Democracy is Losing

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.