Opinion/Editorial

THE RETREAT FROM DEMOCRACY

The concept of democracy is not in retreat across the world.  The practice of democracy as a form of effective and reflective government is decidedly in retreat, however, and that retreat is not being noted nor argued against by mainstream media all across America.  The concept of democracy, and then it’s practice, even in a representational republic form of democracy, as is practiced in the United States, does not depend upon express and enthusiastic voting.

It works better when that kind of thing occurs in any election, but it is not required.  What is required is the acceptance of those losing elections to accept the defeat and then continue to work in the system to continue or attempt to change the way things are run by electing people they support.  The enthusiasm demonstrated by the record turnout, for both the democratic and republican candidates in the last 2020 election, was obvious and everywhere.  No election in American history has ever created more interest, been better funded, or had more voters going to the polls.

What has happened since that election however is the reason this article is being written.  The mass media and the information appearing on the Internet have become the two ways in which the massive majority receive the data that becomes the foundation to what they believe and, in most cases, act upon.  The former president of the United States, fairly elected in 2016 to serve a four-year term, did that without much complaint from the opposition party.  That party waited and then built up a voter base to defeat that man when he ran a second time in 2020.  The second time around, that man was defeated soundly, but that did not sit quietly will with either that man or most of the majority of the republican party.  It was decided, by those two forces, after first trying illegally and violently overthrow the results of the election, that they would initiate and ‘stop the steal,’ movement to claim that ‘that man’ did not really lose the election, but that the results instead were stolen by his opposition.  That movement remains strong more than almost a year following the election.  The result of this division, unfounded and a deliberate lie told by one large group of citizens, does nothing to change what happened. That’s pretty much steeped in the cement the founders of the country built into the system against just that sort of threat.

No, the real evolving change is to force the public into a general belief that all elections are fixed or the result of corruption, either in the machines, the people doing the counting, and the ballots, as well as taking up fierce battles and fundraisers to claim that any election not won by a right-wing republican candidate, no matter who demonstrably dumb, idiotic, and outvoted, has been stolen.  The mass media of the country have mostly avoided the real danger of this movement.  Just as these seven conservative-owned companies controlling the mass media supported vaccinations in presentation while the television stations across the land showed one arm after another being stuck with needles, even those these owners knew full well that fully twenty-five percent of the public is needle-phobic.

The same conservative owners have done the same with racial issues.  The television channels are now filled with huge numbers of black commentators of all kinds.  That has not been done to improve the racial accommodation to the results of skin color.  It’s been done to make the viewing white population angry, that public knowing full well that those of that racial extraction is a much lower percentage of the population than it is being forced to watch.  That kind of brilliant ‘Mad Men’ thinking, taken from the old very popular television show, is being done all over the place.  Authoritarian leadership across the world, in Russia, Poland, China and so many more, is not being fought against, as was the threat of communism.

The threat at home, coming from the former losing president and now the ‘notable statesman,’ is being supported by heavy media and Internet coverage instead.  Most political news coming from both supposed sides of the media complex carry more content from Trump than they do from the current president.  Most media does not cover the awful, low-class, and vapidly craven flags and signs people have begun putting up in their yards.  The mass media and owners of the Internet (and Facebook is fast becoming a company dedicated to becoming all of the Internet!) don’t care.  We have raised up multi-billionaires who have become so insulated from the rest of the concerns of the public that they, through their owned sources (just about the only sources), simply tell one lie after another.

It might be a stunning statement to read here, but most of the people reading this may well live on into a time, in the rather near future, when there are no more elections in the USA.  There will be the shams, like the ones put on by Russia, Poland, China, and the rest…until such time that this country, and those, don’t even bother to even do that anymore.  Socrates, through Plato, so long ago, stated that democracy wasn’t the best form of government. It was the second-best.  A country run by a benevolent dictator would be the best most efficient and fair kind of government…except, among humans, it becomes impossible to find a truly benevolent dictator…as the last leader of America so aptly and continuously proved.