A Republic If You Can Keep It

Many of us living today have experienced two distinct periods in American history: The FDR/New Deal era from 1940 to 1980 was characterized by expansive government that created jobs for the depression era unemployed, and devised the social safety net; the Reagan era that followed was characterized by smaller government and “Reaganomics,” which supposed prosperity would “trickle-down” when the tax burden on corporations and the rich was reduced. The first was characterized by communitarianism, the latter by individualism.

In “The Tyranny of Merit,” author Michael J. Sandel asks, “What do we owe one another as citizens? Over the past four decades, elites have not governed very well. Elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980 were far more successful helping rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthening the welfare state, dismantling segregation, [while] presiding over four decades of economic growth that flowed to rich and poor alike.

“By contrast elites who have governed since have brought us four decades of stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920’s, the Iraq war, a twenty-year inconclusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008, the decaying of our country’s infrastructure, the highest incarceration rate in the world and a system of campaign finance and gerrymandered congressional districts that makes a mockery of democracy.”

It's no wonder that so many Americans are angry, or that a Donald Trump could rise to power.

Enter the respected Republican pollster, Frank Luntz. Now don’t get me wrong: we agree on almost nothing, including whether water is wet, me being left of center and he being right of Attila the Hun, but he is a skilled and honest researcher who is less interested in hearing his own opinions than hearing from average Americans. Luntz says many Americans couldn’t care less about what the TV pundits have to say. Any more, it feels like Kabuki theatre where characters act out their drama, generating a lot more heat than light. Luntz gives us a glimpse into what our neighbors think, not what the paid TV gladiators think. After conducting many focus groups over a long period of time, he tells Kara Swisher, the digital media maven, that he is afraid for our democracy.

On this we agree.

Benjamin Franklin warned that instead of dictatorship or monarchy, we had a republic—but only if we could keep it.

Luntz notes that a surprising number of people are filled with irrational rage that obscures logic. His research says right-wing media impugned Dr. Fauci and made him an icon of out of touch expertise. They won’t listen to him or anyone else. They have no solution, only mistrust, and they welcome the Trump lack of decency and decorum because it spits in the eye of a system that has betrayed them.

He’s a lifelong Republican desperate to revive his party from this trance that has made them more interested in power than democracy; more interested in party than country; “more interested in affirmation than information; and more interested in validation than education.”

He lays all this at the feet of Donald Trump, but insists that Trump is just the vessel, expressing the anger of a significant minority, and that the anger will outlast Trump unless the government actually appeals to those who have been ignored for decades.

It won’t be easy to wrest power from Senate and state Republicans, who, though not in the majority in Congress or statehouses, have gamed the system very effectively.

Call it the tyranny of the minority. They have successfully filibustered most all legislation, and gerrymandered enough districts to keep their minority in power. And apparently now when they lose a fair election, they call fraud, and use their gerrymandered power to change electoral rules (and outcomes) in their favor.

As Liz Cheney, the ousted number three Congressional Republican, is seeing this week, you now have to swear an oath to put party over country and Constitution. We’ve seen this movie before from every banana republic to one-party states like Russia and China. The desire to surrender democracy to a strong man with nationalistic fervor as the sole agenda feels so un-American.

Donald Trump was the wrong guy at the right time, but with or without his overshadowing presence, we have a nation full of people who have been left behind, and unless we address income inequality, wage-stagnation, and the lost upward mobility that gave hope of The American Dream to generations, our democracy is in real trouble.

Right now, many are too angry to reason. They blame experts at universities and suits in executive suites for ignoring them, and they’ll follow anyone who vows to tear it all down.

But it’s still a republic—if we can keep it.