The Perils of Democracy

Republicans are 100% correct: our revered Founding Fathers did not intend that America should be a democracy (where “the people” rule).  Most of the so-called evidence that our Founding Fathers did not favor a democracy can be found on conservative websites with an anti-democratic agenda (it is only recently that Republicans or conservatives seem to be drifting away from the ideal of democracy).  But consider – from the gitgo, from the ratification of the U.S. Constitution – who had the right to vote was up to individual states.  Most states had a land-owning requirement, only one state allowed women or African Americans to vote, and only a few gave the vote to Catholics or Jews (atheists were not even a “thing” back then).  Everyone who sat in on the Constitutional Convention were white men of means, the aristocrats of their day.  And they did not intend that the “people” (as we see the word today) should rule themselves.  So, partisan Republicans are quite right.

However, …

Over time, state by state, suffrage (the right to vote) was granted to Catholics and Jews, to white folks who owned no land, and nation-wide to African Americans (the 15th Amendment, 1870) to women (the 19th Amendment, 1920) and even to 18-year-olds (the 26th Amendment, 1971).

Of course, we are NOT really a democracy as We the People surely do NOT rule, Big Money rules.  We are a plutocracy not a democracy.  But we do have universal suffrage: every citizen over the age of eighteen has the right to vote, the semblance of popular rule.

Nevertheless, while we were not a democracy at birth, democracy surely is in our DNA.

If democracy is encoded anywhere in our history, it would be in our Declaration’s phrase “all men are created equal” and in our Constitution’s Preamble’s opening words, “We the People of the United States, in Order to … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

But what did Jefferson mean when he penned the most immortal phrase in our history, “all men are created equal”?  Surely, he did NOT mean equal by strength, or intelligence, or ambition, or bloodline.  He might have meant equal before the law (made concrete in the “Equal Protection” clause of the 14th Amendment) or equal in the eyes of God.  He might have meant as equal as anyone else in the world to determine our own government.  He might have meant that Kings and Queens were no more divine than the rest of us.  But whatever Jefferson meant, our history has been a drive to make those unlikely words real (see above).

As to our Constitution’s “We the People,” it was sheer hyperbole.  But, once again, our history has been a drive to make it real.

But back to where we began: our Founding Fathers did indeed fear the people’s incapacity to rule themselves.  The aristocratic class that authored the Declaration and the Constitution were highly educated men.  And they did not trust men of little formal education, most of our population of farmers.

But were they right to fear men of little education?

I have written at length of the need for our citizens to be better educated, not just able to multiply 3 by 8 and come up with 24 in a few seconds and with no calculator, not just to be able to identify the heart muscle from the lungs, not just to be able to locate South Africa on a world map or Montana on a map of the USA, but to be able to answer civics questions that smart American 10-year-olds can answer.  Like the colors of our flag, the number of stars and stripes on our flag, the names of the three branches of the federal government, the titles of the chief executives of our cities our states and our nation, and to be able to name the Vice President and one’s own state’s governor.  These are the kinds of questions that all voters should be able to answer.

But most Americans cannot pass such a test, the same exact Citizenship Test that a foreign-born resident must pass to become an American citizen and earn the right to vote, and to sit on a jury of his peers.  To require an American native to be able to pass this test would not “discriminate,” because ignorance is not a part of anyone’s DNA, ignorance is always a personal choice, a willful choice.  We all choose what we want to pay attention to, what we care to learn about, and what we care to ignore, to remain ignorant about.  In this case it is fixable with a little bit of study.  Yes, thinking and learning and studying are harder than ignorance; they are work, and they cost calories!

Then there is the problem of Trump supporters who "honestly" believe that Trump won the 2020 election despite all the hard evidence that can be marshalled against it.  Voters who live in an alternate reality - where what is a fact is determined only and always by one consummate liar - are a clear and present danger to a working democracy.  Will they ever recover from their dream world?  Will our democracy survive their fantasy world?

Can a democracy survive voters who believe that they can have an opinion about anything?  There are no opinions in mathematics; either you know that 2+2=4 or you do not.  There are no opinions in most of science.  You may not know that the speed of light is roughly 186,000 miles per second, and I may not know how to prove it, but it is not an opinion, and you don’t have the right to think it is untrue.  Darwinian Evolution has had 160+ years to be falsified.  There have been modifications to Darwin’s “theory,” but the core of his thinking has been established as scientific fact.  Humans are primates no matter whether God wrote the Holy Bible.  Even outside of hard science, the man on the street does not get to vote on Shakespeare’s or Picasso’s greatness.  One can only have an “opinion” on matters that have not been settled by history or by experts in a field.  You can have an opinion on who would make a better president (as long as the word "better" is not clearly defined and measurable), but you cannot have an opinion on Donald J. Trump being a consummate liar.  You don’t even have the right to an opinion as to what is Constitutional; what is or is not Constitutional is up to five or more of the nine justices of the Supreme Court.

A working democracy requires a sufficient mass (say, 75%) of voters who believe in a collective reality, a shared reality, not “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” (thanks, Isaac Asimov).  As long as a critical mass of voters (say, 40%) believe that what we all used to know as facts are now “fake news,” we are heading toward totalitarianism, the end of democracy.  All because those who are ignorant of what is true or false have the right to vote; and yes it is possible to vote out reality.

Ignorance (specifically ignorance of our founding documents, our political institutions, and a little basic American history) is easily fixed.  If we don’t fix it, we will have only ourselves to blame.  Democracy demands that voters know the difference between true and false.  Thomas Jefferson famously declared: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

P.S.

• Fewer than half of potential voters exercise their right to vote.
• Democracy means the people rule; but Big Money, not the people, rules.
• Most Americans don't know enough about our founding documents, our political institutions or American history to be worthy of the right to vote.
• Americans who do vote are only minimally engaged.
• Too many Americans live in fantasy land, e.g., think the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
• Too many Americans are willing to substitute autocracy or totalitarianism for any semblance of democracy.
• We used to have people on the Right and on the Left, now we have good people and evil people.