DEMOCRACY UNDER ATTACK

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.