gracchusdixit

Since the moment, three hundred and sixty eight days ago, when a violent mob attacked the Capitol of the United States intending to overturn the 2020 presidential election and, in the case of at least some of the mobsters, murdering as many Democratic members of Congress as they could lay their hands on, we have been told that our democracy is in peril, thanks to delusional conspiracy-mongers who refuse to believe that Donald Trump lost the election and a Republican juggernaut of voter suppression and election-rigging designed to ensure that, win or lose, their candidate will prevail next time.  

This danger is incontestably real, but it is far from being the greatest danger our democracy faces. 

On a dreary November day in 1947, Winston Churchill voiced a much quoted but no less dreary appraisal of democratic government:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.  No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

If those words still seem just a bit sharp after all these years, there is good reason.  Having done more than any other person to save western civilization from fascism, Churchill was speaking, not as a venerated wartime hero, but as the head of an opposition party that had been ousted by the very democracy to which he gave grudging praise.  A lesser man might have been less generous.  There are times, nonetheless, when even Churchill’s churlish endorsement can seem too generous.  

Now is one of those times.  

In a recent series of public opinion polls, a majority of Americans declared that, if a presidential election were held tomorrow, they would vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden.  Take a deep breath and try for a moment to wrap your head around that thought.  

After four years of witnessing Trump’s pathological narcissism, boundless corruption, bungling denial of a global pandemic, and, worst of all, feckless attempt to orchestrate a coup d’état, a majority of our fellow countrymen seem eager to return this malevolent thug to the Oval Office.  Granted that Joe Biden is not perfect; indeed, his imperfections have been recounted in these pages more than once.  Even so, Biden—or Bozo the Clown, for that matter—has more capacity for running the country than a criminal nincompoop like Trump.  And yet, a majority of Americans seem to think otherwise.  

How is this even possible?   

If we are to believe the aforementioned polls, the answer seems to be that a large dollop of our fellow citizens are more piqued by higher prices at the gas pump than outraged, or even perturbed, by an attempt to destroy American democracy.  Which calls into question the survival of that democracy, not to mention the sanity of its citizens.

Don’t get me wrong.  Democracy is far more than the least of all political evils insinuated by Churchill’s famous aperçu.  On the contrary, it is the only political system that can be justified on ethical and moral grounds, because it is the only political system grounded in the fundamental and equal dignity of all human beings.  Every other political system, including the so-called “meritocracy” of modern capitalism, pigeonholes human beings according to purported differences in their abilities, capacities, or virtues.  When these “differences” are peeled back and stripped bare, one inevitably finds that they, oh so conveniently, serve the interests of those in charge.  

Nonetheless, the fact remains that democracy is beset by its own contradictions and devils, the first of which is a series of unanswered questions that lie at its very heart.  Lincoln famously proclaimed that democracy is government “of the people, by the people, for the people”.  But who are “the people?  Who qualifies to be a member of the demos that constitutes democracy?  And who determines what those qualifications should be?

No democracy in history has ever answered these questions satisfactorily:  not ancient Athens, where democracy began; not the Roman Republic; not the various republics spawned by the French Revolution; and certainly not the United States of America.

The conventional answer, which we now take for granted, was served up more than a century ago by Woodrow Wilson when he concocted the neologism, “self-determination,” the idea being that, if Serbs or Slovaks, Czechs or Croats, Bengalis or Bosnians, want their own country, they should have it.  Donald Trump and the blinkered idiots who hang on his every idiotic word would cheer this idea, if they knew who Woodrow Wilson was or were capable of understanding anything other than their own slavering self-pity.  

The problem, of course, is that “self-determination” is a stubbornly vague concept, and those who advance it have never resolved the antecedent questions it raises:  What does “selfhood” actually mean?  How and by whom should it be determined? 

The reason “self-determination” remains a vague concept is that the only possible answers to such questions are fundamentally disagreeable.  When “self-determination” is grounded in ethnic, linguistic, or religious criteria, the result cannot possibly be democratic.  To cite but one example, the current prime minister of India believes that his country should be “determined” by the religious and cultural traditions of Hinduism.  Whether one agrees with that proposition or not, it cannot possibly be construed as “democratic,” because it ignores the wishes and rights of millions of India’s Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, and Zoroastrian citizens.  

To think that democracy is nothing more than “majority rule,” howsoever “majority” is defined, is to misunderstand it entirely.  A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is a government in which all citizens have a voice and the dignity of every citizen is secured.

There is, moreover, no moral calculus that entitles a particular ethnic, linguistic, or religious group to its own “nation” in which the basic human rights of the other human beings who live within its borders are ignored, repressed, or “cleansed”.  Nor is there any practical argument that such “nations” are the only legitimate political community by which human beings can organize themselves.  On the contrary, history is replete with alternative polities, in which human beings of diverse cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions have lived together harmoniously, enjoying secure and prosperous lives.  

Those who argue that democracy can only flourish in political entities with homogeneous populations sharing the same language, the same religious beliefs, and the same cultural traditions are fundamentally wrong.  In truth, homogeneity is the very antithesis of democracy—little more than a thinly disguised brand of racism.  The keystone of democracy is a belief in the equal worth and dignity of every human being.  True democracies can only exist when they are inclusive and open.

For a democracy to be inclusive and open, its citizens must be open to the world around them, which requires them to be informed.  Ignorance is another of the devils that beset democracy, and the most “democratic” of our nation’s founders, Thomas Jefferson, gave us a clear warning of its danger:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.  If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem oblivious to Jefferson’s admonition or simply don’t care.  The average American can tell you more about the menu at McDonald’s than the three branches of government; only one in five can locate the Pacific Ocean on a map; fewer than one in five can locate Israel, Afghanistan, or Alabama.  Simply put, Americans are among the most ignorant and uninformed people in the democratic world.

Ignorance this monumental can’t be overcome by school “vouchers,” “home schooling,” or larding up the curriculum with superstitious fairy tales instead of science and facts.  America’s public education system hasn’t failed kids and their parents, as conservatives would have us to believe; America’s parents and kids have failed our public education system by turning their minds and hearts against its fundamental purpose, which is to open minds, cultivate reason, and turn us all into informed citizens. 

When the Democratic candidate in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial election dared to say that parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach and how to teach it, he was almost lynched.  But he was also right.  Putting an ignorant populace in charge of public education is the equivalent of asking a blind man to fly a Boeing 747.

As dangerous as it is, ignorance not the worst devil that besets democracy.  The worst devil is the willingness—one might even say, the eagerness—of its citizens to jettison the very system that gave them the freedom to govern themselves in the first place.  

In this, Americans are not unique.  Can anyone seriously doubt that a majority of the German people adored Adolf Hitler and would have elected him “democratically,” if they had been given a chance?  Can anyone deny that a majority of Russians would quite happily vote for Vladimir Putin, if Russian elections were “free and fair”?  Can anyone credibly challenge the “democratic” popularity of Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, who is by any rational standard a fascist, a racist, and a murderer?  

The bleak truth is that democracies have a weakness for demagogues and “strong men,” and their citizens are all too often willing to exchange their rights and freedoms for jobs, cheap prices at the pump or the grocery store, or a chance to “wave the flag” and thump their chests.  Think Caesar; think Napoleon; think Mussolini; and, yes, think Donald Trump.

The great Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, once observed that democracy is not a process but, rather, an outcome.  If democracy is to survive, those who hope to defend it must exorcize its devils.  They must move past their fixation on process—on voting rights, gerrymandering, the filibuster; et cetera, inter alia, ad nauseam.  They must focus, instead, on achieving true political, social, and economic equality.  Until that day comes, the danger will remain.  Unless that day comes, American democracy may yet destroy itself.