Over-throw a tyrant and establish a democracy? Good luck with that. Our democracy is the form of government most of the emerging countries in the Middle East seek to emulate. What they don’t realize, however, is that a democratic form of government is fragile and constantly in peril. Take ours for example. If we continue on the course we’re headed, our democracy is in great danger.
There is no barbarian force waiting to invade and destroy us at the gates of Rome. And despite what Mitt Romney believes in his back to the future mindset, no great evil Soviet Union is threatening to rain down hundreds of hydrogen bombs upon our heads. But make no mistake about it. Right now, if this current political campaign continues as it is going, our democracy is in grave jeopardy.
Even though our country began with a revolution that took place over two hundred years ago, it is still facing the same peril that most new revolutions face every day—the counterrevolution.
With the Russian revolution, the threat started with the Bolshevik’s overthrow of the Kerensky government. In Germany, the Weimar Republic was replaced by the counterrevolution of the Nazi’s led by Hitler and his brown shirts. And in France, Napoleon seized control when the people tired of the excesses of the French Revolution.
We have to wait and see what happens to the many revolutions that took place during the Arab Spring to see what shakes out and what kind of governments finally take power. But as we’ve seen in Egypt and Libya and other Middle Eastern countries that established a democracy, the will of the people is not so easy to establish and maintain.
Democracies can be easily over-turned by popular presidents who refuse to give up control when their term is over, or in a coup d'état by the military that controls the army.
Democracies that have endured for many years maintained one characteristic that insured their survival. All political parties understood and agreed to the rule that everyone must play fair.
Fair play is the key to success. When one political party loses to another and it’s time to change the government, the losing party must accept the loss and agree to be replaced peacefully by members of the new government.
No court orders should be necessary; no guns or army is needed to force the old government to give up its power—once any of that becomes necessary, the democratic game is over. All members of a democracy must understand this and remember how the game is played.
The losers of an election must agree to engage in a peaceful transition. They agree to this because they hope to win the next election. Everybody agrees to play fair so that power can be peacefully transferred when they’re the winner.
For over two hundred years our democracy has functioned in this manner with only a few exceptions. The most important exception to playing fair occurred when the losers of an election decided not play the game of democracy any longer. This was the time when the Southern states attempted to succeed from the Union after Lincoln was elected.
The second most important time might surprise you. It occurred when the 2000 presidential election was stolen by the Republicans.
When the Republican right wing majority of the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the ballot count and declared George W. Bush the winner, a modern political party took the first step toward significantly not playing fair.
The Court—simply by stopping the count—perverted the electoral system that promised every candidate the right to a recount of all votes cast.
Since Gore won the total popular vote and was ahead in the recount, it is likely that he was going to win Florida, but that didn’t matter. The Supreme Court did not play fair. Had they let the recount determine Florida’s winner but then awarded the election to Bush after a court challenge—that would possibly have been seen as playing fair.
At the time, I was disappointed that Gore gave in so easily and did not refuse to accept the theft of the election. What I realize now is that Gore was being a good trouper by letting the stolen election go in order to try to save the democracy.
Resisting the order of the Court by Gore would have only served to undercut an already fragile democracy. I believe now that Nixon faced a similar decision when it was widely recognized that the mayor of Chicago stole the election in Illinois for Kennedy.
But like a high school bully who got away with his first act of bullying, stealing an election by the Republicans was just the beginning of not playing fair.
The Republicans had already begun to run their voter disqualification scam in Florida in 2000. That’s why the election was so close. The Left howled for a while after the 2000 Florida debacle, but then they behaved like they’ve always behaved: they rolled over and let the Republicans take control of the government for the next eight years of Bush. We know how that ended.
Voter disqualification scams are being run again by Republican legislatures in many of the swing states. When you have a good thing going, something that worked once, why not use it again? They’ve also added some new techniques like limiting voting hours and generally making voting as restrictive for the working class and minorities as possible.
Not too long ago, it was determined that the American people owned the airwaves and television stations could only license the airwaves in order to broadcast their programs. The FCC had a strict policy that stations had to follow in order to maintain that license. They were forced to give equal time for opposing points of view, and had to maintain truth in advertising.
After eight years of Bush Republican rule, corporations today are able to own the airways as long as they connect to the customers via a physical form, as is done with cable TV; and there are no rules in cable programing. Anything is allowed from the excesses of porn to Fox TV.
At another time, reporters were trained to be objective in their handling of hard news. Opinion would be labeled as such and placed on a page called the editorial page. News organizations didn’t always adhere to objectivity, but at least they went through the motions. There are only a few newspapers left that adhere to that standard now.
Technology has advanced and everything has changed. Internet web sites can slander anyone while cowardly hiding behind anonymity. Print journalism has been replaced by blogs with little or no control over the truth of the content. Time Magazine recently announced that it no longer had editors to edit articles printed in its magazine! Like a blog, the writers are their own editors. And fair play has been replaced by who can say it the loudest and repeat it the longest, true or not.
Republicans decided in the 2008 election to repeat the Southern strategy of Nixon by breaking out the racial slurs. But John McCain refused to allow the sermons of Obama’s preacher to be used in the campaign and even corrected a voter who called Obama an Arab. But outside the main stream in the tea party meetings, racism continued to raise its ugly head.
At the time, the right wing Supreme Court justices had not yet figured a way for the rich to buy elections with the Citizens United ruling so the billionaires were not able to ignore McCain and flood the airwaves with racist commercials. McCain still had to say, “I approve this message.” He didn’t.
I predict that nothing will stop the super packs in the 2012 election since Romney has already embraced the appeal to racism by tolerating the birther movement with Donald Trump and by continuing to call Obama foreign and not an American, socialist, and I could list about 20 to 30 other examples.
It is obvious that nothing is preventing Romney and Ryan from reaching back and dusting off some of the old Southern strategy playbills. The latest: Obama lies so much Romney is afraid that most of his time in the debates will be spent correcting the record. Unbelievable!
Romney’s campaign has refused to play by the rules of honesty. They brag about ignoring the fact checkers who attempt to keep the arguments real.
But there are still a few conservative commentators who understand the importance to our democracy of playing fair. They recently criticized Ryan’s nomination acceptance speech for Vice President as replete with lie after lie! Even Fox News had a commentator who criticized Ryan. And if Fox says it, it must be true. Evidently, there are some on the right who still know the importance of fair play to our democracy.
But Romney and Ryan troop on. They have ignored the fact checkers that declared a commercial stating that Obama was changing the work rule of welfare as out and out lies. The ad continues to run—a lie that fits the concept of The Biggest Lie.
It is ironic to me that the very technique that helped the Bolshevik’s come to power and established the Communist state is now being used by the Communist-phobic Republicans. I won’t call it the Big Lie—it’s more than that, it’s the Hell of a Lot of Big Lies! Keep saying all kinds of crap over and over, whether any of it is true or not; just keep stating lie after lie, over and over, time after time, again and again, and soon there will be so many lies, that the people will come to believe them, reasoning, there’s so many, they have to be true—an interesting twist on the old big lie concept. So many lies, so little time!
This coming election will go down as one of the most important in the history of our democracy. It will rival the importance of the election that gave the presidency to Lincoln.
With this election, the people of America must repudiate Romney and the Republican Party that believes that it is all right to disregard the fair play principals of our democracy in order to win—that anything goes—that the end justifies the means—any means whatsoever. The people must reject the Republicans with a resounding clearing of the board for all Republicans in all races from dogcatcher to the presidential pretender!
The Republicans must be taught that you don’t fuck with the rules of fair play in our democracy. If you win, you must win honestly, fairly and hopefully, with some integrity remaining, because afterward, you too will have to govern.
If we do not trounce the Republicans with the vote, and do it at every level possible, this will be the beginning of the end of our American democracy. If Romney wins through lies, deceit and distortions, will there be an American Spring?