What is this thing
called democracy? How easy is it to create, to sustain? What are the factors
that undermine it, strengthen it? These are the things I've been forced to
think about since election night turned out way differently than I'd expected.
Here are a few
thoughts I've had about the fragility of democracy since that night.
1. Every democracy is an experiment. Sometimes experiments fail, abysmally
We don't talk about
this enough, nor do we respect this notion enough, but every democracy is a
series of experiments. Every time we go to the voting booth, we are saying (and
actively doing) something about democracy. We're taking control of it and
staking our claim to it. When we fail to participate, we're doing precisely the
opposite. When we shrug and walk away, we leave the door open to those whose
version of democracy is anything but democratic. Those people are motivated.
They show up every time. Those who have opposing views must be equally so.
It's tough to
overstate how easy it is for this experiment in democracy to fail completely.
With every tweet, every Thank You rally utterance, we are given further reason
to question PEOTUS's suitability for high office, but we stumble on. We
must.
The American election
process gives us an escape hatch in the form of so-called faithless electors of
the Electoral College, but I'm pretty sure we won't use it (and,
unsurprisingly, we didn't) but even if we had, then what? We would then have
been in completely uncharted waters if the required 37 electors had said “Nay”
to the Donald.
And so we're
a-stumblin' on because the people have spoken, though to whom and what exactly
they said is an open question.
The experiment
continues.
Whether the experiment
will ultimately prove successful remains to be seen.
2. Functional
democracy? We have one of those?
This US democracy[i] may have been around for 240 years
but it's not perfect; it never was, attestations to the contrary
notwithstanding. After two centuries one might think that most of the kinks
would have been worked out by now. Not so, mon cher! Equal rights? We're just
not there yet. Equal justice remains
a (largely elusive) dream; Civil Rights for people of color are barely 50 years
old and are being undermined every year; equal
marriage recognition is barely two years old - and could
easily go away with the 'right' appointment to the SCOTUS; and the rights of
LGBTQI people are still not completely protected under the law and such
protections as do exist can be easily undermined; and
prisoners are still technically enslaved and that's upheld by the Constitution. And
that's after 240 years.
Real democracy isn't
like evolution, moving from one stage to the next, pushed on by necessity. No,
democracy is art and with an unskilled painter, the outcome is no Mona
Lisa.
A relatively
functional democracy is what the majority of Americans have always known.
Because of that, none of us has any idea what it takes to establish this thing
we call democracy from scratch; what it takes to create something from
nothing.
We've never had to
consider that process before since we discovered our democracy in
relatively good working order (hence the italicization of the word democracy)
and generation after generation has mostly left it in slightly better order.
Our job, generally, has been to 'perfect' the union not create it; mind the
store not build a startup. Four years from now, things might be a little
different.
We look at places like Grenada, Syria, Iraq,
Libya and much of Latin America (places, coincidentally, where our
government has had a hand in destabilizing or removing governments) and cast
aspersions on the character and will of the people and their leaders to
establish a lasting peace, a shared prosperity and a participatory democracy.
We've had the temerity to judge others' efforts at establishing democracy when
we haven't the first clue what it takes to create political and social order
out of chaos. We have no idea what it takes to rebuild a failed democracy,
especially one broken by an authoritarian, but we may be about to find
out.
Let's hope that our years of sneering at others
don't come back to bite us in the arse.
3. When it comes to democracies, 'functional'
ain't the default setting
We've been lulled into a false sense of security thinking that after 240 years, 'functional' was the default setting on our democracy and that all we had to do was (i) show up from time to time (even if halfheartedly); (ii) depend on the news media for factual information and all would be well. Those days are over. 'Functional' isn't the default. There is no default. If we want functional democracy, we're going to have to work for it. Hard. Every day.
We've presumed that what obtained yesterday -
politically-speaking - would necessarily obtain tomorrow, because We Are
America! We've assumed that what we were experiencing was the baseline;
the low water mark. We've assumed that gains, once made, were permanent.
Yeah, NO.
My great takeaway from this election is
this: democracy is not sustained by the disinterested. You have to
show up. For every one just barely interested citizen, there are at least two
or three passionately engaged folk whose aims are direct opposition to your
barely interested aims, so the onus is on both sides to show up, and may the
bigger side win.
Those who object to growing freedoms are
eternally vigilant, concerned as they are about the erosion of their standards
of decency. They stand ever ready for a fight. Those who complain about big
government and social programs - but never about the ginormity of the defense
budget somehow - are registered to vote and show up at the polls without being
asked or coaxed. Those who object to rights for LGBTQI persons; protections for
criminals/suspects in police custody; recognition of rights for undocumented
persons and all manner of other things, have no trouble getting
involved. Democracy is a fight between ideas. If one side fails to show
up, its ideas won't see the light of day. It's really that simple. Worse still,
if one side fails to show up, there are no longer any guarantees of good faith
actions on the part of the other side. cf North Carolina's legislature this past week.
Tomorrow, as people of faith are fond of saying,
is not promised, yeah well, neither is democracy. Tomorrow's democracy is the work of today's participants in the
democratic process. If you want democracy tomorrow, you'd better show up
today.
The election of 2016 has proven
to me that we have casually and cavalierly presumed that democracy would
continue without our express efforts to ensure same. We now have proof that it
will not.
[i] The word democracy is
italicized because so much that has occurred here in the last 240 years really
is the antithesis of democratic.
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