Two hundred and forty six years ago, the Second Continental Congress enacted and published the Declaration of Independence. Actually, July 2 was the date it was unanimously enacted and John Adams wrote that the second of July would be the date remembered and honored by Americans. He was wrong, the date actually gets fixed on the first day people actually know about things - in this case the Fourth.
In 1776, Declaration was issued in response to the erosion of colonists’ rights by King George III and Parliament. The colonists understood that they had a right to resist the unwarranted usurpation of their rights by governmental power, and that the community as a whole retained a right to protect itself.
The Declaration, and subsequently the Constitution, created an imperfect democracy, slowly expanding liberty and protecting rights over time. It has been a slow, maddeningly slow, process. It has been frustrating and, at time, bloody. But from that time to this, we have endeavored to move in the right direction.
Until recently. I do not look at recently as starting with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump was what Lenin would have called a “useful idiot.” He was the blank slate egoist on whom others wrote their agendas for which he took exclusive credit. Trump or “Trumpism” was and is not the disease against which democracy must protect itself, he is a symptom of a disease already infecting the body politic.
In 1838, during a presentation to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield Illinois, Lincoln said:
”At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
It appears that Lincoln was prescient.
Since 1900 we’ve endured both real and imagined threats to our democracy. We have weathered two largely imagined “Red Scares.” Both “threats” to our democratic order were met by a suspension of that order. Raids were conducted, ”subversive” media was confiscated, proponents of political philosophies were unceremoniously arrested and if possible deported. Government officials recklessly, often without an iota of evidence, named and shamed individuals, costing them their careers, their standing in their communities, and sometimes their lives.
Americans, frightened by both internal and external threats, have sometimes gravitated to those promoting a more authoritarian philosophy. The poet Ezra Pound supported Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany; Father Charles Caughlin supported the anti-Semitic policies of Hitler’s Third Reich; American hero Charles Lindbergh extolled the worlds “good fortune” to have Germany standing against Soviet Russia.
The journalist John Reed was an open socialist supporting the 1917 Russian Revolution as chronicled in his Ten Days That Shook The World. He is one of three Americans buried in the Kremlin. Reed’s wife Louise Bryant was also sympathetic to the Revolution, continued to write about Russia as well as other international issues until her death in France in the 1930s. Gus Hall and Earl Browder headed the American Communist Party, and Hall even ran for president four times - obviously he lost. Both Hall and Browder were prosecuted and imprisoned for subversion and advocating the overthrow of the government.
People are often drawn to extreme ideologies, especially in times of economic turmoil that create perceived exploitation of specific groups. Others drift toward the political extremes because of a sense that life is careening out of control, or simply that the nature of change creates instability and uncertainty.
Liberal democracies are messy. Each group has input and seeks a share of public resources. Anne Applebaum writes that because democratic decision-making is so ”messy,” people start gravitating toward authoritarians who will simply make decisions for the rest of us.
And if race or ethnicity is involved in decision-making and resource allocation, then this becomes a zero sum game where one group wins at the expense of another. This in turn creates what one writer labeled “white anxiety.” The cure for this anxiety is the marginalization of specific groups, thus taking them out of the resource equation by suppressing their voices and limiting access to democratic processes.
Let’s not ignore the one class of Americans historically barred from the political process - women. It wasn’t until the 20th century that, via the Nineteenth Amendment, women were guaranteed their right to vote. By mid-20th century, women were statutorily protected from discrimination when engaging on their own in various commercial activities. That said, women still make on average 80% of what their male counterparts make for the same or comparable work.
It is well to remember the admonition John Adams received from his wife Abigail. As he sat deliberating on the Declaration, Abigail wrote a lengthy letter asking that John (and through him the other - male - members of the Second Continental Congress) “remember the ladies.” John responded that he had to laugh when he read Abigail’s letter. John was a man of his times; Abigail was a woman ahead of her’s.
In sum, since the creation of the American republic, marginalized groups - overcoming race, class, religious, and gender exclusions to name just a few - have come a long way, just not all the way to reach the promise of equal status.
Throughout our history, as suggested above, Americans have flirted with authoritarianism. We pay lip service to the idea of opportunity so long as it doesn’t cut into our individual and household bottom lines. We are a capitalist society and we’ve bought into the notion of rugged individualism, the idea that if we work hard, are smart enough, and are diligent we each can make it in America.
To some degree that’s true, the rub is what we mean by ”make it.” If by ”make it” we mean Bezos and Gates levels of making it, good luck. If we mean having a family, a roof over our heads, food on the table, stable employment, and enough opportunity for our kids to do better than us, while still possible it’s a lot harder than it used to be.
In point of fact, rugged individualism was and is a canard. To one extent or another, we all rely on our family, neighbors, and the community writ large for some level of support.
We know there is huge income and wealth inequalities in America. In 2021, 10% of Americans held 70% of the nation’s wealth; the next 40% held 27.% of the nation’s wealth; and the bottom 50% of Americans held 2.5% of America’s wealth. Not only is this wealth disparity unsustainable, it is politically suicidal, especially for a democracy.
Since Nixon, we’ve seen a tsunami of money flowing into our politics. In 2010, the Court opened the monetary floodgates in Citizens United, not only allowing even more money to enter the process but reduced the levels of accountability and scrutiny on this financing. Not to argue with the Court but it’s limitation of “corruption” to quid pro quo is too narrow; rather this is the kind of corruption the rots the system from the inside out.
This concentration of economic power can cripple democracy. If 95% (on average) of congresspersons get re-elected each election, and the real substantial money directly and indirectly flows to incumbents, then the chances of a challenger breaking through and getting elected are at best de minimus. And don’t lose site of the fact that big money is not funding inputs (i.e., candidates) but are instead buying outcomes. Tax incentives, tax cuts, deregulation, social issue de jour, and any number of other issues are put up for the highest bidder.
To place this point in stark relief, the high dollar donors don’t donate to political campaigns, they invest in them. And like all investors, they expect a return on their investment.
In the political competition over the formation of policies and allocation of resources, the average citizen can’t begin to compete. Like Oliver Twists from Dickens, all we can do is carry our bowels and ask for “a little more, sir.” And for our troubles we get the same reaction that Oliver got…
The rise in various insecurities (e.g., income, housing, food, health, family, legal) over the past three decades is not accidental, they were inevitable if not deliberate. What is new is that these insecurity outcomes increasingly have the force of law.
For example, not content to let money do the talking at the federal level, more and more funds are directed toward officials at the state level. The expectation is that they will enact laws, the sole purpose of which is to suppress the vote of certain groups, or to gerrymander districts that ensures that one political party has a built in edge over the other. Why stop at buying candidates when you can rig the system and all but guarantee the outcome?
Outcomes result in policies. Policies are upheld by law. So in the case of elections, all incumbents need to do is enact legislation or gerrymander districts that favor them over their opponents. Thus if the election process is unfair, if incumbents act within the law, then the process isn’t illegal. This is the process followed in Hungary by Viktor Orban and his party. Hungary has elections so technically it is a democracy - as Orban describes it, an illiberal democracy.
As we know, laws get challenged in courts. Piles of money directed to select politicians running in gerrymandered districts goes a long way in determining who sits on the bench hearing and deciding cases. Not only does money fund politicians but it also funds organizations that groom people for potential judgeships. The Federalist Society comes to mind.
We’ve seen conservative Justices strike down the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder). The impact of Citizens United has already been mentioned above. Next term, the high Court will hear a case from North Carolina involving some pernicious nonsense called the “independent state legislature doctrine” which could permit a state legislature to substitute its slate of preferred electors for those voted for by the public in presidential elections.
If you don’t think that the Court will go so far as to basically gut the Electoral College thereby dismantling the current democratic order, look what it did this past term: weakened the Establishment Clause; paved the way for the reintroduction of prayer in school; weakened Miranda; created chaos in the regulation of firearms; for the first time in history took away a right rendering subordinate over one-half of the population; and threatened privacy rights, the right to contraception, same sex marriage, and re-criminalizing acts previously considered acts of sodomy.
And that was in the past few weeks of the past term.
If we fail to see what’s occurring in our country, in our name, then the only thing exceptional about the United States is our level of delusion. To paraphrase a riff from an old Doors song (When The Music’s Over), they’ve got the dollars but we’ve got the numbers. But we have to act. If we don’t act, then in the words of the old comic character Pogo, “we have met the enemy and they are us.”
In today’s politics, the enemies of democracy make no effort to disguise their desire for an authoritarian government. They attempt or normalize the events surrounding the January 6, 2021 insurrection. They distract from and evade engaging verified facts. They fraternize with violent “militia” groups (aka armed thugs). They criminalize the teaching of certain subjects in public schools. They are moving to impose bounties on women who travel to another state to access health care. They ban books on topics the don’t like. Some wish to turn our secular nation into a sectarian one. They view immigrants, persons of color, and women to be second-class citizens. And free and fair elections are threats to their power.
So on this July 4th enjoy celebrating with family and friends. Have a hot dog, enjoy the adult beverage of your choice, watch some fireworks, catch a ballgame, or just kick back and watch a movie. Whatever…
But keep in mind that democracy is an ideal, a fragile ideal, one that is realized by us, by what we do, by how we act. This ideal assumes that all persons, young or old, rich or poor, men or women, white or persons of color are equal under the law and that government exists to protect the rights of all of us, not merely the select few.
On this July 4th, our democracy is under assault, not by external enemies but by those in our midst. Individuals acting collectively can respond and defeat that assault. Over the next few years, we can argue over policy, as that is in the American democratic tradition. But all of us must set aside our differences to combat the existential threat to our democratic ideals and traditions.
Most of us have heard and will recall that shortly after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was strolling down a Philadelphia street when he was stopped and asked by a woman, “well Dr. Franklin, what government have you given us?” Franklin responded, “a republic madam, if you can keep it.”
Imagine Franklin being asked about the form of government he helped create by a woman who was unable to participate in it no mater the form. And he answered!
At least he didn’t laugh at her.
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