The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
As July Fourth approaches, Americans debate democracy’s fate
In his 4½ years as a state senator from Manhattan, Brad Holyman has handed out everything from flashlights to T-shirts at political rallies. But for a gathering held soon after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, he decided on something more substantial:
Copies of the Constitution.
“My constituents had been asking me, ‘What can I do to help?’ ‘Howdo I prepare myself?’” says Holyman, a Democrat in his third term who has since distributed thousands of copies. “A year ago, who would have imagined that giving away the Constitution would be seen as an act of resistance?”
Americans have disagreed about government and civic life since the country’s founding, about who should vote, who should run for office and the risks of political factions. But as the U.S. nears its 241st birthday, many say democracy itself is in the dock.
Trump, with his labeling the mainstream press the “enemy of the people” and his disparagement of “socalled” judges and other traditional checks on executive power, has crit- ics anxious about not just a given policy but the fate of self-rule — at the same time that his supporters view his rise as the kind of anti-elitist triumph democracy is supposed to represent.
The debate extends from classrooms and policy in- stitutes to popular culture, to the Trump-influenced staging of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” at Manhattan’s Public Theater and the wave of dystopian bestsellers such as “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“I think it’s highly unusual and disconcerting to have so many people worried about the foundations of our democracy,” says Wendy R. Weiser, who directs the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, based at New York University School of Law and focusing on voting rights and elections, among other issues. “We’re always talking about democracy and struggling to live up to our ideals, but never with so many fundamental questions as we’re doing right now.”
But when activists vow to revitalize democracy, they don’t mean the society imagined by the men who helped create it.
“None of the founders envisioned our modern democracy, with its broad suffrage and competing po- litical parties,” says Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prizewinning historian of the Revolutionary War era. “Running for office was demagogic and dangerous. The founders believed in equality but they essentially meant equality of opportunity. Sons of weavers and cobblers could go to college and become gentlemen, but weavers and cobblers themselves were not to become politicians and campaign for office.”
American leaders in the early years exchanged accusations of being too proBritish or pro-French, a division marked by two ongoing concerns: The country would relapse into British-style monarchy or fall into violence and lawlessness like the murderous “Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution.
In 1788, the year before the French Revolution began, Americans were deciding whether to ratify the Constitution.
One concern, James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, was “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, (who) may by intrigue, by corruption or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests of the people.”
Some founders lived long enough to watch, and bemoan the political rise of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Trump and supporters have cited Jackson as a favorite predecessor in the White House, a populist who defied the establishment and broke down boundaries against who might become president. Trump ally Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, has written that Trump, like Jackson, is “an outsider and a disruptive force chosen to break up existing Washington power structures.”
But Thomas Jefferson, in sentiments critics have echoed about Trump, worried that Jackson “had very little respect for laws and constitutions” and added that “His passions are terrible.”