For decades, our collective confidence in the strength of our democracy has enabled us to shrug off our consistently dismal voter turnout, among the lowest in the developed world. We have remained certain that the Greatest Generation of Americans who died in WWII - enough men to form a line from Washington, DC to New York City - did not die in vain to preserve our democracy. But the stark realities of today demand that we act. We can no longer sit back idly with this same confidence in the assured existence of our democracy and freedom.
Today, over one in three well-to-do young Americans consider it a good thing for the army to run our country. That is an astounding increase from one out of 16 in 1995. Seventy percent of young Americans indicate that they do not think it is "very important" to live in a democracy. And their thoughts are becoming actions. In the 2014 election, 80 percent of eligible young Americans decided not to vote and the participation of all eligible voters fell to a 72-year low.
Freedom House concluded that, "Democracy as the world's dominant form of government is under greater threat than at any point in the last 25 years." Stanford professor Larry Diamond wrote, "Around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt." Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker recently warned, "Democracy, freedom and civilization - it all hangs by a thread."
Perhaps most compelling, Oxford professor Stein Ringen's observes that, "Democracy is not the default...it will disintegrate unless nurtured." It behooves us all to recall that Greece's ancient democracy and its gifts of freedom and prosperity lasted only 250 years. We cannot turn a blind eye to the signs that nearly 250 years in to America's democratic experiment, apparent fissures have begun to form.
The American public does not appear to appreciate the profundity of our vote and the staggering fact that in 36 percent of modern presidential elections, the candidates who won (either the electoral and/or popular vote) would have lost if only a very small number of voters switched. The shifts are as few as one out of 23,000 votes in Florida in 2000. And even in 2004, the election among the 36 percent with the most switches needed to change the result; it required only eight switched votes out of all the votes cast in a polling place.
We no longer internalize that before America's experiment with Greece's concept of democracy and its replication in other countries, human beings lived bleak lives of oppression. We are unaware that an annual income of $34,000, which is commonplace in democracies, is achieved by less than one percent in non-democracies.
We have, as Scottish writer John Buchan says, "overestimated the membrane separating the graces of civilization from the rawness of barbarism." And we seem to have forgotten Winston Churchill's observation that "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried."
The longest serving US Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, warned, "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." Is this our twilight?
Today's threat to democracy is so dangerous to life as we know it that we must take action now. Use your democratic right on November 8th. Help stop this great country from slipping toward the "darkness" and preserve the pillar of democracy that too many, particularly the younger generations of Americans, seem to take for granted.