The Twilight of Democracy

Is anybody looking forward to this election with anticipation? Or should I ask, is anybody looking at this election with anything but dread?

On the one hand we have a seriously unlikable harridan whose ideology is pretty straightforwardly totalitarian, as defined by Mussolini.

“Everything within the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state.”

After an investigation for serious felonies the FBI director announced she was guilty as hell but he couldn’t touch her, in almost as many words. Fanatical supporters crowed she had been “cleared.”

The DNC has been revealed to have rigged the nomination process to block Bernie Sanders by Wikileaks via Vladimir Putin.

And by the way, if they’re willing to rig a nomination do you think they would scruple to rig an election?

And is anybody the least concerned a hostile foreign power is openly trying to decide our election?

Which brings us to Trump. An unknown quantity, since he’s run businesses but never held so much as a city council position.

Need I point out government is not business?

Trump has held a lot of different positions on many issues and nobody seems to notice that at present he’s essentially a moderate Democrat. An improvement over the hard left cadre that has seized leadership of the party to be sure.

He’s a bit vague on how he intends to accomplish the things he promises but at times sounds alarmingly like a Latin American caudillo.

But for the first time in more than a century we have a third party candidate in libertarian Gary Johnson who looks like he might ride a wave of disgust, not into office let’s get real, but into vote totals that can’t be ignored.

If either of the two major parties collapses, there is a real possibility of a third party rising to replace one of them.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the last time that happened a civil war broke out.

So while we still have some semblance of our old democracy, I’d like to reminisce about some things I noticed while I was living in the brand new democracies in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Empire.

In Poland they call their state “The Third Republic.” France is on her fifth.

This implicitly recognizes the first characteristic of a true democracy, continuity.

“Democracy is a habit,” as English writer Gavin Lyall once put it.

In America we have so far never cancelled or postponed a regular election, not even during the Civil War. We’ve had plenty of questionable elections, including a presidential election that was possibly stolen (Nixon-Kennedy). But other countries experience has shown when you suspend your democracy, you don’t pick up where you left off, you start again from the beginning building a new tradition of continuity.

How something is done is at least as important as what is done.

Not long ago I pointed this out in an editorial vis-à-vis legalizing same-sex marriage via executive fiat. A newspaper editor indignantly replied that we can’t wait for messy democratic procedures to correct an injustice. (She compared it to slavery.)

Yes we can, and yes we must.

It would seem like a no-brainer, but the power to wave your hand and do good is inevitably the power to do bad things, unchecked by democratic restraints.

In a new democracy, it’s not the first free election that establishes it. It’s the first election in which the party in power loses – and gracefully cedes power. Then everyone breathes a little easier.

In an old democracy a party impatient of democratic procedures which assumes more and more power to do things by fiat must face the fact that when power is transferred they put those powers into the hands of their opponents.

The thought inevitably occurs, “Then we have to make sure power never changes hands again.”

And lastly something that a lot of people miss. “Soft on crime” is not a feature of liberal democracies but of tyrannies.

Tyrants are friendly to criminals and often use them for their dirty work. Those who desire to rule without restraint admire those who act without restraint.

Have a nice election.