Democracy, Freedom and Evolution: A Key to Defeating MAGA Tyranny
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 8 Sep 2025
Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
31 Aug 2025 – Freedom, within a democratic context, can be understood as “self-determination.” And self-determination for individual persons requires a complex social order for its context. A democracy is a society organized for the common good of its citizens, a common good that includes the provision of the social conditions for the developing and practicing of self-determination among its citizens. A young person growing into adulthood toward self-determination requires healthful food, decent housing, education, and healthcare, goods that can only be provided through a complex social organization.
As philosopher Alan Gewirth expressed in his many books: a democratic government is one that provides the conditions for both freedom and well-being. Well-being means the food, housing, education and healthcare necessary for a healthy physical life, and freedom means guaranteed political due process as well as protected personal rights. The sole legitimate purpose of government is to provide the conditions (freedom and well-being) that make possible the self-determining, goal-oriented lives of citizens.
Evolution has been a basic concept of the sciences and the world view deriving from modern science since the early 19th century and the philosophy of Hegel. Darwin’s Origins of Species appeared mid-century in 1859, and scientific theories of the evolutionary character of our universe emerged by the early 20th century. Hence, over the past two centuries the evolutionary character of all things has become a fundamental component of the cosmological paradigm. All things evolve: non only species, but civilizations, nation-states, communities, concepts (like “democracy”) and individual persons.
The concept of evolution includes the idea of telos, direction, or purpose. A natural world that operated entirely randomly would not be one that evolved. It would be rather a world of chaos, instability, and stasis, a world not going anywhere. Evolution implies directionality and the theory of natural evolution developed by modern biology brings us from early one-celled life, through ever more complex stages, to a highest life form on earth: human beings. In evolutionary theory, everything is not on the same level but there are holarchical developments moving from lower to higher levels.
Very much the same is true of a free, self-determining person. A person who operates entirely out of his or her impulses and momentary desires is not a free, self-determining person. We recognize such a person as enslaved, so to speak, to his or her lower nature. In the Republic, Plato called these impulses and desires a “many-headed monster” that enslaved a soul to its baser nature. (Perhaps we should call this the “Jeffrey Epstein” or “Donald Trump” model of the soul.) A free person manifests a reasonable degree of self-restraint and discipline so as to subordinate these impulses and desires to higher purposes.
Everything evolves, according to the modern scientific paradigm. Species have formed and evolved over the 3.8 billion years of life on Earth. Civilizations have evolved (along with what it means to be civilized). And each human being evolves as a mind-body whole from youthful immaturity to wiser and deeper levels of understanding and freedom. Democratic society, therefore, drawing on the principles outlined above, includes an evolving idea of a common good that itself encourages the growth of citizens toward ever higher forms of maturity and wisdom.
Psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan present us with a growth pattern in which persons move from an immature “egoistic” orientation to an “ethnocentric” orientation (my country, race, or religion is the best) to a “worldcentric” view (affirming one planet of unity in diversity) and, ultimately, to a “cosmocentric” level of maturity (deep awareness of the cosmological dimensions of our humanity). In a related way, the theory of growth called “Spiral Dynamics” outlines the growth process as movement through color-coded levels: “Purple” (group mentality, paternalistic), “Red” (leader domination, the haves rightly prevail), “Blue” (duty based, loyalty to the system), “Orange” (achievement-materialist, striving to get ahead), etc.
After Orange come higher levels of maturity that are participatory, integrative, cosmological, holistic, and “democratic” (now in a higher and more profound sense). At these levels a more mature conception of the “common good” begins to emerge. Society, which as we saw is organized to serve the common good of citizens, can now be understood to include “conscious evolution” or “social systems that encourage growth toward maturity” within the framework of the common good.
In democracy, understood more deeply in this way, the good of individuals complements the common good of society. There is no contradiction between individual self-determination and the common good, since both are premised on a telos of growth toward higher levels of integration and fulfillment (and they dialectically require one another). Citizenship means that citizens actively support their institutions and contribute to the on-going evolutionary development of those institutions. They identify their personal goods (of freedom and well-being) with the public common good of the society (oriented to the freedom and well-being of all).
Can we conclude that human civilization on Earth evolves in similar ways? Indeed, there are many studies of such developments in our collective human consciousness over the past few millennia, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Ken Wilber to Gene Gebser. All things in the universe evolve, as we have seen, and this includes human individuals, societies, and civilization as a whole. As with all things that evolve, we can discern a “telos,” a direction. And anything with a direction or telos implies a point of culmination or fulfillment for the process. We can discern the direction of evolution and act accordingly, both in our individual lives and in our societies. In general, that direction implies a future of integration (unity in diversity), harmony, peace, justice, and environmental protection.
In terms of this model, the current world system of militarized “sovereign” nation-states is clearly a fairly low level of civilizational development and maturity. It is fragmented, violent, threatening to the survival of humanity, and a drag on any further evolution of human civilization. The “telos” inherent in the civilizational evolutionary process includes the unity of civilization within a democratic world system embracing the unity in diversity of the whole of humanity. To understand “democracy” within any one country (which exists with the framework of the immature global “war system”) means to see national democracies as pointing beyond themselves toward global democracy (that is, freedom and self-determination for all, without the disgrace of either wealth inequalities or the war-system).
Only in this way can the true “self-determination” (freedom and well-being) of individual nations be realized much more fully than at present. At present freedom and well-being are hindered by a system spending its wealth on war and war-preparations, rather than on the conscious evolution toward higher forms of self-realization. The evolution of democracy within states also requires the control, regulation (or abolition) of massive wealth inequalities that clearly are detrimental to the common good of society (which emphasizes the equal rights to self-determination for all citizens). Concentrations of private wealth inevitably disrupt democracy and pressure it toward a regression into oligarchy or rule by a small percentage of super-wealthy persons and/or corporations. The tyranny of Trump is the culmination of just such a process.
In sum, the popular idea of democracy in the USA has been severely truncated. It is largely non-evolutionary, assuming incorrectly that “self-determination” means simply the right to indulge every whim or desire that does not interfere with the whims and desires of others. Largely these whims and desires, if direction-oriented, are channeled into the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, making for a “self-disciplined” life dedicated to accumulating more wealth than is necessary, a travesty of true human freedom and dignity. In the USA, this distorted concept of “self-determination” relieves government of its responsibility for the common good of our well-being. It includes the freedom to go hungry, the freedom to become homeless, and the freedom to go bankrupt due to medical expenses. These ideas of democracy and freedom seriously mutilate the principles of our true human situation.
The MAGA phenomenon in the United States is clearly a massive attempt at a regress attempting to thwart democracy’s evolutionary telos insofar as that has been achieved to date. The US Constitution framed a society on the principles of Montesquieu’s theory of separate branches of government in conjunction with John Locke’s social contract theory. It was central to the Enlightenment movement that placed reason at the center of human existence, arguing that all persons shared this rational capacity and that democratic ideals were derived from and protected by reason. These theories of democracy were very advanced for the late 18th century but today we have developed beyond these promising beginnings. Many constitutional scholars speak of the “Second Constitution” that came about through the 14th, 15th and 16th amendments to the original document (after the Civil War) that enlarged and actualized the telos that was implicit in the first document.
On the basis of this “Second Constitution,” the democratic telos was actualized further in the New Deal of the Roosevelt era and in the Civil Rights Movement of the late 50s and 60s. But this process of self-actualization of the democratic telos has been hampered and reversed by the twin undemocratic forces of vast accumulations of private wealth within, and the militarized system of sovereign nations that structures international affairs. The MAGA phenomenon is a direct result of these undemocratic forces.
This reactionary movement attempts to take US society backwards into a pre-civil rights environment of the 1950s when segregation was in place, when the US was the undisputed industrial heartland of the world, when the US dollar reigned supreme, and when McCarthyism freely attacked those considered “unpatriotic,” often ruining their lives and careers. This is in large part because both the traditional Republican Party and the Democratic Party have utterly failed to clearly discern the telos in the democratic process to the point where institutions are developed that support and enhance the evolutionary direction enhancing freedom and wellbeing both in part and whole.
Both parties are riddled with dogmatic ideologies that prevented discernment of the evolutionary telos of democracy and civilization and that blocked their healthy development. The ideology of both parties includes a dogmatic affirmation of “capitalism” as the only economic system that was acceptable or that made sense. Rather than looking at the capitalist system objectively and discerning its many negative effects on human beings, on freedom, and on the environment, they pushed ahead attempting to deal with healthcare, for example, through a private profit model, rather than through the commonsense model of a single-payer public system.
Secondly, rather than discerning the emerging multi-polar world clearly and working to adapt that world toward a unified civilizational paradigm, both political parties hunkered down on an ideology of “implacable enemies” in the form of China, Russia, Iran, etc. Because of this, the industrial-military-academic complex has exploded in terms of power and influence, thereby exacerbating the war-system and draining immense resources from the body-politic. The result has been (rather than a world system growing according to its telos of integration and mutual cooperation for the common good of the planet and future generations) perpetual wars, actual and proxy, and a world perpetually teetering on the brink of nuclear holocaust and planetary annihilation.
MAGA in particular hates science with its understanding of the evolutionary paradigm. It also hates reason and rationality, and that is why the charges against its politicians of “hypocrisy” when contradicting themselves fall on deaf ears. A large portion of MAGA are religious fundamentalists who, like children, cling to an idolatrous world view two millennia old, refusing to recognize that reason (used in the form of historical analysis primarily by Christian theologians) has shown that all scriptures require updating if the true spiritual messages of scriptures are to be grasped in the 21st century. MAGA cannot admit the evolutionary model because this would be tantamount to admitting that they are intellectual and moral children, at Purple (group identity) “Red” (authoritarian) or “Blue” (dogmatic loyalty) levels of development, who simply need to grow up. But if you throw off reason and evolution, all you are left with is power, that is with fascism.
The MAGA phenomenon, which threatens the very existence of freedom and self-determination, must be countered through actualization of a vision of the true meaning and telos of democracy, both within and among nation-states. We need to envision a conscious evolution toward national and global democracy, and the multiple ways in which the freedom and well-being of persons can complement and empower the freedom and well-being of the nation and the world. We need to show people that freedom does not mean hunkering down against “society” or any other perceived “enemy.” Freedom can only be real and effective if individuals are integrated into a community that empowers and protects everyone’s freedom.
Democracy, in sum, forms a dimension of the evolutionary development of human beings and human civilization. It understands that all legitimate government is premised on achieving the well-being and freedom of the people. Government has no other purpose. Since every person is also in the process of evolving from youthful egoism toward mature integral existence, democracy must facilitate this process, itself moving to higher levels of realization. It can, therefore, legitimately tolerate no absolute boundaries. The nation-state system cannot serve the civilizational development of democracy, for all people are growing mind-body realities requiring government to provide and protect both freedom and well-being. The evolutionary telos of the democratic idea is planetary democracy.
For those who deeply understand this meaning and significance of the democratic ideal, we are holding the 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament in Pondicherry, India, December 7-10, 2025. The PWP is authorized under Article 19 of the Earth Constitution that articulates the inner telos of the democratic concept, which means movement towards global democracy. The well-being of each one is directly connected with the well-being of the whole of humanity, and on this principle, we human beings possess all that is necessary to solve our most basic human problems. You can go to our website to find out more.
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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu
Tags: Authoritarianism, Democracy, Evolution, Freedom, Trump, USA
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 8 Sep 2025.
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