Why American Democracy is Safe

With all the arguing, political infighting, misinformation, texting, posting, name calling, screaming, protesting, not counting the side effects of Covid-19, we are revealing the strengths of our democracy. Those other people are stupid, blind, unable to see the facts, living in fantasyland, corrupt, superstitious, crazy, lazy, useless plagues on society. I agree.

This is how people with different biases, superstitious beliefs, post-apocalyptic fears, social demands, xenophobias, delusions of grandeur, and idyllic dreams get along. We don’t get along. That’s the history of our species, and every other species on earth.

We live in a nation founded on slavery, where only white men who owned land could vote. The wealthy men who wrote the Constitution didn’t even think of personal rights. They were an afterthought, and they wrote the Bill of Rights vague enough to assure their continued supremacy. But they weren’t the only selfish, egoistic, biased people in America. The lowest farmer, supported by local militia and governments, swindled the native Americans, murdered them, stole their land, ran them off at gun point. America is founded on greed. Nothing new there in the annals of history.

Fighting is easy. Thinking is hard. That was true when the disgruntled colonists started the Revolutionary War, rather than patiently waiting for their opportunity to separate from England. That was true when the North and South fought the Civil War rather than patiently working out a long-term solution. It was still true when America declared war on Spain, envious of European empires, impatient for some action. It remains true to this day, with U.S. forces still on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, having gained very little. It will always be true.

America is a polyglot society, so of course we are split. We’ve had a civil war, the Jim Crow era in the south, rampant capitalism, rampant economic and social inequality, rampant environmentalism, rampant political correctness, rampant racism and antiracism, you name it. It’s always been out of control in a society like America.

The United States is a carbon copy of Europe, but with a shorter record of war and rampage. Maybe we learned, maybe it was an accident that we’ve only fought one civil war. America is coming of age. With a population equal to that of Europe, we are facing crises of every sort, just as the nations of Europe did over the  centuries. Instead of taking up arms to settle our disputes, starting two global conflagrations, we are fighting on social media and in the courts.

No matter what the outcome of the election, no matter how ambiguous the result, no matter how long it takes to determine America’s next President (not King), there is no revolution brewing. Of course there is the anarchist fringe that likes to play with guns. Those people never started a revolution in the history of the world. Lenin wasn’t an anarchist, but an intellectual elitist with a devoted cadre of followers.

We act like we live in a banana republic at times, but that is only the result of minds with too little to do, and too much entertainment. We have too many pundits, too many religions, too many investigative journalists, too many think tanks, too many whistle blowers, too many guns, too many leaks, too much security, too much food, too much freedom for government to hide its mistakes in the guise of national security. Too much bullshit.

While drowning in verbal and digital sewage, we can hold our heads up and declare that no one has found a better way to form so many people, from so many cultural and ethnic origins, into a working democracy.

America isn’t heaven, but more like purgatory, not because of our Constitution, not because of conservatives, not because of liberals, not because of people of color, not because of immigrants, not because of lazy people, not even because of assholes. It seems like hell sometimes because of our diversity, too many idiots and lunatics, people who don’t think the same we do.

We should all remember that it could be bad. We could be living in China, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela; all countries with relatively homogeneous populations. Look how they turned out.

The author, Joel Garreau, proposed that America is splintering in his 1981 book, The Nine Nations of North America. It was an interesting analysis, but he was wrong. There are fifty nations in America, each state jealously guarding its sovereignty agains the other states and the Federal Government. We have a revolution every two years, as declared in the Constitution, when we vote.

So rant away if it makes you feel better, but don’t forget to vote.