Month: September 2023

In a number of columns over the past two years, I have ended with a statement worrying that our democracy might be failing.

            Like many Americans, I have seen such things as our current political polarization, monopolistic capitalism, racism and even our lack of energy (personal and environmentally clean) as threats to democracy. And they are.

            Recently I have been reading a path-breaking book by historian Yuval Noah Harari entitled Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015), acquired at our local bookstore, Bolin Books.   Harari’s history of our species emphasizes the importance of what we believe the creation of what he calls “our imagined order.”

            The way Harari sees it, homo sapiens (that would be us) was able to overcome the other human species (Neanderthal and a few others) over a 220,000 year period of what historians like to call prehistory. Sapiens were able to do this because their larger brain gave them the ability to think in new abstract ways.  

Other humans and higher animals could use their language to say “careful, a lion.”

            Only homo sapiens, says Harari, could say and believe that “the lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.”  Believing in what Harari calls “fictions” or abstractions like this allowed homo sapiens to form larger groups who shared belief in an idea that went beyond an awareness of things in their local band or physical environment.

            It is this “cognitive revolution” that allows us to create and believe in abstract ideas like religious belief systems and the many “isms” that are a feature of our modern history–nationalism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, absolutism.  You get the idea.

            Democracy, of course, is one of those “isms.” It is a belief system.  There is nothing in our biological or genetic makeup that causes us to see voting or elections as necessary to our survival as a species. Our DNA doesn’t care, Harari tells us, whether we are ruled by an absolute monarch, a fascist dictator, or a duly elected president.

            The only reason we have democratic governments is because over a period of time, a few million people came to believe that a democratic republic was the best way, to quote the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

            All of these aspirations are intangible, part of Harari’s “imagined order.” They are not the real, dangerous lions that our ancestors had to avoid.  These are ideas, honored by millions over recent centuries, but ideas that must be made tangible by the actions of people.

            If we no longer believe in democracy, we will no long take the actions necessary to ensure its survival.  If we make voting more difficult, as Republicans have done in many states by redistricting campaigns and by reducing the number of voting locations in Democratic controlled  cities, we weaken democracy.

            If we vote for candidates who wish to restrict individual rights, divide people into saviors and enemies to be distained or even destroyed, deny people the ability to read certain books, or to see certain physicians, we weaken democracy.

            And worse, if we support and vote for candidates like Donald Trump and his political groupies, who clearly wished to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, place desire for power ahead of democratic norms and rules, we show ourselves and others that we no longer believe in the abstraction of “government for the people, of the people, and by the people.”

Classic western political philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks, recognizes three kinds of government, rule by one person (monarchy or dictatorship), rule by a small group (oligarchy), or rule by the many (democracy).

            All of these require some level of belief and acceptance by those governed, but the first two require far less because once democracy has been abandoned, people only have to submit in order to survive the person or small group to who now have power.

            You have to really believe in democracy to make it work. Do we?

If you are a political news junkie like me, you have doubtless encountered stories that make much of the fact that U.S. politics will be quite different when white voters become a minority and we become what some call a multicultural democracy.

            The 2020 census reported that the number of self-identified white voters fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.3% a decade later.  Soon, pundits tell us, election results may change dramatically as “non-white” voters move into the majority.  

            One of the more interesting book titles in this debate is Steve Phillips, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.  American democracy, Phillips points out, was built on inequality and white superiority from the beginning. It has taken over two centuries to finally secure the vote for poor people, women and (more or less) for black Americans.

Our founding fathers, adds DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, never intended to extend the vote beyond wealthy, landowning white males. (YES magazine, Fall, 2023, p. 50). 

Phillips and Cooper are encouraged by the “browning of America.”  More and more Latino Americans wish to be seen as multi-racial instead of white.  In the 2010 Census 53% of Latinos identified as white; by 2020, only 20% said they were white; most claimed more than one race.

However, this statistical shift in Latino census figures is misleading if we Democrats expect it to result in more Latino votes for Democrats.  Many Hispanic voters are very conservative, opposed to illegal immigration, and supportive of the moral position of the Catholic Church on abortion.  

On the other side of the demographic debate, we find the whole question of white superiority, highlighted by the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally organized by right-wing extremists, the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Proud Boys, other right-wing hate-groups and treasonous Confederate flag-bearing Americans. 

Again, American history certainly supports the idea of white supremacy. Author Steve Phillips believes a new age is beginning in American politics.  His argument is contained in the title of his 2016 book: Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. Beginning with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalitionin 1983 and moving steadily upward to the election of Ralph Warnock in Georgia in 2021, Philips echoes the words of Cooper: “We have the votes to win.” (YES magazine, Fall 2023, p. 52)

As much as I support a multi-cultural majoritarian voting bloc in America, I must get off the Phillips-Cooper train of thought at the next station.  These men are, I am saddened and chagrined to say, putting too much emphasis on skin color and not enough on poverty and other economic issues that determine how people vote, regardless of their ethnic background or race.

Democrats cannot be caught up in the demographic illusion that a majority of non-whites (a murky category) will vote against Republicans. Nor should they assume that all white men and women voters are white supremacists and that we need the browns and blacks to save our democratic republic.

What both white and non-white multicultural or multiracial voters will all do is respond to political leaders who will take their economic, social, and cultural needs seriously. They want to know that government leaders care about them.

Trump did not display that caring while president or since, although he talked the talk. President Biden has responded to middle and lower-class voters, whatever their racial or cultural background, who need good, union-protected jobs, protection from corrupt politicians, decent health care (especially for pregnant women), and the hope that might come with a conversion to truth-telling in government and the media.

All these issues are more important than whether American voters are white, brown, black, or some combination of the above.

We all should respect our ancestry, but that is not where we live our lives. We need political leaders who truly care about how we can live more productive and happier lives in healthy communities.

Democrats, of whatever color, do a better job than Republicans, of whatever color, of responding to American needs and desires.