Can Democracy Survive Today’s American Public?

Our democratic institutions are fighting to survive, but we are no longer a democratic people

Where We Stand Today

Commentators tend to talk about democracy in America as if it is something we have now but we are about to lose. I propose we look at the question differently:

Is America still a country capable of sustaining a democratic form of government?

I believe the America that exists today no longer has this capability. Although we have not yet officially abandoned our democratic institutions and legal framework, we are no longer a democratic people. Too many of us have become too bigoted, too hateful, too uncompromising, and most importantly, too dumbed-down to sustain a democratic form of government.

So at least in the short term, the Republican Plan to Destroy American Democracy seems to be working. The cake is baked, they are simply adding the icing and candles in 2022 and 2024.

Let’s review a little history (a history Republicans are in the process of trying to bury). American-style democracy (a constitutional republic, to be specific) was designed to solve the fundamental problem of political power: the urge to power, the corruption of power, and the absolute corruption of absolute power. The only solution to this problem, our Founders determined, was a political system that demanded power sharing.

Knowing that humans are incapable of sharing power voluntarily, the Founders created an institutional structure that divided political power both vertically and horizontally: first, by creating independent levels of government (federal, state, local) and second, by creating countervailing branches of government (judicial, legislative, and executive), each with designated duties and responsibilities that prevented any one power from gaining absolute supremacy over the others. They also added specific rights to protect that balance of power: a free press to hold government accountable, freedom from religious discrimination, freedom to assemble and protest government actions, and of course, freedom to hold our elected officials accountable at the ballot box.

However, for this system to work, one more ingredient is required. The American people need to believe in it. And that is what we have lost. Thanks to Republican propaganda and hate-mongering, a sizable minority of Americans are now effectively conditioned to despise ALL of these foundations of democracy. And from that rejection, there is little chance of coming back.

People who have been groomed to hate everything that allows a democracy to function cannot be expected to be good citizens in a well-functioning democracy.

And what are those foundational principles of democracy that Republicans have now abandoned, with apparent impunity?

Compromise

“Although the Constitution does many things, at its core it is a mechanism for forcing compromise.” — Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge”

American democracy was designed to require Americans to negotiate with each other and compromise on their inevitable political differences. Reliance on compromise was seen by the Founders as a necessary consequence of the Constitution’s division of power. No center of political power can get anything done under our Constitution that cannot be blocked or amended by one of the other centers of power.

This arrangement has worked pretty well over more than two centuries (when it broke down, we found ourselves in a Civil War), but Republicans believe they no longer need to negotiate and compromise with Democrats, or anyone else for that matter. Rather than compromise, they are happy to suppress and subvert the rights of anyone who might disagree with them. Whether it’s selecting Supreme Court Justices, abusing immigrants at the border, overruling women’s right to make private medical decisions, or overthrowing a 240-year tradition of free and fair elections, they see no need for compromise.

These beliefs and actions — rationalized to their base with a constant stream of lies and conspiracies — are incompatible with a functioning democratic society.

Tolerance

Democracy requires compromise; compromise requires tolerance for the views of others with whom you disagree; and tolerance, paradoxically, requires that a tolerant society be intolerant of intolerance.

“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” — Karl Popper, “The Open Society and Its Enemies”

In a well-functioning democracy, we don’t have to love our opponents, we don’t even have to like them, but we do have to tolerate them. Republicans, in contrast, appear to be very intolerant of tolerance. They call it “wokeness” and argue that common civility, a desire to treat others as they wish to be treated, is some kind of unforgivable sin. Rather, they feel it is their right, not yours, to determine who can be insulted, demeaned, and demonized, and who can’t.

Abandonment of tolerance opens the door to discrimination, bigotry, and ultimately, persecution. It is a sad old song that humans have played over and over throughout history. Our modern Republican leaders, imagining themselves to be smarter than Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and the rest of our Founders, want to play that old song again. Indeed, they want to make it the theme song of their new regime.

A society in which the heel of one group is on the neck of another can never know peace and can never be a true democracy.

Evidence-Based Reasoning

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, “1984”

Over time, institutions learn. They learn what works and what doesn’t work. They do this by comparing expectations and outcomes.

• Did we achieve what we hoped to achieve?
• If not, why not?
• What could we do differently to get better results next time?

By asking and answering questions like these, institutions get smarter and, supposedly, societies that depend on those institutions get better at meeting the wants and needs of their citizens.

All of these steps can only happen if people can agree on some very basic ideas: that facts exist, that beliefs can be right or wrong (regardless of who holds them), and that evidence can be evaluated objectively and independently, rather than based only on someone’s personal biases and preferences. In other words, if two people with initially differing beliefs see the same evidence, they should be able to arrive at the same conclusion.

These insights are fundamental to what Jonathon Rauch has called the modern world’s constitution of knowledge. As his writings outline with great clarity, acceptance of these ideas was hard-fought and took centuries to seep into the thinking and governance of modern societies. They are the hallmarks of the scientific method, without which it is fair to say we would still be living in a medieval world of superstition, dogma, and endless faith-based bloodletting.

What is significant about evidence-based reasoning is that it allows us to admit we might be wrong. In so doing, we acknowledge that we are not slaves to our beliefs. We can correct our beliefs and presumably by correcting them, we can improve our lives. Because, as Karl Popper has also written (and I paraphrase),

In an open (aka democratic) society, we let our ideas die for us, so we don’t have to die for them.

Republicans today reject this fundamental epistemic concept that quite literally underlies the entire modern world. They reject science, denigrate scientists, ignore evidence, and rely on faith-based dogma and “alternative facts” to guide their behavior. They have no intention of letting their followers know that Democrats are not, in fact, blood-drinking Satan-worshipping monsters who run child sex trafficking rings out of pizza parlor basements (while at the same time, miraculously, managing to keep up with their day jobs!).

Republicans do not believe in evidence-based reasoning. Their alternative is isolated media bubbles, ridiculous conspiracies, and shameless lying. We need to see this for what it is: an attempt to engineer a full-scale retreat to the dogmatic belief systems and oppressive political hierarchies of the Middle Ages.

Where We Are Heading

The prognosis is not good.

Compromise, tolerance, and evidence-based reasoning are the raw ingredients of democratic discourse in a civilized society. Without them, democracy is impossible, not because of any missing rules or institutions, but because people refuse to treat their fellow citizens in a manner compatible with democratic principles.

Put simply, Republicans never learned about The Golden Rule in kindergarten. They insist on treating others as they would never want to be treated themselves.

And, as we’ve learned from decades of watching Republicans mold their constituency of hateful, fearful, and easily deceived followers, you only need a minority of the population to abandon democratic principles for the whole thing to come crashing down. This is because all three pillars of democracy require reciprocity. They force people to play the “democracy game.” If one side refuses to play, there is no game. And if there is no game, there is no democracy. Rather, we find ourselves right back in the medieval world our Founders tried to release us from.

We may retrieve our capacity for democracy at some point in the future, as we have in the past when our democratic form of government has been threatened, but I’m afraid it will take a generation to purge both the American public and our political leadership of the toxic mix of fear and loathing the Republican Party and its media apparatchiks have injected into the veins of our fellow Americans.

It has been said that demography is destiny, in the sense that each generation is inevitably replaced by the next. And it seems to me this is the only way the toxic fixations and biases of the current Republican Party will eventually be replaced by the values and concerns of a decidedly more democratically-oriented younger generation of Americans.

So, as the haters who fuel the current Republican Party die off, and as younger Americans get a taste of the cruelty, corruption, and incompetence of a unified Republican federal government (as is already apparent in Republican State governments), the new autocracy will prove — like all tyrannies — unsustainable.

Unfortunately, two very big threats stand in the way of even that slim reed of generational hope. (I discuss these and other possible scenarios for how the Republican revolution might end here.)

The first is the threat of political violence engulfing the nation. Because Republicans are disabling the only peaceful means Americans have to change their political leadership — via the right of every American to vote for the leaders they want to represent them — we will have no peaceful path to dislodge them. I suspect they will need to be removed by force, either judicially (as criminals) or militarily (as seditionists). And that may well lead us into something resembling a second American Civil War.

But the second threat is even worse. It is the ticking time bomb of irreversible climate catastrophe. If it takes a generation to remove the fascists poised to monopolize political power in America, we may find we no longer have a livable planet to take back from them.

Climate change continues at an accelerating pace all around us as we continue to fritter away our time and attention dealing with the autocratic fantasies of a deranged and demagogic Republican Party.

If anyone thinks our future Republican overlords are going to do anything to slow down the looming threat of irreversible climate collapse, they haven’t been paying attention. This is likely to be the final and most damning consequence of letting the lunatics take over the asylum.

Tick tock, America.