Bringing A Dying Democracy Back to Life

        

        Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt know what they're talking about. Their first book, How Democracies Die, created a template for following the demise of our system. It recommended something that we tried, but didn't complete--the fusion of the political parties sufficient to ward off the anti-democratic machine of 47 and his ilk.

        They have come back with another work, one that utilizes history to a greater, broader extent to tell us what is going on now and what energies we have to apply to deny it. It's called Tyranny of the Minority, and it's worth studying to come to grips with the (now) monumental task before us.

        The first thing to remember--and it's something many of us fall prey to--is that the Constitution, which many in the media (and therefore us) note in nearly reverent terms, consisted of a series of compromises without which the nation, as we now understand it, could not have existed. The document is not "sacred." It is filled with flaws. But at the time--which is what soooooo many people forget--it was the best we could do to keep the country from falling apart.

        The second thing to remember--kind of like the overused phrase, "that being said"--the really fatal flaw of the Constitution is that it's too hard to change, with its insistence on two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures needing to get on board.  Oldsters like to say that that gives us legal stability. These authors disagree, and they use democracies developed later in world history to show us why. Countries like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, say the authors, were faced with challenges that they met head-on, and thwarted the backwardness that we've developed because we've been stuck with a constitution that won't let us out of the traps we've made for ourselves. (Example: France tried an electoral college like the worn-out one we have. They tried it exactly once. It didn't work, so they scrapped it. But then, they had the mechanism to do that.)

        Instead of a bulwark of stability, time has presented us with a stodginess, staleness, and a near-complete lack of flexibility to adjust to changing circumstances. In the legal community, the conservatives have endorsed this thinking with references to "originalism," to set the basis of their logic and rulings on what the founding fathers (I won't capitalize the phrase because, unlike others, I don't feel that they knew everything they needed to know before setting out on their constitutional convention journey--they instead made things up as they went along) meant when deciding on actions to be taken in cases before them. Besides, "originalism" has been utilized as an excuse judicial conservatives tend to make when doing things that are unpopular and non-sensical. 

        The result has been that the Republican Party has seized the machinery of a functional democracy and ground it to a near halt, the authors say, and few would object to that analysis. The aforementioned Electoral College and the make-up of the Senate demonstrate this.

        The important thing to remember about the Electoral College is that the founding fathers didn't like it, either. They were a bit befuddled about how to choose the president to reflect the attitudes of the entire country--and yes, a direct popular vote option was presented, and then rejected, by the group. Though the foundations of it were becoming clear even by that time, the concept of political parties wasn't anticipated nor discussed at the convention. That would later confound, and has confounded for some time now, the way to successfully maneuver presidential elections to fit the round peg of political parties into the square hole of the Electoral College.

        The make-up of the Senate, with equal representation among the states, was utilized to break a deadlock which threatened to shatter the entire meaning of the convention itself. It was Madison's idea, presented by a small state delegate from Connecticut, Roger Sherman, who had been on the committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence (the symbolic gesture of which could not be overlooked) in order to soothe jangled nerves, that sought to combine the attitudes of the people at-large with those of the states in getting legislation passed. But again, no one could have seen the position the Senate now has through making up its own rules of ending debate morphing into the now overwhelming dominance of the filibuster. 

        Cory Booker's recent 25-hour display of what the filibuster should be, rather than what it now almost always is--a heads-up that someone who doesn't like a proposal would like to hold an elongated speech instead of actually doing so--sets off a 60-vote supermajority threshold instead of that of a mere simple majority, 51. That brings the lesser-populated states (a decided minority) into the mix in what the authors call (and are right about) a disproportionate way, and leaves the rest of us hostage. It leaves good, solid, helpful legislation hanging out there without a place to go, and dies in places no one else can see.

        In all, it comes down to the right, and inability, for the average citizen to navigate a fair playing field when it comes time to vote. Nothing is completely fair and evenhanded, but these improvements that the authors suggest become vital when confronted with the effrontery and lies and vicious power grabs to which we are now exposed because a minority has grabbed and maintains control:

    1. Pass a constitutional amendment establishing the right to vote for all citizens over 18, period.

    2. Establish automatic registration to vote as soon as people turn 18.

    3. Expand early voting for all citizens. It should be easy to vote, not difficult.

    4. Make Election Day a national holiday.

    5. Restore voting rights for all ex-felons.

    6. Restore national-level voting rights protections--in effect, restore the true intent of the Voting Rights             Act of 1965.

    7. Replace the partisan electoral administrations with those of professional officials, detached from local        and/or national politics.

    8. Abolish the Electoral College and give us a simple national popular vote.

    9. Give the Senate a proportional representation--which would take another Constitutional amendment.

   10. Replace the single-member districts of the House of Representatives with a system of proportional              representation in which voters elect multiple representatives for larger electoral districts and parties             win seats in proportion to the share of the vote they win.

   11. Eliminate partisan gerrymandering and create independent redistricting commissions such as those             used in California, Colorado, and Michigan (notice they're blue states).

   12. Make the House of Representatives larger by updating the act of 1929--yup, it happened that long              ago--which fixed the number of House members at 435.

   13. Abolish the filibuster in the Senate. It just needs a vote in the Senate itself.

   14. Establish term limits in the Supreme Court, perhaps 12 or 18 years.

   15. Leave amending the Constitution to Congress itself, and take out the state requirements.

        Not without these improvements can we have the kind of government we are capable of: one that responds properly; one that gets to the table with the genuine purpose of finding solutions for all; and one that can move the country where it should be going--forward. Tyranny of the Minority is worth your while for its thoughtful, history-based analysis of how we have gotten to the forlorn place we presently are in, and the challenging but necessary ways in which we can catch up to other countries in our efforts to make it good again. We need to, or we will become the tragic disappointment of the world. 

        After all, we began democracy as an experiment that seemed to work. We are now in terrible danger of losing it because we have put ourselves into this rut that seems bottomless and irrevocable. We can't let that happen.

        Americans came up with quite a document back in 1787. But now we're stuck there, floundering. We must find ways to unhitch ourselves so that we can meet the challenges of the world we are in right now.

        We can bring our dying democracy back to life. We just have to understand that it's on its last legs, and time is running out.

        Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

A Very Big, Ongoing Mistake

One of the problems with being a retired history teacher is that you never get tired of thinking about it. Beyond that, the way you taught it. Did you get it right?

I doubt that any history teacher, past or present, will tell you that they got it right or even thoroughly covered in their instruction about the Native Americans; certainly, not in their textbooks. They will probably say or imply strongly that coverage of our history simply included too much to be sufficiently thorough about it. With everything else we needed to deal with, they'll say, we just plain ran out of time.

But that, by itself, is also insufficient. When people say they ran out of time to do anything--read a book, write the novel they were meaning to, cleaning the garage, taking that magical vacation they dreamed about--they mean, too, that it never did quite come to the top of their priority list. It's hard to face it: Not having time to do something means you didn't care enough about it.

We didn't care enough, don't care enough, about teaching our kids what whites did to the Natives. It would make the 1619 Project look like Dr. Seuss. Our genocide of these peoples was thorough, focused, and everlasting. It began before Black slavery came to these shores. It had to if white Europeans were to establish enough of a civilization in order for a solid caste system to emerge. It might add meaning and depth to the word "tragedy" if we would ever come to understand just what we did to human beings from whom we could have learned much, but didn't. Instead, we killed them in battle, intentionally made them perish from diseases, and/or dispersed them to places where we could easily cease caring about them other than trying to turn them "white".

Name the Native nation: It was done to them. Our geography of destruction is fixed in our minds as, mostly, being in the Great Plains; our minds automatically go there because there is the place where the teaching of it, sincere but poorly inclusive, took place. Most of the time, with white European ancestors teaching it (including me), we waited until after the Civil War to encapsulate and emphasize what was to be the final domination and corralling of Natives: the broken promises, the devastation of neglect, the presumptions of inadequacy to conceal overt racism. But it began as part of our beginnings, along the East Coast, and continued to California and the Pacific.

The number of these nations is overwhelming, too. Each has its own story of flourishing interrupted by white seeking land and fortune. That's part of the issue: we were too good at our efforts to wipe out whole civilizations. To cover the contributions of these peoples would take courses devoted to them alone, documentation that supports them, writers who have come and gone and those wishing to buttress what they have found. 

The Natives did not build libraries, at least not equal to the ones we rely on to house and grow knowledge. They did not leave enough evidence behind. But then, they didn't think they had to. Their lives were too simple for whites, bent on technological and industrial improvement and expansion, to fathom.

It was one of those places in our inquiry in which we were all too eager to dismiss Natives as lacking in evidence of intellectual development. We concluded that they could live anywhere, so anywhere is where we dumped them. We missed out on, and cannot embrace now, their wisdom about nature and why it is so important to keep track of our use of it.

Catching up with that vacuum will take more lifetimes than you and I have. Yet, there are those attempting it. In the New York Review of Books the other day, an article reviewed three more tries at encompassing the utter destruction of what Natives might have meant to us besides being peoples in the way. One of these was a book by Ned Blackhawk, a Shoshone, called The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In it, he says simply and decisively: "focus upon Native American history must be an essential practice of American historical inquiry." 

What he asks for is as much a revolution as the discovery of electricity: a sea-change in emphasis and development. He wants historians to go back to the beginnings of white dominance in North America and call it for what it is: Imperialism. Nobody ever thinks of what we did to the Natives as imperial, but it doesn't take long at all to find that at the bottom of our efforts. We give them deserved credit for continuing to exist amidst all that we have wrecked around us, but the thread of that depraved positioning was lost early. The efforts to recover it were never seriously lasting. We've hopscotched our way toward Native historical development, just another way of short-sheeting them.

When I taught and came to the end of the frontier and its final slaughters, I confronted my students with this question: Which is the greater tragedy, the treatment of the Blacks or that of the Natives? It made them stop and think a minute. We've put serious study and caring into the effects of Black slavery, and with obvious good reason, but our abuse of the Natives is still an afterthought. Not until we have come to grips with that can we advance our culture to a place where we can be proud of it. Not until we think of the word "inclusivity" to subsume Natives, too, will we find peace among ourselves. 

Our present government has no thought of that. Instead, it has apparently taken away any notice about Ira Hayes, the Native soldier who was one of those raising the flag over Iwo Jima. That our present government wishes to take away any thought of him and his contributions to our history indicates that we can easily lose track of that essence of humanity--and sustain racism as a twisted reality. That, too, would be a very big, ongoing mistake.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark