Why America Needs to Double-Down on Democracy

It has become an increasingly common cry on the far-right of American politics: 'We are a Republic! Not a Democracy...' And, strictly speaking, this is true. America is a republic. The thing is, China is also a republic. Russia is a republic, and so is Iran. According to Merriam-Webster, a republic is defined as, "a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law". In short, all which is needed to join this group of modern nation-states is to host a loosely representative form of government.

Yet, America has over the years decided it wished to be much more than this broad, vague definition of a representative state. While at the founding of our nation only land-owning adult, white, Christian males were permitted to vote in many states, by 1848 all adult white men were allowed to vote. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, barring exclusion from voting based on race. By 1920, women had earned the freedom to vote. 1965 saw the passing of the Voting Rights Act, which greatly limited the ability of states to use underhanded tactics to prevent minorities and low-income citizens from voting. In 1971 the legal voting age in America was reduced from 21 to 18 years old. In each case, America confirmed to itself and the world that democracy is worth pursuing. While there were certainly setbacks and challenges, our history is paved with the slow, painful expansion of freedom and voting rights. We are a republic, yet a Democratic Republic by choice.

Fast-forward to the year 2022, however, and one could be forgiven for believing democracy is in decline. In fact, you'd be correct in this belief. Not merely in the U.S., but around the world, democracy is steadily losing gains it made over the last two centuries or so. The research-and-report producing Freedom House, in its 2019 Freedom in the World publication, states it has, "Recorded the 13th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The reversal has spanned a variety of countries in every region, from long-standing democracies like the United States to consolidated authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. The overall losses are still shallow compared with the gains of the late 20th century, but the pattern is consistent and ominous. Democracy is in retreat." Not a great look for the most widespread political system in the world.

America, the supposed beacon of the Free World, now stands rated a 'flawed democracy' per the Economist Intelligence Unit, which has given the U.S. this designation since 2016. According to a Princeton University study published a few years back, the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have absolutely no measurable impact on the outcome of federal legislation. Nearly each new Congress over the last couple of decades has passed less legislation than the cohort before it.  Our electoral college system has produced two sitting presidents which lost the popular vote, just since the year 2000. The Supreme Court of the United States is now making distinctly right-wing rulings, encroaching on decades of progress made for ordinary Americans. Our institutions fail to adequately represent and protect the American people, our politicians increasingly wear their allegiance to corporate donors on their sleeves, and both mass and social media tends to fans the flames of division and partisanship in our nation.

So, what exactly is to be done about all of this? What can we do in the face of such dysfunction? The answer is both refreshingly simple and deceptively complex. We need a rebirth, a resurgence of the democratic spirit in America. We need to take our government back. It was intended to be 'For the People, By the People' from the beginning anyway. This means we'll likely need to begin at the local and state level, pushing reform through one state legislature at a time until the idea becomes mainstream, yet it can be done. Much federal-level change in American history was slowly churned through state legislatures before reaching 50+% approval across the nation, from the legalization of interracial marriage to the decriminalization of marijuana (which is still a work-in-progress), and we can bring about such change again.

There are a number of policy changes and reforms we can support right now to begin fighting back against corruption, our political duopoly and general dysfunction in our government. For starters, advocating for ranked-choice voting, which allows the top choices on our ballots to be for candidates or proposals we most agree with rather than the lesser of two evils, would allow for independent and third-party candidates to begin making their way into the ranks of elected officials at a much higher rate than they do now. We can push our states to institute third-party commissions for the drawing of non-partisan House districts, taking the power away from politicians to choose their voters rather than the people choosing their representatives, as is currently the norm throughout much of the U.S. Implementing automatic voter registration laws and compulsory voting statues, which give state tax credits to those who vote, has been shown to increase voter turnout.

Additionally, overhauling campaign finance, lobbying and ethics laws at a state and federal level would serve to greatly reign in the power of money in politics. We could even provide a tax credit for political donations, such as $100 to each voting-age adult, to help even the playing field between large, corporate donors and everyday voters. The bottom line is, if we want things to improve, for our nation to work for its people rather than large businesses, special interests and politicians, we need to do something about the current structural problems within our system. We have the tools, we know what the problems are, and we know how to fix them. There are organizations such as Represent.us and TYT's Wolf-PAC which are actively trying to press reform through state legislatures. While legislative victories have been slow-going, they're nonetheless steadily stacking up.

The American People have to power to change things for the better in our nation, even if we're told such ideas are radical or can't work. It's been done before. Democracy has powered our Republic from the beginning, and the freedom it represents has only grown over time. What we need now is for those willing and able to get involved to do just that, help us make the changes our nation deserves. Volunteer, donate, tell your friends, family, coworkers or classmates. Even sharing related articles or petitions on social media helps increase awareness. At the end of the day, we need to be tenacious and relentless. As the saying goes, the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance. It's well past time we took our nation back. Future generations will thank us.


References:

1) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic

2) https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/voting-rights-timeline/

3) https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2019/democracy-retreat

4) https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2021/?utm_source=economist-daily-chart&utm_medium=anchor&utm_campaign=democracy-index-2020&utm_content=anchor-1

5) https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/

6) https://represent.us/unbreaking-america/

7) https://wolf-pac.com/

Location: California, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

America Should Dissolve the Presidency and Senate

Image
Prior to the presidential election of 2016, a majority of Americans reasonably presumed politics would continue more-or-less as usual. After decades of frustrating yet rather consistent Neoliberal politics stretching back to the Reagan Administration of the 80s, wherein both major political parties seemed more like different sides of the same policy coin rather than ideological opposites, discontented populist wings within both parties were clearly growing in prominence. Yet, left-leaning progressives and rightwing nationalists alike remained unable to capture the majority of the vote from their respective sides, let alone coax enough moderates and independents in the ideological middle to win the White House. That all changed, however, with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Since his ascension to the Oval Office, America's political discourse has been treading dangerously close to the edge of losing the democratic republic we hold dear. Sadly...
Read more

Every American Should Have Basic Needs Guaranteed

Image
The United States of America has long been a nation of free enterprise and personal freedoms, the land of opportunity and protector of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yet, America is also a nation founded largely upon stolen land, much of it built by enslaved peoples and exploited immigrant laborers, where industrialists, tech tycoons and wealthy folks of all shapes and sizes have wielded huge and corrupting levels of power and influence for most of our history. Greed and exploitation has defined America just as much as freedom and prosperity has, yet the powers-that-be overwhelmingly push to remind us of the latter traits over the former. In fact, if one points out the rampant corruption and greed inherent in our current system, or makes an effort to discuss our history in its truer form, they are often labeled 'un-American', 'unpatriotic', 'socialist', 'woke' and any number of other politicized slurs used over the years to dampen dissent and p...
Read more

Why America Needs Guaranteed Healthcare

Image
For over 100 years, the United States has had various grass-roots movements attempting to implement and expand universal health insurance coverage. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, campaigns backed by progressives and socialists to pass universal healthcare legislation were opposed and blocked not only by conservatives, but eventually their own allies in labor unions due to the union's collective fear of losing power over paid-benefits (and thus their usefulness) in an era before there were legal protections for organized labor. While many European nations were beginning to provide 'sickness insurance' and subsidizing mutual benefit societies which helped workers cover medical costs, America's struggle for any forward momentum on the subject led to the issue being handed over to individual states. The states in turn mostly handed the responsibility over to private insurance companies and non-profits, a practice they've perfected through the decades. Throughout...
Read more