THE DEGRADATION OF DEMOCRACY

MARCH 30, 2024 – We’re a big, complex country; 330 million souls, an annual GDP of $26 trillion; billions of transactions and interactions each day that sustain our health, creature comforts, and better ways of life to which we’re accustomed.

“Government,” as it were, plays a critical role in how we’ve organized ourselves. It legislates, regulates, monitors, enforces, mediates, and arbitrates among us who  by free will, impulse, and design work both in concert and in competition against one another for a piece of the enormous tutti-frutti social, cultural, political, and economic pie that is America.

We harbor a range of ideas about the role of government. Some of these ideas are based on direct experience: wanting to build a new garage and running afoul of a local ordinance that requires a 10-foot setback, when what you need is just two extra feet, and the building inspector—a guy who was bullied mercilessly as a kid—just won’t budge. After a yearlong fight with the inspector, the inspector’s supervisor, the mayor and council (all newbies and ironically, bullied by the inspector), you’re now firmly entrenched in the “Government – BAD!” camp.

Or . . . having grown up on a steady diet of “Minuteman patriotism” we equate everything we don’t like about modern government to the Stamp Act passed by the British Parliament in 1765 and the American Revolution a decade later. Yet back then the “country” as it were, was 13 colonies of around 10 million people, most of whom with the aid of a horse and a hoe eked out an agrarian living.

Yet another group of people dissatisfied with “government” are the cherry-pickers of the progressive left and gold-bar right, whose constructs of “perfection” are the enemies of achievable good. These are the people prone to see every Democrat and every Republican as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum and would therefore either not vote or vote for a “protest” candidate.

Keep in mind that however you feel about government—big or small; inept or not inept enough; autocratic or damnit, not autocratic enough; too imposing or too withdrawn; too restrictive of your freedom to do as you please; or too reticent in restricting the freedom of others to do as they please to impinge on your freedom—government in one significant form or another is here to stay. It won’t vanish or radically reform itself because you vote “fringe” or don’t vote at all.

If you’re in the Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum camp . . . or worse . . . I submit that you’re playing with fuel and flame of the most dangerous sort. Whether your issue is “Gaza” or “runaway spending” or “too much government regulation” or “too much wokeness” or the very opposite of each of the foregoing, if you sit out the November election or vote for “perfection” at the expense of “good,” you will be—with my due respect—complicit in the degradation of our democracy.

What do I mean, precisely, by “degradation of our democracy”? I mean the frontal assault on decorum, civility, and standards of respect. These form the essential fabric of a just and orderly society. In our Cowboy Culture—the natural extension of our history of conquest—these qualities are in constant tension with the First Amendment, which allows us to speak whatever rolls off our tongues, and free market economics, which encourage an ex-president to sell Bibles to raise funds to pay for his abuse of legal processes to avoid unfavorable adjudication of substantive civil and criminal claims against him.

What I find most troubling about this state of affairs is that according to most current polling, roughly half of us aren’t troubled enough by the “degradation of democracy” to stop its further decline. In fact, we would join the jack-hammering to degrade our democratic foundations. If we do; if we vote for anyone other than the incumbent president, then we should consider ourselves complicit in what could well be the demise of our democracy.

Now down from my soapbox, for now anyway.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson