A democracy must grow or it ceases to exist. But democracy is not divine--it was not created by a divinity or by divinely inspired men. There is no holy book--the constitution is America's road map to a democracy--but it too was created with the expectation, and the means, to change. Obviously, a document that compromises by calling Africans 2/3s a person--a non voting person--is not the holy grail. It survived because we were lucky to have expanding wealth and some expansive minds. As a country, we were pragmatic and forgiving because we could afford to be. There was the West--a place to go if you didn't fit in--a relief valve for excesses.
Our recent history has shown how the closing of the old frontier has made us less democratic, less forgiving, less humane. Below I shall attempt to show how far we have gone in stunting democratic growth--be warned--it's not only the tea baggers that share the blame--or that are actively stunting democratic growth.
To my mind, the US has never been a good democracy. When we were a young country, we were institutionally bigoted--against the aforementioned African and against all women. We had an elitist idea of democracy--tilting toward the land owner--and the rural. As we became more cosmopolitan, we grew more inclusive--but hardly less bigoted. "They" were expected to know their place. Our greatness came from decreasing that group of "them' while increasing who was considered "us." This calculus is no longer operational--"they" are increasing--even male land owners are worthy of suspicion if they are Spanish speaking and living in Arizona.
Modern American define democracy as majority rules--even if it is abusive--but I believe democracy means more than that. It means it expands freedoms and rights of all people. Using this definition, we haven't been doing too well--and never have. We were one of the last countries to outlaw slavery--some 50 years after the British, for example. We gave the Famine fleeing Irish a very hard time. Then went after the Italian and the Jewish immigrant. A nation of immigrants hating the newest immigrant--not a heritage that should invoke pride--and not one that has shown much positive change
Of course, the evils amongst us have expanded democracy to include corporate free speech. The theorist protectors of our freedoms--the ACLU--ignored consequence and went amicus with corporate Citizen's United. Those guardians of us all, decided to encourage corporate propaganda because that's free speech. It's wrong to yell "fire" in the theater--unless you are the theater. That might make some sense to a very small mind, think Scalia, but the evil will be exposed this November. What victories the right attains might be credited to the tea bag nuts, but they're just pawns of corporations--as was Saint Ronald Reagan. How come the right wing rails against deficits yet still gets to chime in for lowered taxes--especially lowered taxes on the rich and the corporate? Ah--because democracy can be gamed if the populace is unsophisticated.
That brings me to the "starve the beast" theme. Americans were led to believe that test scores show the effectiveness of different schools--not even what kids learned--just the tools--reading and math--we never test critical thinking. If a student believes in Creationism over evolution, he/she is not properly educated scholastically. Since some states think religion and science are equals in curricula, they have decided to uneducate their students for cause--and that destroys democracy. Oh, glorifying the South in the Civil War also makes for dumb voters. So does writing text books making unions into the bad guys. George Orwell warned us of this-- but the anti-democrats took him and Goebbels as templates for success--and hide behind reading scores. Are we still treating Africans as less than whole people? Read some of the new text books--the "darkies" do smile a lot--and dance very well.
I could go on--most of you probably believe the text books that FDR didn't know about concentration camps until WWII was almost over--bullshit. My great uncle told the military about them in 1939--after he was ransomed out by my grandparents. Why would they listen to him--well, eventually they hired this graduate of the Vienna Institute of Technology to copy German military devices. Before leaving this topic--Truman was no saint either--he only allowed 500 holocaust surviving families into the US after the war--put them up in old barracks outside Buffalo. My friend was born in a Serbian concentration camp--yes Serbia tried to protect their Jews--and treated them much more humanely, at risk of Gestapo reprisals --only to have his mother commit suicide over the conditions in Buffalo. We were not enjoying democracy during the war--ask the interned Japanese Americans--another rarely mentioned group in our texts.
My rant is over because I am a shitty typist--and not a very good diarist. It was inspired by my disdain for many of my fellow liberals--the ones that get so pissed about losing an election--even a primary--that they want to take their ball and leave the game. Yes, Lincoln was the poorer choice--but she will be in a dog fight with an even poorer choice--grow up and support her. She was smart enough to piss off the bankers--a populist position our president doesn't seem to want to flaunt. To me, democracy needs to grow--and to protect us from the oppressors--be them religious fundies--Goldman bankers--or bigots. Democracy is a process, a system that evolves--not one created and proscribed in a good book. Most often, our choices are between not so bad and very, very bad--but that's the game. Hamilton wanted an elitist set of rules--and often I agree with him--especially when Americans end up with an idiot dictator like Bush--but that's short term thinking. I have children--we need to protect the environment and the democracy. Both can be inconvenient.