We keep reading headlines about how American democracy supposedly is in peril. “American democracy is under threat,” frets the Economist. “The midterm elections could leave democracy weaker ahead of the 2024 presidential race.”
Not really. Democracy is supposed to be rambunctious. People expecting placid elections are looking in the wrong place.
First, America doesn’t really have a pure democracy, but a republic that uses democratic elements. In a pure democracy, 51% of voters could take away your right to read this article, and my right to write it. In our republic, that right and the others are enshrined in the Bill of Rights, which is difficult to change.
The other elements of the Constitution also make it difficult to attack our rights, including the Senate and the often hated Electoral College, both of which guarantee even small states have power; and the Supreme Court, which is not elected and is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of our rights.
Moreover, under the American republic, the locus of democracy actually is down at the state and local levels. As our country becomes increasingly diverse, how else can major differences be settled? Why should Texas be governed by the mores of California, and vice versa?
When the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision was overturned in June, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, worried, “The court’s ruling overturning the constitutional right for abortion is going to unleash a flurry of new state laws restricting reproductive rights.”
But isn’t that democracy? And where, exactly, was that “right” in the U.S. Constitution? It’s nowhere. When Proposition 1 likely passes on Nov. 8 in California, abortion rights will be in the California Constitution. Why isn’t that enough for this distinguished jurist?
And if that’s not enough, are we supposed to impose his view of abortion not just on all 50 states, but also on the rest of the world? Should we invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because they don’t guarantee “reproductive rights”?
American democracy actually has been pretty wild. In the 1800 election, the partisans of President Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson flung epithets at one another so vile I can’t write them here. In 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr killed former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
In 1856, pro-slavery Democratic U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate chamber and, with a metal-tipped cane, beat into unconsciousness Massachusetts antislavery Republican Sen. Charles Sumner. It was a harbinger of the Civil War that started five years later, which killed an estimated 850,000 Americans out of a population of 30 million. But the war preserved the union and ended slavery.
Skipping ahead to what I remember, the 1960s were a time of vast unrest, with numerous riots, including in Watts in 1965, and countless protests against the Vietnam War.
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Things actually were rather placid after that until the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The old media – three TV news networks, one or two local newspapers – channeled debates into narrow areas. People were on the same page. We had “water cooler” conversations about the previous evening’s TV show everybody watched.
No more. First the web, then social media sharply divided the country. Do you know what social media posts or websites your neighbors check for political news, if any? How about the members of your own family?
Curiously, that old document from 1789, the U.S. Constitution, with its emphasis on divided power and devolved authority, is precisely what’s needed today both to keep the country together and to express the people’s democratic will, largely through local elections.
Complaints about democracy go with the exercise of democracy. Someday American democracy will end, who knows how. But for now, it’s doing fine. Don’t worry. It’s supposed to be like this.
John Seiler is on the SCNG Editorial Board.