Two Cheers

One of the few advantages that comes from growing old is having some experience of life from which to draw precedents. Remembering the past, whether it is a moment or a whole period of one's life, is the best way one can understand the present, especially when one thinks that the present offers what we feel are unprecedented problems and difficulties to us. Having a clear picture of what happened in the past can dispel most of our concerns with the present.

Throughout the eight years of Barack Obama's presidency, there were some rather shrill voices in America (one of which belonged to our current president) that insisted that Obama's presidency was, for various reasons, illegitimate. For eight years some of these voices never went away. As a supporter of Obama (by which I mean an opponent of the alternatives to Obama: anti-liberal, authoritarian, hysterical populism represented by talk radio and its audience), I felt personally affronted by some of anti-Obama rhetoric, though not nearly as personally as black people, who saw attacks on Obama's legitimacy as racially motivated. I felt that an attack on a sitting president, or a sitting congressperson or governor or mayor, as not just an attack on an individual, but an attack on all of the people whose votes got them into office. 

The United States is a representational democracy. Since all the decisions that shape our society and its laws simply cannot be decided by plebiscite, by a preponderance of votes by every eligible voting citizen, a government elected by a majority vote makes all such decisions for us. When Ted Kennedy died in 2009, I expressed the reasonable view that the only people who had a right to pass judgement on his fifty years in office were his constituents in the state of Massachusetts, whom he served as senator from 1960, when Ted's brother John vacated the seat to run for president, until he left office - as it were, feet first.

If one of us votes in an election and his or her candidate is defeated, he or she can have plenty with which to take issue in the ensuing term of the candidate who won. But what he or she is taking exception to is not the government. It seems to me that the problem they have is with democracy, since the candidate they didn't vote for didn't steal the office (even when they suggest that the election was rigged), but was put there by a preponderance of votes in a democratic election. 

I have taken extreme exception with Donald Trump, with practically everything he stands for and every pronouncement that comes out of his mouth. He is a thoroughly deplorable man and a disaster as a president. But I make these denunciations mindful of all the American voters who put Trump in the White House, some of whom are related to me. My problem really isn't with Trump. I have a problem, thanks to the popular election of this disgraceful clown (despite Hillary winning the popular vote by almost three million), with democracy. 

E. M. Forster published a book of essays in 1951 called Two Cheers for Democracy, a title that pretty much sums up my feelings about democracy. Forster wrote in a prefatory note, "These essays, articles, broadcasts, etc., were nearly all of them composed after the publication of Abinger Harvest, that is to say after 1936. A title for the collection has been difficult to find. One of my younger friends suggested Two Cheers for Democracy as a joke, and I have decided to adopt it seriously ... Until livelier counsels prevailed "The Last of Abinger" was to have been the book's general title. But I do not really want to record the last of anything and am glad to change. Human life is still active, still carrying about with it unexplored riches and unused methods of release. The darkness that troubles us and tries to degrade us may thin out. We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two."

Democracy is an imperfect system, but it's the best one we have come up with so far. I am a socialist, committed to a radical reconfiguration of society, which in its current condition resembles more than anything an incredibly elaborate swindle - a free-for-all in which the worst man wins. I am a socialist, but a democratic socialist. I don't want to overthrow the government, even if it were possible. As we have learned - in the hardest way -, all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. I am committed to the radical restructuring of society through democratic means. And - yes - Bernie Sanders is a kind of hero of mine. Socialism means the people shall rule. It is all about human brotherhood. If this surprises you, you should know that I became a socialist when I found out that everything I had been told all my life about socialism was a lie.

No matter. The best way - the only way - to oppose Trump is with democracy, which is clearly what he fears most (other than the rule of law). If it is disclosed that he used unfair means to win the 2016 election - which seems to me obvious by now - he will still have to be turned out of office with democracy, with the free and open exercise of our democratic right to defeat him if he is crazy enough to run for re-election. 

I think we need to stop being government-haters when it is really democracy that gets us into these messes. Stop hating the government and change it.

Get out and vote.