Democracy is difficult and messy, but it's far better than the alternative.
But to function effectively as a democracy, we need facts, truth and reality. Unfortunately, American democracy is now on the verge of collapse because those traits are not respected or valued by one of our two major political parties. If this trend continues we can expect democracy to be no more than a footnote in history books (if they're not banned), and authoritarian rule will be the norm.
To maintain democracy, people must agree on basic facts and a similar reality. We don't have that anymore. Facts, truth, and reality are not agreed upon by large segments of our population, and therefore, the future of democracy is very much in jeopardy.
As everyone knows, Democrats and Republicans are exceedingly polarized these days. The two parties barely tolerate each other, and see this country and the future in vastly different ways. We are at a perilous impasse, in which one side is considered "woke" or socialist/communist traitors, and the other side is seen as a "cult" trying to destroy democratic norms and take away rights we thought we had already won.
Those perceptions may or may not be accurate, but a great many Americans feel this way and are working to destroy the other side in order to "save" America. The functioning American political system we thought we knew is strained to the limit. Problems are pushed aside or ignored, and the average voter feels that the politicians don't solve anything or even care about them. Nobody seems to know how we get out of this existential deadlock.
It wasn't always this way. Several decades ago, Democrats and Republicans were in basic agreement about most political issues, and willing to compromise in order to pass modest and sometimes monumental legislation. Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill and Republican President Ronald Reagan were famously good friends during the 1980s.
Those days of geniality and cooperation have long disappeared. I believe the beginning of our current political dysfunction dates back to the repeal of the "fairness doctrine" in 1987. This Federal Communications Commission directive required radio and television stations to give fair and balanced coverage to all sides of controversial issues. However, deregulation was in vogue at the time, so President Ronald Reagan's FCC changed the rules and pretty much allowed media companies free rein, unleashing an onslaught of partisan activity that never slowed down.
Rush Limbaugh burst onto the scene one year later with his right-wing politics, showmanship, and demonization of liberals, which quickly became popular and transformed AM talk radio. Limbaugh and his peers offered permission and confirmation to the darker thinking--i.e. anger, hate, and fear-- lurking under the conservative beliefs of millions of worried Americans, who saw their traditional world changing much too rapidly.
Media magnate Rupert Murdock saw the potential for this kind of conservative opinion on television, and launched the Fox News Channel in 1996, which soon became the dominant cable news network in the U.S. Imitators, both television and online, followed, seeing how popular and profitable this format could be. Politics was quickly transformed by the partisan right into a passionate messaging battle to capture America's political soul.
The Democratic Party, naively hoping that fairness and compromise were still possible, was slow to pick up on this trend. Liberals and progressives then and now seem to lack the financial backing and ideological passion needed to compete with the right-wing's all-out assault. The Democratic Party fights to win political battles while Republicans seem to be plotting to win a long-term ideological war.
After Donald Trump's election, the Republican Party changed from a traditional political party into a MAGA personality cult, tied to the ego and lies of their charismatic leader. That cult and the remnants of the GOP are based in the red states of the South, including all the former Confederate states (make of that what you will) and much of middle America. These red states are reliably Republican and conservative. Progress and diversity are anathema and change is strongly resisted.
The blue States are mostly found on the Pacific and Northeast coasts, and can be depended on to vote Democratic. They are seen as liberal or progressive, and are comprised of diverse groups and are more tolerant of racial and gender differences than voters in the red states.
The red and blue states are roughly equal in voting strength, but continue to move in opposite directions politically. And something else is happening, the consequences of which could be fatal to democracy.
As the traditional Republican Party morphed into the MAGA Trump cult, all that really mattered to them was winning elections, "owning the libs", and amassing political power. Lies, cheating and bigotry were permissible if it helped them prevail. In addition, conservative media sources were making profits promoting Trump and his reactionary ideas, and the MAGA base thrived on this alternative media, believing everything they were told.
The catastrophic problem is this: the strong right-wing MAGA cult media, from television to social media, as well as extremist politicians, has disregarded facts, reality and truth, without which democracy cannot exist. Their audience tends to be older, low-information, relatively insulated, and motivated to believe what they are told is the truth, especially if it is critical of "libs" and Democrats, and promotes traditional values.
What makes right-wing MAGA people so much more motivated and passionate than those on the left side of the spectrum? I believe it is because not only are their prejudices and anger confirmed and approved, they are fed a steady diet of distrust, misinformation and division from profit-driven media sources intentionally stoking those emotions.
The Democratic Party is reluctant to challenge their own wealthy donors. They and other liberal and progressive forces seem to lack the inner strength to resist the more motivated and powerful forces of the MAGA right.
And MAGA Republicans will believe all kinds of crazy things if they hear it from Donald Trump and/or his allies. There is more than a bit of ignorance and gullibility in the American electorate. We start with the fact that 74 million Americans voted for a demonstrably mentally unstable, ego-driven con man and handed him the presidency in 2016.
Although Trump was clearly defeated in 2020, but couldn't accept it, a CNN poll in March this year found that 63% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe Joe Biden stole the election. Another poll found that a majority of Republicans (55%) say "the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast we may have to use force to save it" (George Washington Politics Poll, July 2021).
Incredibly, a quarter of Republicans bought in to the Q-Anon conspiracy theory, believing government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation (Public Religion Research Institute, 2022).
America is going to go one way or the other: authoritarian with fascist tendencies or the imperfect democracy we have now. Our country can't be governed successfully with both. We are living a mix of the two now and it just isn't working.
The solutions: reviving the Fairness Act would be terrific, but the likelihood of that happening is negligible. We need to be aware that Republicans have always relied on contributions from their billionaire mega-donors to win elections. If super-rich Democrats could be persuaded about the danger ahead, their contributions would help a lot.
But most likely, if we truly want democracy, something we've been striving for since our country's independence, aware voters will have to work their asses off and buttonhole voters door to door to get it. Voters will have to be persuaded of the dangers if the MAGA Republicans take charge. Fair elections in the future would be unlikely, with even more gerrymandering and voter suppression.
In an April 21, 2022 speech at Stanford, Barack Obama summed it up well: "People like Putin and Steve Bannon, for that matter, understand it's not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe."
The stakes for this country--in fact, for the world, are as high as they've ever been. It is not hyperbole to state that if the fascist-like authoritarians gain control here, the rot would spread around the world and the consequences would be devastating.
We can't let that happen.
