My championing democracy isn’t just sappy sentimentality. Nor merely the principle of government accountable to citizens. Democracy makes for a better society with happier people. Francis Fukuyama wrote about how it serves a deep psychological need for respect and human dignity. It promotes literal law and order, and better policies overall and thus higher incomes. Further, democracies are less prone to destructive warfare. Practically all wars involve dictatorships. A democratic Russia would never have invaded Ukraine.
But most people understand none of this and fall prey to demagogues playing a different tune. The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper has long been visiting Trump rallies and talking with fans. They’re salt-of-the earth people, God love them. But their notions about matters political tend to be altogether clueless or else shaped by Fox News and other even worse crap spewers. They don’t read The New York Times or Fukuyama. Thinking America is screwed up needing strong medicine, oblivious to how much is right about the country, that Trump would screw up. They’re an unnerving counter to my democratic idealism.
And this sort of thing’s been undermining democracy the world over. People falling for the lure of the strongman, the “only I can fix it” shtick, manipulating deep-seated primordial psychology.
Latest off the rails is Indonesia. Got free of a dictator in 1998 and democratic since. They twice wisely elected Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”), of humble background and mien, over Prabowo Subianto, a strutting general guilty of bloody atrocities (and that dictator’s son-in-law). Jokowi’s done much good. But power corrupts. Prabowo was made defense minister, and then, Jokowi being term-limited, he ran again for president, with Jokowi’s son as running mate — exempted from an age restriction by the judiciary’s head — his uncle. Prabowo has won in a landslide.
If power corrupts even good people, it sure never makes bad ones better. How often we’ve seen that movie. Good luck, Indonesia.
Back to America, it’s striking how voters no longer punish Republican politicians for rotten behavior. Not just personal stuff, but matters of public import — like January 6. The day after, I’d naively thought Republicans would pay a huge electoral price. Who could imagine they’d actually be rewarded, winning a House of Representatives majority? Of which they’ve made a shambles.
Regarding their recent fecklessness over Ukraine aid and border legislation, columnist David Brooks said he’d thought himself unshockable — but this shocked him. Yet once again Republicans seem to be paying no electoral price.
It wasn’t always like this. Indeed, Americans have traditionally been puritanically intolerant of politicians’ foibles. Remember Muskie with his tears; Hart with his “Monkey Business;” Dean with his “scream?” And more recently Andrew Cuomo and Al Franken.
Those were all Democrats, punished by Democrats. Republicans today seem to have other fish to fry. Trump said he’d lose no votes if he shot someone. He hasn’t done that, but plenty other awful stuff. Like found by courts culpable for major fraud (Trump University; now his real estate business). Once upon a time that alone would have been totally disqualifying. Worse by far was January 6 and his plot to overthrow democracy itself. But Republicans just slide past it all.
Many voters, and not only MAGA cultists, seem unswayed by Trump being called a threat to democracy, shrugging that off as just political rhetoric. And his vile character? Also widely shrugged off.
And so crime pays. In their latest Ukraine/border travesty, Congressional Republicans nakedly trashed the national interest — indeed, on issues they themselves have been screaming about — for the sake of political advantage. They virtually told us so. Rather than fix the border, they prefer having a mess to smear Biden about. And, voila, they’re gaining that political advantage. Polls show voters trusting them, on such issues, more than Democrats.
Those voters have infantilized themselves. They’re not ready for democracy.