Democracy and Demagoguery

As has been said by many others, and covered in several 'Rants', democracy does not work. Whether any government 'works' in the sense of being a stable and contributory adjunct to a prosperous and free society remains to be proven. A more focused question here is whether any representative government can work in the above sense, and the original objective of the Founders of the United States Government had hoped that they had achieved such a goal. We are close to definitively proving them to be wrong.

It is fairly obvious to this author that a fully enfranchised citizenry of a representative government system such as ours is doomed at the outset. Maybe in a pure democracy (everyone voting on every piece of legislation) the majority would mostly avoid shooting themselves in the foot on taxes and similar matters, but then again there is the spectre of the 'tyranny of the majority' in which any identifiable minority faction will be exploited to benefit the majority. In the representative version, there will always be a majority - poorer, dumber, more ignorant or just envious - that are vulnerable to demagoguery. This has been the evolution of the situation in the U.S., particularly as we have embraced universal suffrage over the last century or more.

Over the last century the Democrat Political Party has utilized demagoguery to gain and remain in power a large percentage of the time. Class Warfare, 'something for nothing', free lunches, you name it, have won the game for them over and over. The Republican Pary has adhered to fiscal and constitutional principles more closely, and has suffered defeat for their efforts more often than not. As a Maryland politician said when a reporter questioned her for telling one group one thing and another group the opposite, "I tell them what they want to hear". Demagoguery works!

The problem in the Republican Party in the 2016 Presidential race is that, contrary to the norm, a bonafide demagogue is in the running. And although it seems that somewhat less than a majority of registered Republicans are taken by the demagoguery, a sufficient plurality is gullible enough to possibly make him the Republican candidate in November. At that point we would have a Democrat demagogue against a Republican demagogue, and could very likely prove the thesis of my first paragraph. A century of democratically elected representation has brought us to the brink of implosion, and one more demagogue may very well be the final straw.

It is possible that one of the several principled Republican candidates can pull off both the nomination and the election, but the odds are against it. As the pilot of the PSA jet said seconds before it plowed into a San Diego neighborhood in 1978, "Brace yourself".

Returning to the abstract question of whether any variation of representative government can work, it doesn't seem too hopeful. Perhaps conditioning suffrage on demonstrating with some sort of standardized competency exam a rudimentary knowledge of the functions of government would help, but then the inevitable question is: who defines the exam? It seems all too likely that all forms of government are vulnerable to ultimate demise - monarchies and dictatorships to mortality and representative versions to demagoguery.  Sad.