Democracy doesn’t work. Read the news for proof. We the people elect incompetents – not once, to our highest office, but often. We tolerate – and reelect – venal stupidity. We ignore facts. We allow ourselves to be misled – and are shocked when our ship of state founders. “When the pilot is drunk,” promises a Greek proverb, “the ship will not reach port.”
Surely, our system needs repairs. But how to repair human nature? Any system will fail managed by dolts and thieves. “The blind lead the blind,” warned Jesus, “and both shall fall into the ditch.”
It’s not intelligence electors lack, but attention. Our minds are elsewhere – in our jobs, pastimes, gewgaws. Governance bores us – let somebody else do it. The uglier the mismanagement, the likelier we’ll look away. Wake me when it’s over.
Tyranny is one solution to this dilemma. Tyrants are convinced citizens must be treated like tots. Let Daddy manage things, don’t you worry. If Daddy were decent and sane, this might work, but tyrants are mostly whackos. “Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton observed, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The other disadvantage of tyranny is it infantilizes a population, so obedience replaces initiative, imitation originality, memorization thought.
Plutocrats are convinced wealth equals wisdom. If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? History suggests an opposite conclusion, that wealth stupefies. Avarice is a broken compass.
Our Founders entrusted governance to a landed aristocracy. Property owners would want to protect their possessions. This made sense at the time, but those times are past.
To assure competence in a profession, we license practitioners. Drivers we license to keep us all safe. Why not license voters? To vote you must demonstrate rudimentary knowledge about our system and palpable commitment to the common good. If you know nothing and do not participate in the work of self-governance, you may live here but not vote.
No license guarantees competence. Knowledge does not mean intelligence or participation patriotism, but they improve the odds. Standards for licensing would be uniform and non-discriminatory: no Jim Crow mischief. A license would measure commitment to our mutual enterprise.
Feasible? Of course not. Potentates prefer a feckless electorate. Dopes are easier to dupe. We envision utopias not to enact them but to better understand our own predicament. The Republic, a tyranny, was floated as a fix for Athens’ democracy, which Plato abhorred. Swift’s Houyhnhnm land, Thomas More’s Utopia and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (nowhere spelled backward) similarly fantasized impossible futures.
If we don’t try to fix America, we’re doomed. Eventually, we’re doomed anyway, but it would be nice to continue this experiment a few more centuries. The beneficiaries of today’s system resist reform. The rich like getting richer, at the expense of all.
Our only hope may be a near catastrophe. This seems our current direction. If things get bad enough, maybe we’ll rouse ourselves at the eleventh hour. What most amazes me about our current debacle is that a third of us still support the goons responsible. How stupid can we be, I keep wondering. “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” snorted Mencken, who wasn’t a fan.
The notion of America arose from near catastrophe. In that summer of 1787, our Founders knew if they didn’t try something new, their ass was grass. The Constitution they made is among the luckiest accidents in history, a Hail Mary pass we caught for a touchdown. Retrospect sometimes detects God’s hand in the result. Not likely. What we the people made, we must repair. Or at least try.