In a cynical world, we must guard democracy or risk its loss
We should put the frog metaphor to rest. Scientists have largely debunked the idea that a frog put into hot water will jump out but, put into tepid water that is brought slowly to a boil, that same amphibian will get cooked to death.
Yet the truism lives on, mostly because it describes so well how easily and how often we humans continue to be fooled by slow-moving threats that don’t seem to be all that alarming. Until they do.
So it is now with the slow-moving realization that, more than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is democracy that appears increasingly to be under siege, not only overseas but right here at home.
President Joe Biden has experienced this problem with particular pain over this past year. After 20 years of struggle, democracy fell in Afghanistan on his watch.
And Sudan and Myanmar have become totalitarian military states with effective overall control now held by military leaders.
Belarus strongman president Alexander Lukashenko forced an airliner traveling through his country’s airspace to land in his country so a prominent opposition journalist could be seized. And throughout this year, he continually has harassed journalists merely for doing their jobs.
Cuba’s crackdown on street protests and internet use, as well as Vladimir Putin’s troop buildup along the Ukrainian border, also gave the free world yet more cause for concern.
Fewer than a fifth of the world’s people live in fully free countries, according to Freedom House, which notes that the share of countries designated “not free” has reached its highest level since 2006. The 2021 report downgraded the “freedom scores” of 73 countries, representing 75 percent of the global population. India, once listed as free, is now designated as only “partly free.”
“Associational and organizational rights in the Americas have steadily deteriorated over the last 15 years, contributing to a large decline in freedoms in the region,” Freedom House reported just this week.
And the United States, while still free, lost a few significant points in its Freedom House report card after President Donald Trump’s administration dismissed inspectors general and punished whistleblowers, among other actions detrimental to the democratic cause.
But this country doesn’t need a Washington, D.C.-based think tank to tell us that the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and the electoral vote count should be a wake-up call about the ongoing fragility of our shared democracy.
Just as disturbing is the growing unease among Americans about our elections, according to a variety of polls. That distrust usually falls along partisan lines.
For example, most Americans (62%) say they will trust the results of the 2024 election even if the candidate they support loses, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. That includes 82% of Democrats but, troublingly, only one third of Republicans (33%).
Many Republicans appear to have bought into Trump’s lies about nonexistent widespread fraud in an election he lost, even though Trump’s complaints clearly flowed because he didn’t like the outcome.
Speculation will continue, along with the complaint of voter fraud, which also serves as an effective organizing issue for the Republican Party — just as Democrats rally around such issues as GOP-backed gerrymandered districts and voting restrictions that they claim put a thumb on the scale against Democrats.
Voting fraud allegations are nothing new, as Chicagoans know all too well. But that’s why we have, among other important institutions, a court system, which has held up well against more than 60 lawsuits filed in various states on behalf of the Trump campaign.
Democracy can be disappointing, especially when your preferred candidate loses. It can also be inconvenient and agonizingly slow, especially when its wheels necessitate accepting compromise or waiting for a preferred piece of legislation to be legislated. It is understandable for some Americans to envy China or some other high-performing autocracy when it produces some economic or scientific achievement faster than we do.
But look also at the price that must be paid to live under a government that has only a passing interest in individual rights or, in such cases as China’s oppressed Uighurs, human rights. And China has not exactly been the model of transparency in the face of this ongoing pandemic and legitimate probing of its origins.
Democratic practices and ideals long have been crucial to this nation’s social and economic development and credibility to the the world. Our success as a model for the rest of the planet is evidenced by the vastly larger number of people trying to get into this country than those who are trying to leave.
In a world that poses endless challenges to our cherished freedoms, it is important to remember that it doesn’t always take a war to bring down a democracy or grow a dictatorship.
It only takes a failure of our ability to tell the difference.