Restore Our Lost Republic
Two Jobs. We not only have lost our direction, we have taken a large step backward. So we have two big chores: We have to regain the ground we have lost, and then we must restore our sense of direction.
When Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 a woman anxiously asked what we had as a result. “A republic, if you can keep it” was the immediate reply. Well, we now have lost it. We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people.
Yes, we have a vestigial republic (or representative democracy, if you prefer) in that the people get to vote. That is not enough. Although we vote for our leaders, they do not feel responsible to us, the people. They feel responsible to various special interests, and those are the ones that they serve.
How did that happen?
The First Job. You have heard the expression “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. You could say as well that the price of democracy is eternal vigilance. The problem with such abstract homilies is that, however great they sound, people do not know exactly how to put them into practice. Many conservatives seem to think that this one just means constantly killing lots of foreigners. That really does not work.
The Power Grabbers. What it does means for representative democracy is this: In a republic or representative democracy we the people put other people in positions of power, in the hopes that they will represent our interests and values. Power, however, is addictive. People who have it tend to want more and be resentful of any limitation to it, including the limitations imposed by responsibility to the people who elected them. They will find various ways to evade that responsibility depending on time and circumstance. If our republic survives another hundred years or so — a somewhat dubious possibility at the moment — there will be new circumstances and politicians will be finding new ways to augment their power that we cannot now imagine.
But we are right now in the grips of a power grab of our own, one of a kind that our Founding Fathers could not possibly have imagined. For that matter, most of us do not understand how thoroughly it has destroyed our democracy, even though we are daily bombarded by the evidence. [THERE IS MORE HERE.]