Our Democracy Is Killing Our Democracy

The Defendant trampled everyone in Iowa, is galloping to the nomination, and stands an excellent chance of being President again. This is an abomination. How did it happen? There are a lot of smart people coming up with a lot of answers to that question and a lot of those answers make a lot of sense. (Apologies for saying, “a lot” a lot). My modest suggestion for an explanation is simpler. It’s democracy. 

We hear all the time that if The Defendant is elected, he will destroy our democracy. Maybe it’s just the other way around. Maybe it’s the democracy that elects him that will be what destroys our democracy.

You all know the statistics. Thirty per-cent of the public think that Biden’s election resulted from fraud. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans think so, including fifty percent of the Republican voters in the influential New Hampshire primary. Three in every ten people also think that what happened on January 6 was non-violent. These people barely have brain waves.  These people couldn’t be trusted to park your car. And yet, these people vote. That’s democracy.

As you also know, this was not the way that the Founding Fathers envisioned it. They were not in favor of “democracy.” They distrusted “the people.” In the Constitution they wrote, they made sure that Judges were appointed, not chosen by the people; that state legislatures, not the people, chose Senators; and that the Electoral College, not the people, chose Presidents. They wanted a Republic, a representative democracy. This, they reasoned, would best filter out the passions of the people. As Alexander Hamilton said in  Federalist 10, a representative democracy will “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”

And yet, as time has gone by, we have continuously revised our system in quest of reversing the Founders ideal in a quest to become more “democratic” “Power to the People,” we cry. We now directly elect Senators and we no longer let party leaders choose candidates, we choose them in democratically structured primaries. 

Of course, the people’s power still has limits, but those limits are imposed by the monied interests. Cash is King. This certainly was not what the Founders had in mind either. All it does is enable “the people” to have their ideas manipulated by the wealthy, hardly the group that Hamilton was talking about when he envisioned those “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”

If you have read this far, you are likely saying to yourself, “O.K., Mr. Smartass, so if you know what the problem is, how are you going to fix it?  Funny you should ask. If I, not the Defendant, was made dictator, there are three main things that I would put in place:

1. A constitutional amendment that says that money is not speech; 
2. The re-institution of the “Fairness Doctrine” by the FCC; and
3. A voter qualification test.

Books could be written on each of these proposed solutions and very few people would read them.  Here are some infinitely more concise explanations.

First, the constitutional amendment. This is necessary to get the corrupting and corroding influence of money out of our politics. Way back in 1976 (a year memorable to me for Chris Chambliss’ home run to win the pennant for the Yankees) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Buckley case that money equals speech and is thereby protected by the First Amendment the same way that any other speech is. Therefore, limits on political contributions can only go so far. Not satisfied with injecting that bit of poison into our body politic, the Court went further in the famous Citizens United case and held that corporations are people, too, and have the same First Amendment rights to jab their money into the candidates of their choice. 

It is as likely that this Supreme Court will reverse those rulings as it is that Clarence Thomas will turn down a free meal. Won’t happen. So, in order to turn off the spigot of cash that now gives an outsized voice to those with the money, we need a Constitutional amendment. The amendment could say something like, “Financial political contributions do not constitute speech and are not protected by the First Amendment.” Simple. And what a difference it would make.

Second, the “Fairness Doctrine.” We used to have a rule that if any FCC licensed broadcaster aired political views on its station, then it would have to give equal time to the other side. It was a little more complicated than that, but that was the general idea. It worked. We got to compare opposing views. However, in 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was repealed. At the time, that seemed like a good idea. Cable was growing and it appeared that all these new cable outlets would provide the same variety of ideas that the Fairness Doctrine did. It hasn’t turned out that way. Oh, cable gives us e variety of ideas all right, but only if we repeatedly change the channel. We don’t. As everyone has recognized, each channel creates its own tunnel and gives its viewers its own tunnel vision. Worse, the more closed off the tunnels are, the more dramatic and appealing the channel becomes and the more viewers it attracts. So, the ideas expressed on the channels keep getting narrower and narrower. We aren’t getting competing views. We are getting extremist views with little, if any, opposition. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has failed. It should be resurrected. 

Finally, we need voter qualification tests. Just proposing this idea will be uniformly greeted with guffaws (although I have no idea what a “guffaw” sounds like). The concept is shrouded in its despicable use in the south to block black voting. My proposal is nothing like that. My proposal incorporates the very same ideas that we always used in deciding who can vote and who can’t. We think nothing of the barriers to voting that we have  imposed in order to weed out those whose votes we think will not be well-informed. I speak, of course, of our age requirements. Why must people be 18 (it used to be 21)? Only because we believe that people below that age will not have the sufficient appreciation of the issues necessary to cast a meaningful ballot. The corollary to that idea is that everyone over 18 will cast a meaningful ballot. Both sides of that proposition are ludicrous. Need I further elucidate how so many of those under 18 are well informed while so many of those over that age are as dumb as a stump? I don’t think so and therefore, I won’t.

So how do we decide who should vote and who should not? If you have read this far, I bet you can guess. Yes, we should do that with a test – a very simple test – a test that makes sure the voter has a basic notion of the candidates’ backgrounds and a fundamental idea of what they stand for. As an example, for this 2024 Presidential election, one question could be, “Which candidate was once a United States Senator?” Or, which candidate has owned four companies that have gone bankrupt, has been twice impeached and is facing 19 felony counts?” (Maybe this latter question is a little slanted, but I’m sure professional survey makers could create a better one).

Well, that’s what I think. If we are going to let our country be governed by the people, it makes sense that we make sure that those people know what the hell they are talking about.