A democracy primer, then and now
This Saturday falls on April 19, the day that colonial Americans confronted British regulars at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge in 1775, firing the “shots heard ’round the world” and starting the war for independence that marked the emergence of a new world order – that order being representative government and democracy.
“For centuries,” the historian Sean Wilentz tells us, “throughout the Western world, such political arrangements had seemed utterly unnatural.”
Going back to the time of the Greek philosophers, political doctrine proscribed democracy in favor of hierarchical rule – rule in which kings or holy men wielded the authority of the state or of the church over the lives of the ordinary run of humankind.
As Wilentz reminds us, it was thought that “most of humanity was unsuited for public duties more elevated than the drudgery of farm animals.”
History seemed to bear this out. Ancient Greece and Rome both dabbled in rudimentary forms of self-government. Both failed to expand or to sustain the experience. The “people” as a governing mechanism were considered wildly irrational and wholly ignorant.
“The rabble” put in an appearance during the time of Oliver Cromwell in England. The eventual restoration of the monarchy, however, snuffed out any incipient march toward self-rule.
Rule of the people by the people was a-goner, until the idea was refreshed in the late 1700s in America, most prominently among the colonists meeting in Philadelphia in 1776.
By the time Constitution-makers gathered in 1787, the idea had really taken hold, so much so that the document they produced was framed in the context of “We the People.” What had once been on the fringe of political thought, Wilentz asserts, was now mainstream.
Not that there wasn’t some remaining fear of “the mob.” While members of the House of Representatives were to be selected by popular elections, state legislators, unless they chose otherwise (none did), were assigned the task of picking senators. Likewise, the president wasn’t elected directly, but by the Electoral College.
There was to be – and there remains – an appointed judicial branch of government. The system of presidential electors is still around as well.
An expanded American democracy has traversed many passages – the rise of political parties, westward expansion, slavery agitation and popular sovereignty, Civil War, Jim Crow, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few beginning in the late 1800s, a populist revolt, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Cold War, the civil rights revolution.
And on it goes. Today’s challenges are as severe as they have ever been. Besides which, there are warning signs of danger ahead, such as a persistent undercurrent of violence and mayhem.
Last week, a 17-year old was arrested and charged with murdering his mother and stepfather inside their Wisconsin home. The murders were all part of a bizarre plan to “obtain the financial means” of eventually assassinating the president and overthrowing the government, law enforcement officers contend.
In Harrisburg last week, the executive mansion was fire bombed by a 38-year-old man using Molotov cocktails. The suspect later told authorities he was fully prepared to bludgeon the Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, with a sledgehammer. Was he a copycat? Months earlier, at his home in San Francisco, the elderly husband of the then-Democratic speaker of the House was beaten about the head by an intruder using a hammer.
Also last week, in a suburb of Atlanta, police used a stun gun to subdue a protester at a public meeting conducted by a Republican House member, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Another man and a woman were also arrested while police escorted other protesters out of the meeting, the Associated Press reported.
Greene, a practiced rabble-rouser herself, told the protesters “bye” as they left, the wire service said.
Meanwhile, there is the main show in Washington, D.C., where the Trump administration continues its frightful assault on the rule of law and democratic norms. The Founders took into account the possibility of a renegade president. Not so much the rest of us. A president openly disdainful of the courts as well as Congress, a divider of the American people into hostile camps, is certainly a novel occurrence.
The American political system has experienced its share of shocks. One of its most frightening may be unfolding now.
Robbins Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.