Thanksgiving: Democracy

On this Thanksgiving Day, we give thanks to God, family, friends, first responders for COVID-19 patients, the brave men and women at the FBI for keeping our country safe, and last but not least democracy.

The word “democracy” originated from the Greek word “dēmokratia” (popular government) by combining “dēmos (common people, district) and “kratos” (rule, strength).

Led by Cleisthenes in 508–507 BC, Athenians established the first known democracy in the world, proclaiming equal rights for all citizens (though only men were citizens at that time).

After Cleisthenes came Socrates, who was the first moral philosopher and a founding father of Western philosophy. In 339 BC, Socrates was sentenced to death by a democratic jury of 501 ordinary citizens of “good standing.” He had a choice to either accept the verdict or escape Athens with the help of his allies. He chose death by poison. Socrates sacrificed himself for the sake of democracy even though it was imperfect.

Many people have taken democracy for granted. America’s founding father John Adams served as the first U.S. Vice President and the second U.S. President. He gave a stern warning in 1814 that “Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. ... It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. ... Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty.”

Indeed, democracy can breed tyranny if the checks and balances of the three branches of government – legislative, executive, and judicial – are broken. Presidential pardons, for instance, can be subject to the abuse of power by the President. We are in dire need of a Constitutional Oversight Committee that can sound the alarm before it's too late. U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen – who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties – sponsored a constitutional amendment in 2017 to limit the President's pardon power.

American philosopher John Dewey introduced the term “social endosmosis” in 1916 to describe an ideal democracy in which a society is not separated into a privileged and a subject-class. And President Barack Obama said at the Economic Club of Chicago in December 2017, “You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly.”

How should we go about protecting and perfecting democracy? Plato told us that “States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.” Therefore, the answer lies in the Transhumanist Movement:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/transhumanism-save-democracy-from-its-demise-newton-lee/