We Americans love democracy. The only people who hate monarchies more than us are kings’ second-born sons. We made dictatorships seem so gross that Russia and Iran still hold elections. The only thing we let anarchists do is puppeteering, and then only outside of economic forums. The only thing that makes Americans feel more superior than democracy are clothes dryers. There’s nothing better than when the president sits in those huge White House armchairs next to a king. It’s so embarrassing. Does everyone in their back-ass country ride horses? Do their brides hang sheets out the window to prove they lost their virginity? Do their mentally ill high schoolers go on sword-fighting sprees? Do they read books? We love democracy. But we don’t care about it all that much. We love democracy like parents loved their children in the 1950s. My lovely wife Cassandra and I come from liberal, Northeastern stock. Our extended families care deeply about the environment. Yet every time they visit us in California, where we tax gasoline heavily to reduce carbon emissions, they shriek about the price per gallon. Which is totally normal. While 69% of people say they are willing to spend more on items that are better for the environment, only 7% actually buy sustainable products. And most of them don’t buy them because of their environmental impact but because they believe they’re good for their personal health. Worse yet, those of us who have electric cars mostly get them to virtue signal about them in our Substack columns. I am writing this while on a flight. I can prove that this was not a necessary flight simply by telling you where it was from: Miami. You can care about lots of things. But you only care passionately about a few. Like many people I know and don’t want to offend by choosing the wrong words, you might care deeply about a woman’s inalienable right to choose what happens to her body and not let men, even ones who are definitely allies, talk any more about this topic than one sentence. In fact, you probably care so much that you might want the Supreme Court to re-establish that right. Not because you examined the Constitutional arguments and agree with them, but because the heretofore mentioned inalienable right is crucial and you don’t care how it gets established. In fact, you might have liked the idea of adding justices to the Supreme Court to secure the right to abortion. Like me, you also might think the re-election of Donald Trump would be dangerous, both because of his undemocratic principles and the fact that when narcissists are close to death their impulse is to take as much of the world down with them as possible. So you might want courts to take him off the ballot or put him in jail. You don’t want this because you have studied the definition of “insurrection” or any of the cases against him. You just want it done. These are not democratic impulses. These are urges for an authority to take an issue away from legislators. A short way to put that is “authoritarianism.” Democracy dies when the frustration that the issues you believe will destroy society – climate change, racism, gun control – don’t go your way, or don’t get there fast enough becomes stronger than your belief in the system. Or as Steven Thrasher, an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern, put it:
---- No American has marched for democracy. No one has been unfriended on social media because they wished King Charles was really in charge. That’s because democracy is a mushy concept. It’s the water we swim in. It’s three branches, although in some countries just one, and they need 60 instead of 50 because of some rule and there’s a difference between a check and a balance that gets confusing. But abortion I understand. Immigration I get. I mean, I don’t really know anything about those things either, but I could explain them better than how a bill gets out of committee, which I assume is by horse-trading and pig-barreling, and earmarking. But I do know that without democracy, people lose human rights. They also often lose fingernails, the right to grow beards, and, occasionally, the month of January, which the dictator might name after himself. I have no doubt most of us would live a fine life in the mix of dictatorship and democracy that is becoming popular in countries such as Hungary, India and now, possibly, the Netherlands. But not all of us. And not for long. I was at lunch with a friend, talking about how unimpressive we had become in middle age. The dadding. The job we’ve been doing for decades. The mortgage payments, the marriage maintenance, the discussions about what new shows we were watching. And he told me about the Five Good Emperors. This was the first time we both lit up. Because we were men talking about the Roman Empire.  These were rulers who came into a peaceful, prosperous Roman empire and didn’t deal with any major wars or famines or moms wondering what the fuck all these men were doing to their sons. These guys maintained. They kept it going. And that, my friend argued, is hard, grinding work. Holding off entropy is heroic. And it was once appreciated enough to get the title of Five Good Emperors. Joe Biden is a Middle Emperor. All we can ask right now is to keep our democracy going for another four years. Despite all the other issues that keep us up at night, the ones whose champions are our heroes, keeping democracy going is the most important job there is. Because what we love is more important than what we care about. Thank you for paying to read my column. Wait: This is for the people who didn’t pay? Then I owe you nothing. You are the ones contributing to the end of my career. If you want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get one extra post a month – which often won’t even be that good – upgrade to a paid subscription here:
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Thursday, March 21, 2024
Democracy, We’re Just Not That Into You
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