Democracy in America 2024

In an era where freedom and democracy were on the upswing, and poverty on the downswing throughout the world, in which the Western model of controlled free enterprise and expanded (almost universal) safety-net social services for young and old was prevailing everywhere, it was incomprehensible to sense so much discord in America – as the chief protagonist of that model. George Will said it best: Rene Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am,’) has become for many Americans, ‘I despise, therefore I am.’ Contempt for the other tribe, rather than affection for one’s own, is life’s animating passion. Will had it right. It was all driven by tribalism, but it was not ethnic or racial tribalism. It was ideological tribalism. Better yet, it was what the founders of America called “factions.” And it was eating up America’s soul. Factions, or “extremes,” as we call them nowadays, can be constrained by a system of checks and balances. America has one of the best designed for that: One of its three co-equal branches (the Supreme Court) constantly declares laws promulgated by the legislature to be unconstitutional and does the same for executive actions it deems invalid. The legislature itself has one branch (the Senate) which is not strictly one-person-one-vote; instead, it represents geographic regions of the country and vests in them, whether big or small, the same power. There’s also a more organic factor at play in curbing the power of the extremes; it is called the “civil society” and was, in America’s embryonic days, the key to civil discourse, as noted by Alexis de Tocqueville. As we will see in the next section, the civil society acts as the moderator of “The Great Debate” that guides and nurtures a well-functioning democracy. Its demise could spell trouble for America. The factions that so worried the Founders of this nation, aided and encouraged by a very powerful media, could damage American democracy irreversibly. Could the advent of social media provide a counterforce to that? Could it silence, or at least moderate, the proverbial “loudest voice” of the radicals? Or, to the contrary, does social media aggravate the extremism of factions? Americans have always spoken with one voice where it comes to essential values. Lately, however, a “culture war” has emerged that pits those with strong religious beliefs against those who want to take God entirely out of the public arena, where The Great Debate is staged. I will tackle all those issues in this book, keeping in mind what Thomas Jefferson said about the Constitution needing to be revised at least once every fifty years. It may just be that Americans need to sit down and reestablish common principles of societal behavior, lest the fragile fabric of democracy be torn away by the ideological extremes on both sides. Or perhaps not, since history teaches us that it happens organically in America, due to the exceptional mix of its people, the wisdom of its Founders and the enlightenment that comes from its Judeo-Christian roots.