I worry a lot about the future of American democracy, it keeps me up some nights. The violence and the chaos that we experience, the gun violence the willful ignorance and the new forms of superstition, gun-nuttery, climate change denial, foisted on a willing segment of the population by the corporate media, a media increasingly led by the worst of it, make me doubt that anything like democracy is going to survive here.
The best alternatives to democracy are no comparison to democracy in its ability to improve the lives of people and their posterity. None of the many alternatives are comparable, though many are, indisputably, preferable to other available alternatives when the requirements to have a real democracy are absent.
The Egyptian election which installed a military leader of the coup against the elected President and legislature has certainly ended the heady optimism people had for the Arab Spring. While I have no doubt that many Egyptians want democracy, those who wanted a Western style democracy didn't prevail at the polls. A democratically elected government by The People chose the Muslim Brotherhood members who didn't appear likely to produce that kind of democracy. So, we can see, just by that, that elections don't do it. That an egalitarian democracy depends on the things that lead people to choose who they vote for. But we know that from our far more developed experience of elections which have chosen the anti-egalitarian Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and the tolerated, stolen election of 2000 in which the Supreme Court installed Bush II.
Women in Egypt have certainly not enjoyed increased freedom as a result of the Arab Spring revolution that ousted the Mubarak government, neither under the Muslim Brotherhood nor the military rule that ousted them . That failure to produce egalitarian democracy in what is sometimes considered one of the most modern and developed countries in the region, with a relatively large middle-class and educated population with a feminist movement that goes back to the beginning of the last century, points to the fact that wanting democracy is no guarantee that you can get it.
An even more instructive example is how Russia in the post-Soviet period has gone through a chaotic period of government under an elected president and legislature and has chosen, as an alternative, a classic strongman who shows no evidence of turning into any kind of mythical Cincinnatus.* How egalitarian democracy has not happened in Russia shows how hard it is to get and how hard it is to sustain. The corruption of the Yeltsin years with the habits of thought by those with power and the people who elected them, the nationalistic terror campaigns by separatist factions, and the putrid rise of the billionaires out of the incompetence and corruption - many of them high up in the communist state, those are just some of the things that seem to have prevented democracy from taking hold in Russia, even with elections. Even with, briefly, a free media.
If a country as developed, as educated, as Russia hasn't managed to get the democracy that I have no doubt many if not most its people would like to have, it is clear that believing you want democracy is no guarantee that you will get one. Around the world we can see that just because there are elections under a constitution, by an electorate that is fairly well educated, isn't a guarantee of democracy. That is something we should have learned from Germany in 1933.
Why it takes in some places, such as (cross your fingers) Tunisia and not in others seems to me like something worth serious study. What we find out might just save democracy in the few places it survives.
I don't have anything like a complete theory of how democracy arises and survives but it is certain that its possibility has prerequisites and is as dependent on contingencies in the environment in which it will either exist or not as any living organism. The examples of failed elections, corrupt elections, elections that result in a free choice of despots and those who will develop into despots shows it's far more than a matter of merely following a formula and the recipe contained in even a justly adopted constitution. It certainly doesn't just happen when people want it to or like the sound of the words and ideas.
Democracy exists in a tension with those things that work against it. Unfortunately and, I am absolutely certain, a lot of those things that work against democracy are some of the more attractive tendencies in human nature, exactly those things that the free-press use to sell us products sold by its funders and depots use to sell ideas, beliefs and attitudes to those who are more than willing to be duped by the attractive packaging. Perhaps that is why the class with the greatest ability to satisfy its desires, the rich, seem to be the natural enemy of egalitarian democracy (with some exceptions, of course). But those pathogens of democracy can infect anyone with even a small amount of wealth. Selfishness, comfort, laziness, self-indulgence, are the message of the American media guaranteed to give them a larger market share than exhortation to strive for the common good. In the last half-century, under the banner of freedom, the media here has been laying the ground for what is going to destroy American democracy.
The freer the media is from requirements to actually serve the public good, it will attack the foundations of democracy. This paradox is made to seem more pardoxical by the poetic, vague and inspecific language of the First Amendment to our Constitution, which leaves out the most important and non-negotiable reason that a free press is desirable, that it serve to inform and convince The People of the absolute necessity of egalitarian idealism so they can produce government of, by and for The People. Sufficient information is important, entirely important, but without the real and effective belief in the moral necessity of acting justly, even when you would rather be self-centered and selfish, information will only serve to make The People act like well informed oligrachs, working for their individual gratification and not the common good. That the media has made that seem corny and trite, it is more important than the form of election and constitutions. It was the power of that belief that led the frequently reluctant and recalcitrant American people from the white, property holding, aristocratic form of the original constitution, through the Civil War, Jim Crow, women's suffrage struggles, the labor movement, the gilded age crooks, imperialism, etc. to the high point of American democracy SO FAR before the decline beginning with Nixon. It was the abandonment of that ideal through a stylish cynicism that held its expression in contempt, through a weariness with civic virtue that
The interview of the President of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, I heard this morning, was the motivation of this post**. When the British interviewer righteously brought up charges of violations of free speech and the prospect of him violating the two-term provision of the constitution, Nkurunziza pointed out that elections in Burundi have hardly been an ideal expression of the common good but a dangerous and deadly occasion of ethnic violence. The change of government in Burundi, for the entire period of independence has been that of removals by murder and coup d'etats. This time-line can give you a quick education as to the inauspicious climate in which whatever democracy Burundi can manage, lives. I think the interviwer's questions might have been somewhat different if he had looked at it. Nkurunziza may, as a number of sources say, the best leader the country has had in a long time. If that's the case, it might be worth the chance that The People of Burundi could if they vote him back into office, despite the term limit.
The People, their common good, the environment they and we all depend on, is the entire reason that such things as Constitutions have any legitimacy, the only reason those matter.
If the common good and the environment are in conflict with provisions of the constitution, then it isn't unreasonable to see the constitution is of inferior importance. That is true despite our view from a distance, who seem to believe that the possibility of democracy depends on people merely liking the idea of it, of wishing they had it in their country and the possibility of having it, in part or in whatever fullness we imagine it exists in some, as of yet, unattained ideal form. The reality is that democracy is very difficult to achieve and is always bound to be a matter of continued striving and maintenance of what has been achieved. It seems to me that instead of people in the United States or Britain lecturing people who, in the face of obstacles such as those faced by people in Burundi, Rwanda, or other places making some progress, insist on them producing, full blown post-war, Western style democracies, we should take the difficult steps necessary to protect those from the decadence that endangers the core of that democracy. Beginning by reestablishing the kind of egalitarian ideals, justice and respect for the truth that the media is always trying to talk us out of respecting is more important than insisting on what those other countries can't and, perhaps, shouldn't try to achieve. I've pointed out before that it was the freely expressed, Western style shock-jock radio in Rwanda that both encouraged the genocide and enabled it. Yet, here, encouraging the development of the kind of violent, racist, bigoted, shock-jock style, is considered the very pinnacle of free press.
* Just why a democracy would look to that champion of aristocratic privilege over rule of law instead of his opponent, the champion of the common people, Terentilius, is well worth considering. And when I have considered it I may write about it.
** I will post a link if I can find one. I haven't been able to so far.
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