Growing up I didn’t think about democracy. No one did back then, not really. It was taught, of course, how it functioned, its evident advantages. We had won all our wars, hadn’t we? – territorial, civil, economic, military – licked the Depression and Hitler. Every emerging nation wanted to be like us or said they did. Some thinkers declared democracy the inevitable conclusion to millennia of striving – the evidence was in. Those debates that commenced with John Locke and the philosophes and culminated in the glorious if sweaty summer of our Constitutional Convention were of academic interest maybe, but we the people knew what we were about. Peace, prosperity, supremacy – what wasn’t to like!
How often the obvious blinds us to the actual. We don’t see because we don’t look. Democracy’s spectacular success obscured its flaws. Turns out, democracy is not natural, inevitable, the last word in human management. That the Nameless One and his goons are busy wrecking it indicates its imperfection. Maybe its centuries of detractors – monarchists, communists, Nazis, dictators – were onto something which America-boosters, in our swagger, overlooked. I can’t even hum that awful song “Proud to be an American” anymore, because I’m not. Yeh, we’re exceptional – exceptionally stupid, lazy, feckless, cruel.
What was it we didn’t see about our ingenious self-governing system? What grime in our gears brought the engine to a screeching halt?
Democracy, far from inevitable and natural, is laborious and unnatural. Its processes are predicated on sharing, cooperation, selfless exertion in the common interest. Humans in their natural state don’t like to share, labor for others, make nice. We know this from kindergarten. We want more for ourselves, less for the other guy. We want to work less – or for our gain. We collaborate only if obliged. We prefer our own way. Bore into any human brain – mine, for sure, and I suspect yours – and you’ll find resentments, gripes, vindictive fantasies, no kumbaya council of happy campers. We must be taught to make nice – taught by fear, our only persuasive professor.
Fear animated our Revolution and stoked our Civil War. Fear composed our Constitution. Fear taught us to combine against a common foe. Fear formed the United Nations and other collaborative arrangements. “Either we hang together,” as Ben Franklin supposedly quipped, “or we hang separately.”
My generation forgot those fears. Poverty, Hitler, death camps were so yesterday. We’d even made progress on gender and civil rights. Capitalism enticed us with delights more delectable than civic meetings and briefing books. Let others run our government, folks who couldn’t find a better job – hadn’t we earned our “free time”? (As if time were ever free!)
For self-government to work, selves must be willing to work. Americans weren’t. We abrogated responsibility and in rushed Avarice, sensing opportunity. The rich wanted to get richer – duh – and that meant filching from the poor. Let’s replace cumbersome consensus-building with top-down corporate-style decrees to tilt our coffers toward already bulging wallets. Let’s lie, if we must, and cheat, and mislead – the stupid citizenry will never suspect. And to win elections let’s ignite imaginary grievances and fan the flames with fanciful phantoms. (Gender-confused kids? Really?)
How to rescue democracy from these kleptocrats? I’m not sure we can. We must change our lazy luxuriant clueless natures first. We must relearn selflessness, which is no walk in the park. Not only must we believe in democracy’s superiority, we must be willing to die for our beliefs. We must see what Locke, Montesquieu, and our Founders and heroes saw: that democracy works – if (and only if) we the people make it work.
Good luck with that.