de • moc • ra • cy noun pl cies
A government in which the supreme power is vested in
the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly
through a system of representation usually involving
periodically held free elections.
The common people especially when constituting the
source of political authority.
The absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions
or privileges.
-Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
Louis Brandeis wrote that the most important office in a democracy is the office of citizen. While Justice Brandeis did not delineate just how the citizen was to execute this the most important of offices, he gave us to understand that democracy required of us a great deal more than the simple exercise of the ballot.
If the laws and policies promulgated by the elected were to continuingly reflect the ideals given voice to in the constitution and embodied by the electors, the electors, or voters, would have to keep themselves vigilant and well informed. After all, history is replete with examples of those who came to do good and stayed, unwatched, to do well. A democracy of checks and balances does not presuppose a polity of saints, but, rather, foreordains something of a symbiotic relationship between the elected and the electors who elect, and then doggedly watch them. How else to keep those, in whom we vest power, on the straight and narrow?
Of late, citizen-voters have found it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to comply with Brandeis’ implied precept of citizen-oversight and self-education.
The governance of America is a vastly more complicated enterprise than it used to be. There is exponentially more of everything now than before. More citizens. More wealth. More power. More legislation. More laws. More crime. More enticements. More attenuation between governor and governed.
The legislators themselves seldom have time these days to read the bills they dispose of, thus making them, more than ever, vulnerable to pressure from well-heeled lobbyists.
Correspondingly, there are fewer readily available newsstand-handy resources of information to help the common citizen in understanding the dizzying machinery of modern American governance. The nation has fewer than half the newspapers it once had. Television has been more hurtful than helpful. News organizations are corporate and uncompetitive. Their owners are uniformly wealthy. Political campaigns are un-substantive, sudsy and, increasingly, downright demagogic. Spin doctors are in growing demand. We live in an image-only era. We have arrived at a point where trust must necessarily be blind. Hence, Brandeis’ citizen knows less now than ever, and those his citizen elects are free to fly by their own lights to wherever their penchants take them.
I once asked a member of Congress why he opposed voter registration efforts in his district, and was told “I have all the voters I need.”
Small wonder, then, that theater has replaced substance in an American democracy now drawn in the form of a flag-draped Trojan horse from which a new cut of self-providers has emerged into our soft, unguarded midst.
Since 1977, ordinary Republicans and ordinary Democrats have voted into power officials that have overseen the largest transfer of wealth (to the rich from virtually everybody else) in American history. During this period, income (adjusted for inflation) decreased for half of America’s households at the same time that it rose some 500% (from 1.8 million to 10.6 million a year on average) for American CEO’s. The wealthiest 1% of Americans have as much disposable income as the bottom 100 million voters (Republicans, Democrats, assorted rubes) combined. All facilitated by officials the all too manipulable dispossessed installed in office.
Such is the consequence of ignorance, distraction and fear, all enemies of authentic democracy. While we weren’t watching, our country was stolen and its democracy became a farce.
Randall Robinson (rr@rosro.com) is the author of The Debt – What America Owes to Blacks and other works.