When leaving the constitutional convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government had been created; he responded, “a republic if you can keep it.”
The quote that we tend to ignore is from John Adams, who said, “there was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” or James Madison, who wrote, “democracies have in general been as short in their lives as they’ve been violent in their depths.”
Last week the United States witnessed a rally in Michigan for President Trump. Ten days before the event, the FBI foiled an attempt to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer by arresting 13 participants of this plot.
At the Michigan rally, thousands of people egged on by the President of the United States himself, began to chant “lock her up”. When questioned about this, surrogate Lara Trump said the President was having fun.
Due to the President’s comments, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist, now needs security because of the threats against him.
It would be easy to look at this event and cast it off as a one-time event or something that will pass like a virus that has run its course. These events should not be seen as a one-time event but as a continuum of events that threaten the fabric of the republic. Whether pressuring Ukraine for dirt on his opponent, the family using their office for business purposes, cuddling up to dictators, or using the Justice Department as a weapon against his political opponents, these events must be taken seriously. The jury is still out on whether a nation with a significant population that supports this type of activity can survive as a republic.
This is not the first time democracy has been under threat through demagoguery. During the 1950s, McCarthyism was a pernicious threat to the rule of law, leading to the ruination of careers and reputations.
Too much is being put into a potential presidential victory of former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris as a cure for the present turmoil. While it might be a start, heading back to a sense of normalcy will take more than an electoral victory. Donald Trump is not the cause of the current crisis in civic engagement; he provided an opportunity for it to be unleashed.
The vote is critical as a start, but it must not stop there. Civic culture has been eroded to the point of absurdity and will continue to erode until there is a re-organizing and re-creation of the nation’s civic fabric. From a social and political perspective, people’s propensity to accept misinformation and act on it will remain relatively high after the election, no matter who wins.
This is not new and many people on both sides of the political spectrum (although republicans seem to be more susceptible) accepted misinformation about Hillary Clinton and the uranium deal.
The question as to whether this can be turned around is not quickly answered. If Republicans are swept out of office, there will be many in the base that will call for greater purity. You will even hear people say Trump was right, but we need someone a little bit smarter.
America has always been polarized politically and socially. Issues have divided communities and families from its inception. Not all people in the colonies supported the Revolutionary War, and the Civil war was the ultimate example of American polarization.
One challenge is to move beyond living vicariously through leaders who claim to share your viewpoint. It should always be suspect when a candidate approaches the electorate by stating their conservative or progressive bona fides. Politicians running for office have learned to use the idea of political purity to their advantage. They know that people who support the sense of purity, whether from a conservative or progressive perspective, are susceptible to this. Politics, by its very nature, is never about absolute purity but the art of the possible. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, includes GOP ideas. Yet despite liking most aspects of it, many republicans dislike it because it passed under a Democrat’s administration.
Another challenge is to re-establish mediating institutions that enable the electorate to obtain facts to make decisions. While technology has presented options for people to receive information, it has also created outlets where fringe elements from Alex Jones to QAnon can distribute false information.
Mainstream media must move away from creating equality between viewpoints when it is unwarranted. There is no reason to provide equal time to climate change deniers. Whataboutism is not appropriate simply to draw viewers. While local news still occurs during the morning and dinner hour, too much of the media is opinion-based. From early in the morning to late at night, news coverage from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and everything in between is about political opinion. Media outlets must also find new ways of providing opposing sides of important issues without inviting people who offer little substance. Unfortunately, asking a Republican and a Democrat to discuss a subject creates confusion more than clarity.
Ultimately it’s up to the electorate to heal the civic culture. Americans live in an overly compartmentalized manner. There is a constant attempt to disassociate with what happens in the political and civic arena. Comments such as; I don’t do politics is a statement of naïveté, but as Niven Postma said, “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you.”
What Benjamin Franklin was referring to is that to keep the republic, there must be an informed and engaged populace. Anything other than that will put the republic in danger of disintegrating into anarchy and chaos.
American democracy has deep roots in it’s historical and present DNA. It has survived challenges to its social fabric and has proven resilient. Even those who experienced oppression under the republic, fought for its survival and see it as the guarantor of hard-fought-for rights.
The good news is that Donald Trump is a bumbler and is not the brightest bulb in the pack. His political success is more akin to a petulant Chauncey Gardner, where his followers proved to be quite gullible. The bad news is that there will be another Donald Trump except smarter, smoother, and more appealing. Whether the nation will have the political and social infrastructure to guard against the inevitable will be decided perhaps sooner than people think.