One of the most dangerous misunderstandings of contemporary America is about that subject which we are supposed to know the most about: democracy. The liberals have hijacked the Founding Fathers and what they "believed" and have, essentially, turned those men into bland, wooden figures. One of the most consquential misconceptions the new ilk of liberal historians have created is about the Founding Fathers and Democracy. Students learn that the Founders where just pro-democracy. That's all. No nuance, no caveat. The truth is that the Founders where completly against the pure one-man one-vote democracy we have today, wherein voting is a unalienable right of women, gays, African-Americans, everyone. They conceived voting as we conceive of driving. It's something that only those who are able to drive well enough that should have the right to drive so that we have safety on the roads. With Democracy they belived if everyone got the vote, no matter how little they care about poltics or know, that democracy would be as hazard as letting everyone from 5 upward to drive. As a way of making sure only the most informed particpated in democracy they limited to the white male property owners of the gentry. Women where not inclined to be meant for poltics or war, blacks, to them, didn't have the intelligence and the poor white male masses couldn't nesscarily be trusted not to get greedy and lazy and vote themselves the uppercrusts wealth by fiat.
Democracy was not thought of nearly as highly as today. To be a democrat in 1772 was to be for mob role, to be for chaos and the sucide of a civilation. Indeed, the Founders thought pure democracy, nothing short of, sucidal. They believed that a poor democracy would destroy America over time as the masses given the vote would eventually figure out that they could just vote themselves money and descend into the duldudrums of socialism, class warfare, communism, etc.
So what did the Founders want? They want a hybrid. They wanted a combiatation of democracy and monarchy. They thought that balance was essential. That sense of balance is utterly lost today. No one would even think of requiring Americans to know where Iraq is on map (even if we could logistically find that out) as a requirment for voting. Making sure only citizens who take democracy seriously and take the time to study the issues are those who in the Founders eyes where entitled to voting.
We really, i would argue, are suffering from our ungrounded, chronically lofty view of democracy. A nation, ideally, at bare mininimum should see democracy as a chllendge for an electrorate rather than a gaurntee of national prosperity. We seem to think that democracy ensures success and that ones you go democratic nations go on auto pilot, up, up, up and away into the straphoric heights of national honor and glory. The Founding generation and many generations that followed them, as i say, saw themselves as having a duty to show that the European aristos where wrong and that the American system of democracy and self goverment could work without descending into mob role and socialism as so many pessimists predicted. We lost that sense of proving the critiques wrong. Its crucial that Americans of the 18th and 19th and early 20th century understand the downsides and potential downsides of democracy and that made them better, more dutiful and serious "proffesional citizens" as Ralph Nader would say. After America became so prosperous and the gasy poltical rhetoric of self congradulations emerged as a unbearable mainstay of American poltics. After polticians began wearing "We're Number 1!" sterophome big hand thingy, Americans forgot the potential downsides of democracy gone awry.
For instance, older generations of Americans didn't think that all peoples where meant for self government and democracy (like say the Hiatians or Africans). Leaving aside there view of Hiatians abilities to self govern themselves, America's ethnic and religous/cultural composition and roots where essential to the success of the American democracy. Democracy is fragile and in order to succed its citizens must police their vices and desires with unusual discpline. Citizens must take there voting rights seriously as a responcibilty as well as a sort of proffesion, where they all have to be informed and vote on non-veceral but cerebral grounds.
The need for these charcterstics of displine, steely self control, moral restraint, personal responcibility, a sence of community and a responcibility to the whole, which are all central to working democracy where provided in America by the Puritans in paticular, who pratised succsful small self goverment well before 1776. The Puritans showed that people could manage there own affairs as small villages and hamlets was a obvious example of posssibilities for our founding fathers many of with came out of PUritan New England such as John Adams.
The Puritans where made for democracy and self goverment because with freedom comes the responcibility for a citizenry to control and restrain itself and its vices and veceral desires. Democracy falls apart at the seems if everyone abuses freedom, citizens must not see freedom and/or democracy as licence to do whatever they want. Citizens must have there own morals and values (which Puritanism provided) in order to make democracy work.
Those Puritan values are so faded and we see the effects in the decline of our democracy. I wouldn't deny that women's suffrage and the Voting Rights Act have probably hurt our democracy. No one can say that our democracy would be better, more informed, if blacks didn't have the vote or women. And that is taboo as hell! But truth is truth. African Americans are woefully uninformed about poltics, not very intrested, they vote on race usually, etc. and this obviously is not a asset of American Democracy
No comments:
Post a Comment