Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy
These are only notes on the Introduction of the book. But it is such good reading, and outlines the answers we have been seeking, to truly understand what we as Americans are doing to ourselves by accepting any 'rhetoric' produced by the far-right and the portion of the Republican Party that has joined them. The portion of the Republican Party (Congress) is tired of losing, instead of doing government business, of which they are paid, it is easier to feed upon the miscontent, eveyone has kept and felt, over the years, to gain power.
Be careful of what you wish for -
Introduction: Our Own Worst Enemy - Burn It All Down
You can hear it everywhere. These are just the worst times ever, and we all know it. Crime, drugs, joblessness awash our society, and we're killing ourselves, intentionally and accidently. The landscape begin to be on the verge of another civil war. Even before COVID arrived, which sank us into misery, which reminded us of the recent past, as the Good Ol' Days. Everyone world wide were tired, worn out, fed up and angry. Peace, freedom, prosperity are just words from regimes that had promised these benefits and then provided nothing but stagnation and endless war.
Perhaps the Constitution has run its course, or possibly liberal democracy itself, was a bad idea, only a blip in history and now it's time to move on. Either way 'the system' has failed, and so perhaps we ourselves should destroy it.
Of course, this is all nonsense, as Tooma Ilves , a former president of Estonia noted in 2019, the citizens of the world's democracies are living in a time of plenty that was unimaginable a half century ago. The continual increase of the standard of living is amazing, just within the last 40 years.
Would anyone back then have felt that from clothing to energy would be less expensive and a better product? Our food would be so plentiful that we don't know what do do with most of it, or the Soviet Union would break-apart peacefully, nuclear weapons once stored now destroyed or that diseases once feared were now under control. Our ancestors would laugh out loud, believing we lived in an utopian world. This was the twenty-first century. They thought our generation woiuld be choking on over population, we'd be eating Soylent Green and joining gangs in a wasteland, armed and ready to protect our supplies of water and gasoline. However, we're nothing similar, we've become spoiled, demanding and reliant on services, such as cell phones, wi-fi coverage, social media all demanding our immediate attention.
We've always been able to look at our past and see things are better, than they were, and still insist better.We can be gratefuk for improvements while remaining aware of the problems we face, even in a time of relative well-being. But we must stay grounded and not ignore the reality around us. The world isn't perfect, but perfection is not a true measure of government, much less an entire era. The question, really, is wheter liberal democracy has somehow failed us on its own terms, and made life less free, less prosperous, and even less worth living, in ways that justify retracting our consent to be governed by such arrangements.
Millions of U.S. citizens and other established democracties seem to think s. Even before a mob overran the U.S. Capitaol in January 2021 - some intent on not only mayhem but bodily harm on members of the House and Senate and lynching the vice-president - liberal democracy, by any number of measures, was in trouble. When nearly a fifth of the voters in America, Italy and France (one third Europeans younger generation) think military rule would be a good idea, that's trouble. When most people around the world, including four in ten Americans and Canadians think a governing system in which someone other than elected officials made national decisions would be a good alternative to democracy, that's trouble. When fully a third of Americans, just a week before an election, think it is justified to 'use violence to advance political goal's, that very serious trouble. And when sucessive generations in democracies across the world think it is less and less essential to live in a democracy, that't not just trouble, but forseeble trouble for our future.
Ordinary citizens and political movements are assaulting our liberal democratic government, with its notions of equality, tolerance, and compromise; they believe their interests and their futures are being subverted by malign forces at home and abroad. These citizens are turning to illiberal and anti-demcratic alternatives, including a span of aspiring demagogues whose appeals run from know-nothing populism to blood and soil nationalism.
Populism pits good and pure-hearted 'ordinary people' against self-serving, out-of-touch 'elite'. It inherently is divisive as it singles out specific groups as distinct from the people (elites, immigrants, bankers, journalists). Also standing in opposition to 'the people', as they preach, we could add globalists, military officers, bureaucrats, lawyers, experts, intellectuals, and quite frankly anyone politically connected or economically privileged. populists use 'democracy' and 'freedom' as meaningless incantations used to cover-up any complicity in the same conspiracy to squeeze the last few ounces of cheap labor from a victimized woking class.
The populist right are mired in nostalgia and social revenge that has emerged as the main threat to liberal democracy over the past twenty years. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, a populist, stated 'democracy is no longer able to protect people's dignity, provide freedom, guarantee physical security or maintain a Christian culture, and in Brazil Bolsonaro promised to 'unite the people and combat gender ideology - equal rights for minorities.
These are leading figures who are promising to rescue their people from the world more prosperous, more peaceful, and even during the pandemic, a healhier one. It is important to be able to distinguish between smug political assertions about progress and sensible recognition of the dramatic advances made by human society over the last century. As the state of the planet is itself a rebuke to illiberal and brutal appeals.
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Today's standards of living have improved so vastly, those populist leaders must ramp up their White-Hot rhetoric about 'carnage' or 'gender ideology', lest the public doubt for a moment whether they should believe what they're hearing or seeing with their own eyes. These political entrepreneurs have taken a dangerous mixture of entitlement, resentment socially, and the natural fear of change, and inflamed these emotions to larger flames of anger and dissatifaction.
All of today's problems such as climate change to economic stress to political equality are solvable with democracy, so the reasoning why so many people are voting to place these charlatans, racists and/or politicians on a ego trip. No system of government can produce a perfect equal society or prevent poverty. But attempts can be made to impove upon it. Voters must understand they are stewards of their government, their natural resources and their own rights.
In a liberal democracy, citizens are masters of their fate. If we have felt our government has failed us, we must question if we have failed the test of democracy. Civic introspection is an indispensable duty for voters in a democracy, even during peaceful and calm times. We should consistently check the societal temperature of our citizenship, because if we withdrawal our support of our government, will those failings befall all of us. Yes, we are responsible for our own happiness, our safety of freedoms but we are also straddled with our own problems,
Rather than accept our citizen responsibilities in our democracy, many opt not to be involved, to not vote, which could lead to the decay of our democratic government, and without realization also losing our freedoms and security. This abandonment is manifeted in ways small and large from inexcusably low voter turnout to the political discourse targeting revenge versus coopration.
U.S citizens in the past have managed to resist 'these' biased pushes such as McCathyism, but when it came to push and shove, the American voters placed the brakes on such ideologies. However, today, the American society is very divided, their elections rocked by scandals, violence and threats to constitutional order.
All that began in 2016 when the Presidential race became a made-for-television carnival between Trump and Ms. Clinton. This assualt on liberty, often rationalized as protection against dangerous foreign ideas and threats ranging from homsexuality to immigration leaving the population vulnerable to power grabs. Democratic decline today is more subtle and gradual, also more dangerous because it comes WITHIN, from our own choices, not from those on the outside. As voters we don't see our own actions as the problem but the solution. Illiberals think of themselves as populists.
The threat to today's democracy comes from the working and middle class those who were born and raised with a rage from cultural insecurity, inflated expectations, tribal partisan alliances, obsessions about ethinicity and identity, undue ambition and a stunted understanding of limits of government.
Authoritarian systems are the authors of their own troubles and deserve every molecule of the opposition they face from within. But why are people who are already free, and who are by any relative measue materially and politically better off than those in more repressive states, attacking their own systems of government? The answers are as disturbing as they are counterintuitive:
We are losing because we won.
We are suffeing because we ae successful.
We are unhappy because we have what we want.
Conclusion: Is There a Road Back?