MAY 13, 2021 – The notion of a citizen-army or a citizen-government seems so right, so Norman Rockwellian. Why shouldn’t the gentleman farmer become a general, then president? Why shouldn’t a self-educated log-splitter become president—without first being a general? . . . And why shouldn’t a 29-year-old wait person from Queens—or a Q-Anon kook from Georgia or a mud-wrestler from Ohio—be sent to the U.S. House of Representatives?
At least citizen-soldiers go through boot-camp. A famous entertainer—or notorious charlatan—can’t just sign up and be assigned a high rank.
Back when the world was far simpler—with far fewer people—than it is today, a Davy Crockett could warrant to his fellow frontiersmen that his “common sense” was sufficient qualification for service in Congress. Aside from age—and citizenship, in the case of the president—the Constitutional qualifications for the highest elective offices in the land haven’t changed since . . . before Davy Crockett. Now, it seems, to “qualify” for high office, all you need is notoriety on social media. Whither hast thou gone . . . Common Sense?
What a country.
In no other field can dunderheads go directly to the top. This doesn’t mean dunderheads can’t be found at the top—of corporations, universities, major league sports teams, charitable foundations. But in very few instances do such dunderheads get there overnight. More to the point, in percentage terms, morons in high positions outside of elective office are far fewer than in Congress and the White House, as we witnessed between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021.
Why do we (the people) stand for this? We wouldn’t board an airliner piloted by a celebrity with absolutely no training. We wouldn’t rely on a surgeon whose chief qualification is adherence to conspiracy theories. We wouldn’t pay $2,500 for season tickets to football games played by middle-schoolers. Why, then, do we readily elect to Congress and the White House, people who’ve achieved celebrity or notoriety but know nothing about the workings of those institutions, the legislative process, and perhaps most important of all, the unwritten rules of functioning democracy?
Chief among those rules is the art of compromise. Without it, democracy in a pluralistic society is dead in the water. This condition leads to frustration and eventually, disillusionment with the “system”—with democracy, which, in turn, opens the door to ideological hooliganism. Given the incongruous, puritanical streak in our otherwise laissez-faire culture, compromise is too often branded as ideological impurity and thus, intolerability. But essential compromise requires parties to accept a common set of . . . facts. Defy inescapable, empirical evidence and you destroy the foundation for “give-and-take.”
All of which takes us to . . . us, the people, and our disregard for evidence and our simplistic understanding of democracy, and consequently, to our susceptibility to demagoguery. If democracy goes over the cliff, we’ll have only ourselves to blame. We the people who, after 250 years of an imperfect democracy, rushed to destroy it.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
