We are three weeks away from the mid-term election and as I look at the world today, I see a very different picture from what I was used to seeing for most of my life and from what I expected to be seeing as an inevitable path to destiny.
Growing up in the Netherlands as I did after the second
world war, I looked at Eastern Europe as a backwater that was hardly worth
paying attention to. A lost cause, largely hidden behind the iron curtain. All
through my schooling years, I was a fervent proponent of European unification,
but Eastern Europe was not part of the consideration. Civilization, in my eyes,
had developed on a continuum from ancient Greece to the Roman Empire, to the
Renaissance in Western Europe, and was now in the custody of the Western
Alliance that had been forged out of the two world wars. America, having been
the decisive factor in winning the wars, was in my eyes the undisputed champion
of freedom and democracy.
Today, the world looks a little different. If the polls have
it right, (and that is a big “if” because with the disappearance of landlines
for telephone communication and peoples’ tendency to block calls on their cell
phone from unnamed sources, who really gets polled?) American voters see
democracy in peril but are disinclined to make the issue the litmus test when
it comes to voting for or against candidates who are a threat to the voting
rights for all eligible citizens and a threat to democracy as we know it.
I wipe my eyes in disbelief when I read that suddenly 28
percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, say that they have
little or no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections. This is
what the echo chambers fed by the partisan media have wrought. Republicans, who
are now faithful Trump followers, are set to only accept election results that
come out in their favor and Democrats have doubts that this time the system
will hold and that the popular vote will prevail in all cases, against any
shenanigans that Republican governors, Secretaries of State, State
legislatures, and other election officials can come up with.
Isn’t the American election apparatus supposed to be the envy of the
world in fairness and accuracy? And hasn’t it been proven over time to be
incorruptible and unassailable? What has suddenly changed? The answer has to
lie with the current mass media which allow for falsehoods, rumors, innuendo,
and conspiracy theories to spread instantaneously and widely without being
seriously contested. Opposing voices are simply muted out.
It is inconceivable to me 1) that Americans going to the voting booths on November 8 will ignore the threats to democracy represented by those candidates for public office who still deny the results of the 2020 presidential election. 2) That the voters will forgive the Senate Republicans who endangered our democracy by not impeaching Trump and eliminating him from elected office after it had become clear that he would do just about anything to block a peaceful transition of government. 3) That American women will overlook the fact that sovereignty over their bodies is being denied by one of the two political parties. 4) That Independent voters, who represent a larger segment of the voting population than either the Republicans or the Democrats, would be accepting of the far-right or far-left positions espoused by the candidates who have survived the partisan primaries. 5) That young voters would allow retrograde illiberal policies to rule their lives and prospects. 6) That senior citizens would accept the Republican proposal to subject their social security to a five-year sunset provision. 7) That patriotic Americans would look up to Putin as an effective national leader rather than a thug. All of that defies logic. And yet, all of this may come to pass and will be revealed by the outcome of the mid-term election.
The bottom line is that American democracy is in peril, and it
is unclear if “the People”, who under our constitution are supposed to be the
final source of authority, will fend off the challenge presented from within.
Contrast this with the heroic display of courage, belief,
and conviction by the people in Ukraine and Iran who are literally under the
gun and are willing to put their lives on the line for the right to live their
lives as they see fit. I was wrong all along, pinning my hope and beliefs on
the Christian western civilization and dismissing the value and strength of the
east European culture and the willingness to fight for what is right now on
display in Ukraine, as it was in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
It becomes clear to me how telling it is that, after the
Revolutionary War, America has never had to fight again for the system of
government its founders had designed and implemented. It was only threatened,
one time and from within, by the issue of slavery and the Civil War. That kind
of fight has, until now and in the Atlantic sphere, been the fate of the East European
powers. It now looks like complacency has set in on our shores. We have had it
too good for too long and now we no longer recognize how precious and tenuous
democracy, the right to be governed by the people we elect to the offices we
create, truly is. If the American people are okay with allowing a President to
thwart an orderly transition of government to a duly elected successor and putting
people like Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz in the Senate, we are no longer
serious about good democratic governance.
Democracy is under attack, here, and in Ukraine; in Iran the
people are fighting to regain a democratic rule. If we are the only ones who
don’t care enough about democracy to fight for it, maybe we deserve to get what
the polls seem to tell us we will be getting. Then the fight for democracy will
have to be fought again by future generations. We are already burdening future
generations with a burgeoning national debt. It would be unconscionable to ask
them to also restore us to democracy.
