Why is Democracy an Issue?
August 21, 2024
China’s rulers jeer at our messy democracy, deeming it more efficient to crack the whip. But being insulated from citizen accountability does not make for good policy. Studies show people thrive better in democracies. Their freer economies are more dynamic.
And humans want their dignity respected, a sense of agency, with their voices heard, rather than feeling like ants in an anthill.
Democracy was basically nonexistent through most of history. Setting up ours, with a carefully crafted system, was genuinely revolutionary. And over time we’ve broadened and deepened it. Yet in other ways it’s become sclerotic, less democratic even, contrary to the founders’ thinking.
They feared big states dominating small ones. Not foreseeing the greater divide between urban and rural, and how their small state protections would overly empower thinly populated rural ones, with resulting minority rule. Aggravated by gerrymandering, which characterizes the electoral college and the Senate.
For example, Dakota Territory was divided into two states just to give Republicans, in control at the time, added Senators and electoral votes. The Senate’s thusly skewed power balance is worsened by its filibuster rule, an historical accident the founders never contemplated either, giving a small minority of the nation’s population an effective veto. And none of this can be fixed because the minority veto makes amending the constitution itself virtually impossible.
Still, imperfect democracy is better than none.
Republicans, having a lock on rural voters, also try to make it harder for urbanites (read: non-whites and the poor) to vote at all. Giving up on persuading such voters, their whole political project is not to gain national majority support but to perpetuate their minority rule.
But this can take them only so far. Republicans, thanks to the electoral college, did manage to capture the presidency in 2000 and 2016 despite losing the popular vote (impossible in any other modern democracy). But in 2020 they lost it so decisively that the trick didn’t work. And that’s where their fundamental anti-democratic ethos really was exposed — refusing to accept the outcome, and even while falsely shouting fraud they themselves resorted to outright fraud (fake electors!) and even violence.
One more time: There was never any evidence Trump’s loss was “rigged.” All his legal challenges were laughed out of court; his lawyers punished for lying. Trump himself so obviously cried “stolen election” only because his damaged psyche couldn’t face being a loser.
The country has failed to absorb just how consequential this is. All sides accepting election outcomes is essential to any democratic system. Otherwise it cannot work. America had a noble history in that respect, through 58 elections, always with peaceful transfers of power accompanied by gracious goodwill, and no recrimination. Even in 2000, Al Gore, who’d won the popular vote, and had an arguable claim he was cheated in the electoral vote, insisted his supporters accept his defeat.
Trump broke that upstanding history. An unspeakably vile assault upon the very essence of America. That anyone would dream of voting for him, after that, shows they’ve lost it. But his supporters, like the Queen in Alice, have the uncanny ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
It would be nice to think another defeat would finally draw a line under this insanity. But even if Trump does lose again, those voters won’t just shrug and say, “Oh well.”
And either way, it seems our citizenry lacks mature seriousness. No longer harbors the ideals and values of responsibly participating in a democratic community.
Welcome to Idiocracy.