The Achilles Heel of Living in a Republic
It would be a good thing to stop calling America a democracy, because it is not, and has never been. We are a republic which, both linguistically and actually, is a long way from Republican with a capital. Words matter, as do capitalizations.
A republic is a form of government where the voters select from a number of candidates and decide which will represent them. Part of the political difficulty in which we presently find ourselves has to do with the quality of candidates offered.
Currently, you fear mine and I can’t abide yours
Thus, the Thanksgiving Dinner just passed became a battleground, rather than a celebration of togetherness. In less volatile times, I might well have preferred mine, as you preferred yours, and we worked it out through bipartisan negotiation. If that seems a distant vision, it sure raised hell with productive discourse. So, here we are, half the nation separated from the other half, and no easy solution on the horizon.
We have met the enemy, and he is us
Well, half of us for sure and you can speculate on which half.
As noted, we vote for someone else to represent what we hope to achieve. Yet, every ‘someone else’ in sight is bought and paid-for by a tiny fraction of citizens. There is no more “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and if there were it would be laughed out of the movie theaters. Headlined by Jimmy Stewart, in 1939, when I was but a child, it won an Academy Award for Best Original Story.
There’s a lesson there
Even in 1939, a hero in the Congress was regarded as a character in a fictional story. Give a golden statue for Mr. Smith and raise a glass to Huey Long.
Elizabeth Powel, a friend to Benjamin Franklin, [JF1] asked, as he left the Constitutional Convention, "Well, Doctor, what have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?" His famous reply was “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” We will try, Ben. We will try.
The Founders considered the common citizens too ignorant to direct themselves in a democracy…and have proven themselves mostly correct
And here we are, the mightiest nation on the face of the Earth, at a crossroads. It apparently wasn’t enough to separate us from our representatives, we are at one another’s throats because of those dudes. They turned on us for money. What else is new, when a candidate spends $5 million to secure a $270,000 job.
Yet, we’re a strong nation, and history tells us we are at our strongest with our backs against the wall. The easy accusation is that it’s ‘their’ fault, whoever they may be in your personal politics. But we are the other half of they, and that may turn out to be our salvation.
It's possible that we are not herd-animals after all, although it’s a long way from Ben Franklin’s wisdom to our present circumstance. Can we separate ourselves from social media conspiracy theories? Learn to listen to opinions that are not ours from the other side of the family table? Require baseline competence, at the very least, from those we elected to decide for us—and turn away from them when they are found to be crooks?
The claim is that things were simpler, in Franklin’s day
Simpler, to have created a fragile form of representative government in a dependent colony, six thousand miles of angry sea from mother England. Simpler, striving to foretell all the stones in the shoes of an unknown future. Simpler yet to write a Bill of Rights and Constitution, documents thus far never conceived by man. Then, simply sign your name to them in bold strokes, in the knowledge that your life and property was held at stake.
Imperfect documents, by the way, that made concessions to a slave-holding nation in order to glue it together in the blind, impossible hope that freedom could be made right in an unknown future. Sorting things out that had never been sorted in the history of governed human populations. We remain captive today to some of those imperfect concessions: the Electoral College for one and and a not yet sorted out Civil War for another. Some wounds take a long time to heal, but we persevere.
America is a not yet perfect work-in-progress, if you will
And, a very nervous world looks on as we thrash things out, some with fingers crossed, others banking on our failure. We are no longer six thousand miles of angry sea from that world, it is electronically upon our doorstep. Old Ben Franklin, who knew a thing or two about electricity, would puff on his pipe and chuckle at our claim of impossibilities.
Solve them. Throw the bastards out, tax the untaxed, face realities and bring back the classless nation you once built upon the backs of slaves. America is not as good or bad as it gets, and going down the tubes.
It is, and always has been, a work in progress.
Time to go to work.