-governance that has always been intended to be by, for and of the people. "People" is plural and denotes a collective gain that too many Americans now denounce for their own self-interest.

The Jan. 6 committee investigating the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol presents us all with an opportunity to get the fuller picture of how our votes — our individual and collective choices — affect the workings of governance. It reinforces the notion that we are indeed all part of a greater, collective good that requires individuals to recognize and perform a duty to it for it to survive and be sustainable. Individually we all have a duty to recognize that bond we possess to this greater good for our own good.

Those who seek to put their own interests above country, whether for profit or any other reason, are a direct threat to the systems that sustain us all. Over our history, we've plucked the Joseph McCarthys and the Richard Nixons from their self-righteous and wholly transactional paths. We must do the same to Trump for the simple reason that he cannot remain unaccountable for the assault on the seminal act of our collective self-governance — our vote.