Over the course of the past year or so, the world has watched in fascination as a number of countries in a wide swath of the Arab world — from Tunisia to Libya, to Egypt, to Syria — have been shaken by popular uprisings which, in most cases, have upset authoritarian regimes of varying degrees of brutality. Gone from the world stage are two long-standing dictators, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. What will eventually replace them in the long term is uncertain, although most observers lean toward some form of democracy in all of these countries. Still, if the history of popular uprisings in the Middle East sheds any light here, a long term democratic future in any of these countries is far from guaranteed. Over 30 years ago, the Iranian people toppled the Shah, and what has unfolded there in the years since has proven that democracy is by no means the ultimate outcome of popular uprisings in that part of the world.
Still, for the moment at least, things are looking up in much of the Arab world, which is more than can be said about some established democracies around the world. Hungary, for example, in defiance of the European Union, of which it is a member in good standing, is on a slow slide back into the authoritarianism that gripped it throughout the cold war. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, backed by his party’s supermajority in the parliament, has forced a new, restrictive constitution down the throats of the Hungarian people, and has been threatening to curtail the independence of the media, the central bank, and the judiciary. And this in a country that was one of the models of reform after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin is trying out some very undemocratic moves in Russia, but has been stunned by a serious and unexpected backlash from the Russian people which appear to have put his plans on temporary hold — but has by no means altered his long-term trajectory.
While many people view the world as a much safer place today than it was 40 years ago, when communism reached deep into Europe, and authoritarian dictatorships were the rule rather than the exception throughout the world, particularly in Latin America, all this movement toward democracy and liberalization around the planet is not necessarily the end of the political evolutionary process, by any means. Even Plato believed that democracy was the penultimate step, one which must, eventually, devolve into tyranny.
Which brings us to America today.
The founders of this republic seemed to go out of their way to put into place the kinds of institutions that would guarantee that democracy would thrive and be self-sustaining. We are a federation of states stitched together by a central government with three co-equal branches — a distinct executive branch, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary, each with effective checks and balances on the powers of the others — an amendable Constitution, and a strong set of long-established traditions including majority rule, a loyal opposition, and political compromise. These traditions have been strained at various times, and have even broken once — resulting in this country being torn in two during the Civil War — but by and large they have sustained us through some of the toughest times in our history. Indeed, even in the midst of civil war, the union still conducted its presidential election in 1864 when most countries would have postponed it, or even skipped it entirely, because of the national emergency.
Sometimes we here in America forget just how special these institutions are. We forget that some countries operate just fine without many of the things we take for granted. Britain, for example, conducts its affairs quite effectively without a written constitution. This serves as an object lesson as to the relative importance of written documents versus civil conduct, most notably that of majority rule, loyal opposition and compromise between opposing parties. Absent these fundamental institutions, the documents aren’t worth the parchment they are written on, as the constitution of Russia aptly illustrates.
Stability in a democracy depends in large part on everyone understanding that we are all playing by the same rules. That everybody can place their trust in the fact that the restrictions that are keeping us from ramming through our ideas unimpeded are also impeding the opposition from running roughshod over us. While not explicitly written into the Constitution, political compromise is the grease that keeps the engine of representative democracy running smoothly and without overheating. And as any mechanic will tell you, withhold the lubricant, and you run the risk of damaging the engine beyond repair.
In America today, we have one party that is bent on denying lubricant to our democratic engine, convinced that the only way to save the engine is to destroy it. Last summer, during the fractious debate on whether or not to raise the debt ceiling — with the Republicans, led by Republican Leader Eric Cantor, digging in their heels, refusing to compromise, turning a routine congressional vote into a major fiscal crisis — we witnessed far reaching tremors in global financial markets, shaken by the fact that the government of the world’s largest and most powerful economy was mired in partisan gridlock. The Republicans were doing nothing less that holding this country’s creditworthiness hostage to their stated desire to stand as a roadblock to President Obama in every way possible so that his presidency would be a failure. That our credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poor’s, resulting in the loss of trillions in investor equity, was a small price to pay in order to destroy a presidency.
We next saw Cantor and the Republicans politicizing the plight of the victims of Hurricane Irene, tying monies for relief aid to corresponding cuts in a litany of programs that the Republicans in Congress have had a long-standing hatred for — thereby putting political concerns before the needs of hurricane victims.
As we mentioned, the Congress is a bicameral institution, and so not all of the intransigence is on the House side. For their part, Republicans in the Senate, although technically in the minority, are doing their damnedest to keep pace with their House brethren in the “no compromise” sweepstakes. They have brought the process of confirming President Obama’s choices to everything from government agencies to judicial appointments to a complete standstill, even when those nominees are extremely well-qualified for their positions. A requirement that the previous president completely ignored (“Heckuva job Brownie”) and yet still managed to get Democratic approval. As outgoing Congressman Barney Frank observed, the Republicans in both houses of Congress are “blatantly distorting the Constitution, substituting a refusal to allow the constitutionally mandated nomination process for the legislative process in which they simply do not have the votes to accomplish what they want.”
The hypocrisy here is that while the Republicans are standing like a monolith for deficit reduction, these very same Republicans had no trouble approving President Bush’s tax cuts and our involvement in two wars whose impact on the budget dwarfed the TARP bailout. But now that a Democrat is in the White House, they want to tie his hands and keep from him the tools that he needs to fix this Republican-generated mess. All so that they can point their fingers and say, “see, things are getting worse”, and “how’s that ‘hope-and-change’ thing workin’ for ya?”
The complete absence of compromise, coupled by this irrational need to destroy the opposition rather than to work with them, is not unlike the way business is conducted in tinhorn banana republics, in which political opponents are undermined so that your political faction can gain the upper hand. The needs of the people don’t even figure into the equation. It’s all about getting your hands on the switches of power so that you can dictate your will on the country.
The Republican party, like the Nazis before them, are adept in using the institutions that democracy provides in order to undermine those very institutions, and put into place something that is quite different from kind of government those institutions were designed to sustain. By hijacking our Congress and the Judiciary, the Republicans are now in a position in which they are free to hurt America at will in order to achieve their political objectives. They want to destroy our economy, and they have come some distance along that road, from taking Bill Clinton’s surplus and turning it into a deficit of unimaginable proportions and then hamstringing President Obama in his attempts to get it under control, to the wanton destruction of the middle class, once the backbone of the American economy, now slipping further and further into poverty every day. They want to destroy our political institutions, subverting them from every angle, rendering even a numerical majority for the Democrats in the Senate utterly meaningless by forcing virtually everything that comes before them to pass with a “supermajority”. They even want to destroy our military, once the Republicans’ pride and joy, by cutting funding at the expense of soldiers in the field (while at the same time allowing expensive military projects that benefit their states or districts), turning over essential military operations to contractors, and denying veterans, who have given the full measure of patriotism for their country, medical and other benefits to help them with their transition back to civilian life.
All the while chanting their “support the troops” mantra, without so much as a trace of irony.
In short, the Republican objective is to weaken and destroy America so that they can wrest power from our democratic institutions and replace it with their self-styled authoritarian dictatorship. A post-democratic tyranny that Plato would have been proud of.
If we value our democratic traditions, and our democratic principles, not to mention our very way of life, we have to see the Republican Party for what is — the single most dangerous terrorist threat our nation has ever faced.
Our very future as a representative democracy is in the balance.
They will win in the end only if we let them.
They must not be allowed to prevail.
