A "2020 Vision" of Democracy
I have been reading a Chapter of Gibbon a Day in Coronavirus Time. Highly recommended as an antidote to the insanity; I will write you a prescription if you wish.
Gibbon's Ology of the decline of civilizations resonates nicely with current events, as you might imagine. There were precursors of the Trump base in the Crusades. Pandemics, real or Metaphorical, recur every fifty pages or so. I invented pleasant Truisms while reading: Acre always falls; Carthage comes back; the Alexandrian library burns again and again; there's always a Pandemic somewhere.
There's an enjoyable anecdote, I can't vouch its true, that, during the American revolution, Benjamin Franklin once attempted to call on Gibbon in an inn somewhere in Europe, and Gibbon disappointingly, coming down off his mountaintop and concerned with the strictures of being a tiny, loyal Englishman, refused to see him. Franklin lamented that he had so much material to offer the historian, for his Decline and Fall of the British Empire.
When a historian a thousand years from now (if there are any) is writing Decline and Fall of the United States, I offer the following tidbit: In every day life, there are certain things you hope never happen, because there is no way back from them and they will define you and be remembered for ever, for example, vomiting drunkenly on your friends' shoes at a wedding.
The election of Donald Trump is such a moment. What a repudiation of the U.S. Constitution, the "machine that would go of itself", that that could even happen. A Reality which shines in full focus from the night sky, unobscured by light pollution or any clouds, is that there were enough millions of suckers that a stupid, amoral, talentless and (not an important factor) ugly man could be elected, that the system of media, propaganda, Late Capitalism and self-deception could cause those millions to think he was capable of being the President. It was a Full Frontal Failure of democracy.
We can elect a Democrat in November, capture the Senate, and start repairing the damage, but we can never live down what happened, nor fully assure it can't happen again.
I never wanted to, never imagined I could, join the "Democracy doesn't work" crowd, and still refuse. But in order to sustain democracy, you have to have reasonable, well-educated, and in my Humble Opinion, Compassionate voters, and we don't have those. How do we rebuild? Its easy to say, and given the ridiculous limits of human nature, hard to carry out the entire education of future generations with better values. (I coined a Truism I am rather proud of, that all 500 page books of Prescription could be boiled down to three words, "Be better humans".)
The way I avoid giving up is via what I have nicknamed "Wallace's Wager", after Pascal's. His Wager was to live as if God existed. Mine is to live as if I were an Optimist. I will spend the rest of my life trying to identify, and aid, like a match you are lighting in a wind, any measure which will promote a continuation, a restoration of democracy in this country.
One thing I think about a lot is not how to live with the Trump base, but how not to. I want a divorce. I identified some years ago a Huge flaw in all democracies. They claim to be based on the "consent of the governed" and then fight civil wars to prevent political subdivisions from leaving. In a true democracy, which Ernest Renan called "a daily plebiscite", there would have to be a mechanism for people to leave at will, not try to reclaim their fellows whose values are too selfish or violent, not be in a country with them any more.
"Be Better Humans". The ridiculous incidents and accidents of human nature will cause this necessary feature to fail. All democracies will die in a few years, as people are persuaded by propaganda to leave for the wrong reasons. Brexit is a case study of that phenomenon. What this all boils down to is the question we have been litigating since the CroMagnons decided to kill all the Neanderthal people, as to whether human freedom, autonomy, responsibility, compassion and peace are possible in human history.