AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS IN INCREASINGLY TROUBLED WATERS
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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American democracy has faced serious challenges in the past. I remember the years of segregation. When I was in my first year of college, President Eisenhower sent troops to integrate the schools in Little Rock. When I was in law school, I wrote a Law Review article about Virginia’s law against inter-racial marriage. This law was soon found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the case of Loving v.Virginia. Later, in 1968, when I was working in the U.S. Senate, the country seemed to be coming apart. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were murdered. Across the country, violent riots ensued. In Washington, D.C., parts of the city were burned down. Tanks and military troops patrolled Capitol Hill. Many thought America might not survive.
But we did survive and moved forward. We confronted the legacy of segregation and passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. We elected our first black president—-and re-elected him. We defeated Communism and democracy seemed to be moving forward. And then, in the last few years, democracy seems increasingly challenged and, in the opinion of many, in retreat. For the first time in our history, a defeated candidate for president refused to accept the results of a free and fair election. He claimed it had been “rigged,” but provided no evidence that any court found credible. His own Attorney General and White House counsel said the election was fairly conducted. This was followed by a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, with shouts of “Hang Mike Pence.” The Vice President became an enemy to some for following the law and certifying the election.
More recently, the F.B.I. Has come under attack, with some Republican members of Congress calling for defunding the F.B.I., echoing those on the left wing of the Democratic Party who have called for “defunding the police.” Angered by a court order for the F.B.I. to remove classified material from Mar—a-Lago, one political extremist, who evidently was involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, sought to assault the F.B.I. office in Cincinnati. Why many boxes of highly classified material had been removed from the White House, in violation of the law, is as yet unknown.
At least some conservative voices are ill at ease with recent developments. Editorially, The Wall Street Journal declared, “Mr. Trump took an oath of office to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander-in-Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused. He didn’t call then-Vice President Mike Pence to check on the safety of his loyal Vice President. Instead, he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out…Character is revealed in a crisis and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his.”
The New York Post, also a long-time supporter of Donald Trump, provided this assessment: “It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime. But as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.”
In Early August, President Biden met with a group of prominent historians who compared today’s threat to American democracy to the pre-Civil War era and to the era prior to World War ll, when pro-fascist forces were becoming increasingly vocal.
According to a Pew Research Center report in October 2021, based on a survey of 17 advanced economies, the U.S. is more divided than the other societies surveyed. Nine in ten U.S. respondents believe there are divisive conflicts between people who support different political parties and nearly 60% of Americans surveyed think their fellow citizens no longer simply disagree over policies but over basic facts.
Professor Jungkin Seo of Kyung Hee University in South Kore observes that, “As political polarization intensifies in the U.S., the self-cleansing process of American democracy, which aims to drive reform through elections, will no longer be able to function properly. With the Senate trapped in a filibuster, the U.S. Congress no longer serves as a representative body for addressing changes in American society through legislation.”
According to a poll by the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 16% of Americans say democracy is working well or extremely well, 45% think democracy isn’t functioning properly while another 38% say it is working only somewhat well. A Pew Research Center survey finds that just 20% of Americans say they trust the federal government just about always or most of the time.
A CNN poll in Sept. 2021 revealed that 56% of Americans think democracy in the U.S. is under attack and 52% reply that they are just a little or not at all confident that elections represent the will of the people. Fifty one per cent say that it’s likely that elected officials in the next few years will overturn the results of an election their party didn’t win.
Throughout history, many historians and philosophers predicted the democratic societies would self-destruct. Plato, Aristotle, and more recently De Tocqueville, Lord Bryce and Macaulay predicted that people in democracies would give away their freedom voluntarily for, among other things, what they perceived as greater security. The historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay lamented in 1857 that, “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must,sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both.” Looking at America, Macaulay wrote: “Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reigns of government with a strong hand; or your republic will be as fearfully laid waste by barbarians as the Roman Empire was -with this difference, that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your institutions.”
There is no doubt that American democracy is increasingly troubled waters. Our political parties, in the past. formed coalitions and managed to work together. They did not view themselves as enemies. Together, they won World War ll, advanced civil rights, and won the Cold War. Today, the future of democracy does not seem secure when members of one party refuse to work with members of the other party. What would Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill think of what our political life has become? If there was ever a time to change course, this is it.
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