I’ve been reading up a bit on the Founders, especially Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. I’ve been considering again some of their ideas that were
so radical for white Europeans of the time, ideas like self-determination, inalienable rights and the
experiment of a democratic state. I enjoy
trying to put myself into a mindset of the time: coming from the monolithic
British Empire which held an unquestioning value that people who were born into
money and title and privilege were inherently superior to those who were born
peasants—even ordained by God to govern.
Remembering this context helps to remind me how radical it was at the
time to propose that the common people could be trusted to govern
themselves. (Radical for white Europeans, that
is—indigenous people all over the place generally had much more egalitarian
views about individuals’ ability to manage their own affairs, though within the
framework of a communal, rather than individualistic, culture. It's important to remember that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had a well-functioning system that informed Ben Franklin's thinking in particular.) And although I’m deeply critical of European
culture, maybe because I’m critical of it, I’m also deeply grateful for this
long experiment in democracy. It was an
attempt to thumb the collective nose at the Divine Right of Kings, at the millennia-old
idea that there are simply those elite few who are fit to govern, and the rest
are only fit to follow or feed those elite.
I’m thinking of all this, of course, in the context of the
United States of America circa 2020, in the midst of the most preposterous
presidency I’ve seen in my lifetime, watching a diagnosable narcissist and
apparently pathological liar take the reins of the experiment. My point here is not to get bogged down in specific policies or agendas, but rather to look at the longer arc of
history and give
some voice to my deep concern that, in our current position in that long arc,
democracy seems to be losing.
My first bit of evidence for this assessment is the failure
of the Electoral College. Twice in my lifetime I’ve seen a President elected
who did not win the majority of the popular votes, the most recent losing by
more than 3 MILLION. I’ve written about
this before (SEE HERE), but as a brief recap, the electoral college was originally
instituted as a means of preventing a mass of uneducated voters from being
taken in by a smooth-talking populist who wasn’t really qualified to do the
job. Take, for example, this section
from Alexander Hamilton’s argument for establishing the Electoral College in Federalist
Papers 68:
“… the immediate election [of the President] should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station… A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”
Essentially, the U.S. Founders, the greatest Euro-descended champions of
democracy and self-determination at the time, still didn’t trust the people 100%. Sure, arguments could be made—were made, and
still are—that the Electoral College is a necessary ballast for the fact that
large population centers tend to vote in a similar way, and often differently
from the rural areas. With the advent of
mass media, however, and WIDELY diverse views within modern cities, this
argument simply doesn’t stand up to the numbers anymore. What’s worse, gerrymandering, the
manipulation of voting districts by whatever party is in power at the moment,
has become so rampant, so intricate and so corrupt, that it can literally
change a district’s majority vote from one term to the next simply by remapping
it. This tactic has only come about
because of the Electoral College. If
real democracy is to have a shot, this anachronistic system needs a serious
overhaul. Ironically, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently
tweeted “I’m so glad the President and I agree that the Electoral College has
got to go,” citing a 2012 tweet from Donald Trump in which he called the
Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy.” (@AOC Aug 27, 2019). I think that's funny, and telling.
Like many Americans my age, 9/11 inspired a whole new level
of outrage at the state of our politics. While the attack itself was shocking
and scary and sobering, it was the national response to it that freaked me out
even more. The sweeping additions to
Executive power that ensued with Bush Jr.’s Trifecta of the Patriot Acts 1 and
2 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 caused an amount of power to shift
into the hands of the Executive branch that was previously unprecedented in american
history. Essentially, they allow the
President to name anyone or any organization a “terrorist” and therefore a
military combatant and, with no evidence necessary, imprison them without
charge or sentencing for an indefinite amount of time. This is scary, it’s a direct outgrowth of the
increasing power of the military-industrial complex and I worry that it’s only
a matter of time before such power will be truly put to use by a despotic
President. However, as concerning as
this is, for me it’s actually less alarming to me than the current state of
media literacy among the average voter.
We are already surrounded by a cacophony of voices pointing
to the schism that the U.S. finds itself in today, and many point to the media
as one source of the split. I don’t
believe this stems from media outlets being more clearly split along
ideological lines than before. “The
Media” is not, of course, a single entity or voice or even community, and I don’t buy into the too-easy binary of biases
that separate Fox News from CNN, for example.
Those biases may be there, may have been there for a long time, and it
certainly doesn’t help that we have a President now who is actively slandering
news sources that criticize him and reinforcing his supporters’ beliefs that
any report that doesn’t view him favorably must be fake or biased or
inaccurate. But I don’t think even that, in itself, is the problem. The problem is that Americans are getting
dumber. We have grown so intellectually
lazy, have been so poorly educated in the concrete skills needed to critically
read media sources, that we have become a nation of ideological lemmings only
too eager to be led off a cliff. So many
voters can’t even give a clear definition of the word bias, much less identify
their own. If we don’t institute—and
quickly—a massive effort to provide even basic media literacy skills, to deconstruct
bias, assess reliability and seek out multiple sources to find the truth, we
may be lost.
The bit of evidence for democracy’s endangerment that
compels me the most is a less quantifiable one.
I hear it in conversations; I see it in social media comments more and
more. When I hear others like me lament
the decline of democracy, I often see the counter—often from conservatives—that
goes something like this: “Well, remember that the US isn’t really a democracy,
it’s a republic.” Many rural Republicans even campaigned during the 2018 midterms by consistently referring the "American Republic," clearly choosing the word Republic as a sort of concerted rhetorical move. The fact that this
excuse has become so pervasive worries me a great deal. It’s as if, with this oversimplified and
facile distinction, people are giving up on the whole experiment the country’s
founders embarked upon. Yes, of course, the U.S. was established as a (Democratic) Republic, in order to
balance the need for practiced and expedient passing of laws, with the vigilant
governance of the voting public who elect those law-makers. But that was a compromise from Day 1. Jefferson argued long and hard to have a true
and full democracy, while others cautioned that the people were not quite ready
for so much freedom and self-discipline.
And even with that historical context aside, this country has, for its entire existence, held itself up
and been held up as an exemplar of democracy and individual rights around the
world. We have invaded unoffending
sovereign nations—recently—on the pretext of establishing DEMOCRACY. I would argue that the very purpose of this national
experiment has all along been an attempt to keep nudging aside the barriers to
the informed and engaged self-determination of the people, not to meekly turn
away from them for the sake of semantics.
At this momentous point along the long arc of history, I
think democracy is in pretty dire straits.
The middle class is getting strangled, and it’s difficult to ask people to
do much more when they’re living without healthcare and working two and three jobs
to pay their inflated mortgages. At the
same time, massive corporations and multi-billionaires have garnered more
influence in Washington, more control of those very media outlets of deepening
reds and blues, and more control over our educational institutions than ever
before. The Divide and Conquer strategy
has always been a winning one for those with the wealth and the power, but if
we are to keep this national experiment alive, if we are to prevent the hope of
democracy from becoming lost, we really need to read critically and more, and
get clear on what all this self-governing was supposed to be for.
