gracchusdixit

Winston Churchill famously quipped:  “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”  However cynical that may sound, Sir Winston was a lifelong parliamentarian dedicated to the proposition that democracy, no matter how imperfect, was infinitely preferable to the alternatives.    As he later, no less famously, put it:  “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

The survival of this “worst form of government except all those other forms” depends upon a fragile bargain between a democratic people and the leaders they elect as their representatives.  It is a bargain, the fragility and importance of which was understood not only by Churchill but, long before his time, by our Founding Fathers.

On our side of the bargain, We the People are obliged to educate ourselves about the government that represents us, the issues that confront us, and the world in which we live.  If we truly wish to govern ourselves, we cannot surrender fundamental decisions to any oligarchy or managerial class.  No matter what the NRA may say, the ultimate guarantor of our liberty isn’t guns—it is knowledge.  In the words of James Madison:

A popular government without popular information, or the meaning of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.  Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.  And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the Power that knowledge gives.

Nor can We the People subordinate the general good to our own selfish interests by dividing our society into self-serving categories, into “us versus them”.   Democracy works for no one unless it works for everyone.   Here is John Adams:

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.

The Founders believed that We the People could and should be the ultimate decision-makers in our democracy and would make the right decisions—if we were armed with “the Power that knowledge gives”.

At the same time, they understood the practical reality that ordinary citizens cannot acquire such knowledge all by themselves and, without it, may succumb to self-destructive emotions or “passions”.

Thus, the Founders believed that those who represent and govern us have a fundamental obligation to present us with the facts and tell the truth, to reason rather than inflame, to inform rather than manipulate.  To quote Madison again:

As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers: so there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.

If We the People fail to uphold our end of the bargain, if we surrender reason to  “some irregular passion” or betray the common good for “some illicit advantage,” we become We the Mob.  If our elected leaders fail to uphold their end of the bargain, if they choose to mislead us with the “artful misrepresentations of interested men,” they become demagogues—or worse.

Unfortunately, we have reached such a low point in our national life that both these dismal possibilities have become reality.

When millions of so-called conservatives—few of whom have ever met a Muslim, know anything about Islam, or could even identify an Islamic country on a map—declare that Islam and Muslims pose a “threat to American values,” they have broken the bargain.  Their willful ignorance is surpassed only by their prejudice and hate.

When their leaders, or would-be leaders, declare that Muslims and Islam pose an “existential threat” to Western civilization—which has somehow managed to survive the collapse of the Roman Empire, the bubonic plague, centuries of religious persecution, the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, and the human carnage of two World Wars—they have broken their end of the bargain.  Their inflammatory rhetoric is not only factually absurd, it is fundamentally dangerous.

When right-wing voters assert that our President is a Muslim, a communist, or a latter-day Manchurian Candidate secretly planted on our shores—lies that would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive—those voters, by dint of their odious stupidity, have broken the bargain.

When the Republican Party’s Presidential candidates and its representatives in Congress not only fail to correct such lies but refuse to confront the ignorance and spite of their own electorate, they have broken their end of the bargain.

It was James Madison who said:

The people can never willfully betray their own interests; but they may be possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people.

We the People have been betrayed, and we should call the culprits to account.