Democracy isn’t easy. That may be the reason
The problems of democracy are not, of course, limited to those who seek to hold power. In any given population, many long for—lust for—a strong leader. I suspect that the main reason for that originates in the child’s belief that “daddy” provides protection for the family: “daddy” is big and strong and will save the family from the forces of darkness. In the old days, kings and other “chiefs” led their troops into battle. Many, of course, died in that endeavor. (See Monarchs Killed in Action.) In the military, rank has its privileges. It also has its responsibilities, one of which is leading troops into battle. At some point in history, greater emphasis was placed on the leader’s wisdom than on his (or her) physical strength: It became more important for a monarch to develop good battle strategies than to lead attacks on the enemy.
In modern democracies, the leader is even further removed from actual conflict but is responsible for selecting the best people to plan and execute battle strategies. This, of course, has both advantages and disadvantages. The principal advantage is that the leader can assign the people best at certain tasks to do them. The principal disadvantage is that the leader may not select the best people, making decisions based on favoritism. In the States, one of the reasons we have fewer women politicians than we have males is that men have traditionally been seen as “stronger” than women, primarily because of physical attributes, but also because of the role they have traditionally played in warmongering. Given modern military forces, the head of state no longer needs to be a physically strong man capable of leading troops into battle as President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) demonstrated during WWII.
The problems with modern democracy rest primarily on the governed. Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” While I think he is right about that, modern history has demonstrated that you can fool a majority of the people often enough to strongly influence the outcomes of elections. To exacerbate the problem, once an election has been won, the rules can be changed to influence subsequent elections. That’s how gerrymandering came about. The party in charge changes the rules to ensure that it will remain in charge. One of the ways the Ku Klux Klan gained political power, for example, was gerrymandering. That wasn’t their only way, of course, as intimidation also played a significant role.
It is hard for individuals to resist a popular national movement. The most famous example is that of Good Germans during the WWII era. After the war, Germans were eager to claim resistance. Some of them, no doubt, had been among those who resisted. We know enough about the resistance to know that many resisted heroically and paid for their resistance with their lives. The Nazis were not known to treat those who disagreed kindly. The question those of us in the States need to be asking at this point is where we—collectively—are on the political spectrum. From our current perspective, it is hard to tell how close we are to the tipping point—the point at which the latent-Nazi will come out in the majority.
Pre-WWII Germany proved that it doesn’t take a majority to assume control of a nation-state. A dedicated minority is all that’s required. The question we in the States need to ask ourselves is whether we currently have a large enough minority of dedicated individuals to assume control of our democracy. It may be a case of being too close to see the forest for the trees. It may well be time for us to take a step back and carefully consider what we would like to have happen next.
