Representative Democracy in the U.S. Will Not Be Revitalized with Email Lists and Political Donations

In July 2022, the midterm elections in the U.S. approached and brought a tsunami of email requests for contributions to the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC, political action committees, and individual candidates running in Federal, State, and Local government elections. I was moved to write about how ‘chipping in 5 dollars’ would not address societal imperatives such as climate action, racial justice, voting rights, reproductive rights, the corruption of the judiciary (particularly the extreme fundamentalists of the so-called Supreme Court as well as unqualified appointments by Trump), and expelling and indicting the seditious conspirators in Congress who attempted to overthrow the government of the United States on January 6, 2021.

While I expected the usual onslaught of misspelled suggestions from the willfully ignorant, I did not anticipate the response from a social friend in the Democratic Party who said:

“Great job encouraging people to elect more Republicans!” and also “This isn’t time for whining, real lives are at risk.”

Essentially, their message was to shut up and just write more checks to the Democratic Party.

First, for better or worse, I am unlikely to shut up. Sorry about that. Silently writing checks without thoughtful analysis is a major part of our political quagmire. When a party that advocates a platform benefitting 90% of the population can barely defeat a GOP candidate who could not utter a complete, coherent sentence, there are significant shortcomings that must be addressed. I will not be bullied into silence by ignorance on either side of the political aisle.

The midterm election cycle is now fading from the rearview mirror. Thankfully the Democratic Party was able to gain one Senate seat for a temporary and precarious 51-49 majority (although now lobbyist favorite Sinema has declared herself an Independent, and so-called Democrat Joe “Big Oil and Coal” Manchin will happily put future generations at risk for his anti-climate paydays).

Mainstream media reported that the Democratic party defied midterm history by not getting slaughtered at the polls. While the results flew in the face of historic trends, the midterm cycle was unprecedented. At no time in modern history had a major party incited an attempt to violently overthrow the U.S. government. So perhaps, restated, the Democratic party only managed to lose their U.S. House of Representatives majority in an election after members of the opposing party conspired to overthrow the government through lies, frivolous lawsuits, violence, slates of false electors, and prosecutorial threats. My apologies for not joining in the celebration.

If the Republic, the representative democracy of the United States, is to be saved, there must be an open and thoughtful transpartisan discussion about what has gone horribly wrong. The system must address corruption and incompetent candidates (or officeholders) and prioritize the interests of current and future generations over party politics.

Otherwise, it is only a matter of time before there is intractable authoritarian minority control of all three branches of the U.S. government. There will be no further hope of a polite competition of ideas around charting a liberal, conservative, or moderate path for the future. It will be about the extreme concentration of wealth and power (think Musk, Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Phil Knight, Robert Mercer, and a handful of others). Today's United States is a textbook example of why society cannot simultaneously support extreme wealth inequality and meaningful democracy.

Any thought of a government for the people and by the people will be relegated to an obscure footnote (that will be deemed too extreme and unpatriotic to be taught in U.S. schools along with actual history.)