"Threats to Democracy"

 With the Iowa caucuses now behind us, the 2024 Presidential campaign is officially underway. Let the games begin. For the next ten months, the airwaves will be inundated, as will social media, with each candidate swathed in self-glorification, spouting lies, and bashing his or her opponent.

 

If the consequences weren’t so important, we should laugh at the pretentious political pontification to which we will all be subject, as candidates bluster inanities. My advice is to turn the channel to real comic relief, like watching old movies with the likes of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers, or better yet, one of Mel Brooks’ classic comedies from the ‘70s and ‘80s, or John Landis’ 1978 Animal House. Remember, it was John Belushi’s character “Bluto” Blutarsky who is destined for the U.S. Senate, while it was straight-arrow jerk Douglas Neidermeyer (played by Mark Metcalf) who is shot by his own men in Vietnam.

 

My apologies to subjecting you to one more essay on a time-worn subject.

 

Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Threats to Democracy”

January 16, 2024

 

“The problem comes when the government is inhibiting 

innovation with overregulation and short-sighted policy.”

                                                                                                                Garry Kasparov (1963-)

                                                                                                                Deep Thinking: – Where Machine Intelligence Ends

                                                               and Human Creativity Begins, 2017

 

On January 6, 2024 near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, President Biden opened his 2024 election campaign: “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. It is what the 2024 election is all about.” Politico, the left-leaning digital newspaper, reported last month that comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler had become routine for the Biden campaign. Dean Karayanis, in the January 5^th edition of The York Sun, wrote: “When an incumbent president swings that brickbat, though, it raises the stakes to a dangerous level.” And Perry Bacon of The Washington Post, who believes the issue is legitimate, wrote in a recent column that such a focus “sidelines other important issues,” that a “general election is in many ways a national conversation between citizens.” But it also trivializes the horrors inflicted by Hitler and the Nazi regime. And remember, Hitler’s Nazis controlled the press and the universities. Trump and the Republicans do not.

 

Let me state at the outset, if Donald Trump were to be elected next November, which I hope he is not, our democracy would not be at risk. In the January issue of The Spectator, Roger Kimball wrote: “At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that ultimate freedom belongs only to the state.” Trump is a bloviating blowhard, but he would not destroy democracy, even if that were his desire which I don’t believe it is. What would happen is that the mechanics of government would slow, and possibly grind to halt. Even before Trump took office in January 2017, the false Russian collusion hoax had been concocted by the Clinton campaign, which hampered his administration. Millions of dollars were spent on the Mueller investigation that unearthed no collusion, except that between the Clinton campaign and the F.B.I. Two impeachments were attempted; both failed for lack of evidence. Attempts by the Trump Administration to clean up the intelligence communities were stymied. Recall Senator Chuck Schumer’s prescient comments to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on January 3, 2017, when he insisted that Trump was really dumb for attacking the intelligence agencies: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” The unarmed rag-tag gang of men and women who entered the capital on January 6 slowed but did not stop the wheels of government. What Biden and his Progressive buddies have done, in reverting to the campaign slogan that democracy is at risk, is to lift a page from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who said that if a lie is repeated often enough, people will believe it. 

 

Yet changes in our culture – the re-writing of history, the obviation of standards of decency, a focus on DEI, the proliferation of identity politics, the offering of trigger warnings and the provision of safe places, the abandonment of universal truths, climate adamancy, ignorance of biology, and the willful use of the courts to destroy political opponents – do threaten the values that made this country a beacon to the world’s poor and persecuted. In his recent memoir, How Do We Get Out of Here, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. wrote that “…culture is more important to politics than politics is to politics…” The late British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that civilizations begin to decay when they lose their moral fiber. I would add that they also decay when citizens fail to appreciate the long arc of history. In the same issue of The Spectator quoted above, Daniel McCarthy wrote “…an entrenched liberal ideology has made modern life on these shores resemble a few of the worst features of the dystopias envisioned by [George] Orwell and Aldous Huxley.” Following the Battle of Bẽn Tre on the Mekong River in January 1968, an American Army officer is alleged to have said: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Is it not possible that Progressives have adopted that as their motto: We have to destroy American culture in order to save it. 

 

While both Parties have been responsible for the expansion of government, deficit spending, and the increase in federal debt, it has been Democrats who have been most persistent and most effective. It was President Reagan who, at an August 12, 1986 news conference, famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” It was Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, on November 8, 2023, who mistakenly claimed (deliberately or because of ignorance?) that Reagan had reinforced Democrats’ preference: “We’re from the government. We’re here to help.”

 

The two-party system has, generally, served us well, in that voters can change horses every two years. Over the past seventy-five years Republicans have held the White House forty years and the Democrats thirty-five. But in the House and the Senate, the two-party system has been less rewarding to Republicans. Over those same seventy-five years, Democrats controlled the Senate 56% of the time and the House 70% of the time. But what has really upset the two-party system has been the growth of the administrative state – the vast federal bureaucracy and the regulatory agencies they control. While every two years we elect 435 members of the House of Representatives and one third of the U.S. Senate, there are approximately two million civil servants, of whom only four thousand are presidential appointees. The rest – overwhelmingly Democrats – comprise the permanent (and expanding) federal employment structure. While theoretically non-partisan, those employees are not immune from the sectarianism that has infested our political culture. George Washington worried that partisanship would lead to a “spirit of revenge,” driven by a desire for personal power rather than governing in the people’s interest. His fears seem to have been realized. Extremists from the left and the right have become significant in both parties. Like communists and fascists, they share the same principles and the same methods of dealing with dissidents. A striving for personal power and monetary gain via the public arena has replaced the once common tradition of public service.

 

There is no question that democracy is fragile. It depends on an educated, enlightened electorate, the free flow of ideas, the rule of law, civilized behavior, respect for others, and adherence to the traditions that have allowed this Country to move forward over time. We must weigh humanitarian and social wants against the cost to pay for them through continued economic growth. The size of our national debt and the demand of future entitlements pressure growth. In the mid 1950s, total government spending – federal, state, and local – amounted to about 14% of GDP. In 2022, it amounted to 36.3 percent. In 1974 federal debt, as a percent of GDP, was 32%. In 2022, it was 127%. In 1974, US Debt was rated AAA by all three credit agencies. Today, two of those agencies have downgraded the debt to AA+. According to Trading Economics, in the 1950s and ‘60s the average US GDP growth rate was above 4%. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the growth rate dropped to 3%. For the past ten years, the growth rate has averaged below two percent. Low birth rates and subpar economic growth negatively affect the ability to fund future entitlements.

 

In his memoir mentioned above, Tyrrell quoted the late British philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott: “To be a conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” While there is much in that quote that appeals to me, especially humor, I also believe in dreams and curiosity, that we must not be afraid of the unknown, to experiment and innovate, that change is inevitable and that we must be able and willing to adapt. But I believe we run unnecessary risks when we demonize our culture, its teachings, and the evolution of our history. Keep in mind, it was (and is) our culture – of which democracy is a part – and the economic opportunities our nation offers, that attract migrants to these shores. We rightfully complain about our open southern border, but it is instructional that there are no lines of migrants waiting to enter Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela. 

 

In 1854, William Anderson Scott published Daniel, A Model for Young Men, which included this famous line: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” The United States has become an angry place, and threats to democracy cannot be ignored, whether the source is an individual or whether the threat comes in the form of subtle but insidious changes to the culture that has allowed this country to become the beacon to the world. Care is warranted.