Democracy dies in … Oh, shut up

OK, so, fair warning. I may be a little “spicier” than normal. It’s been a challenging couple of weeks and I’m in a worse mood than usual.

It started with me getting thrown out of my own band over my stated intention to wear a kilt onstage. OK, so it is more complicated than that. I had been unhappy for a long time over the band’s failure to commit (as we had all agreed to when we started the thing) to making original material more of a priority. I wanted at least 20% originals and they wanted to play dress-up for their friends.

And, no shock to anyone, I can be unpleasant to work with when I’m unhappy. And, I actually quit when I was told I would have to get my couture choices approved in advance and submit to the will of a two-third super-majority who wanted something different from what I wanted. So I basically threw away two years of work and voted with my feet. Oh, and, added bonus, this all happened on my 65th birthday. Happy freaking birthday to me.

Which brings us to the actual subject here. Democracy.

It has been a turbulent few months and I am not gonna get into what or who I support or don’t support. That is not important and, besides, I am not allowed to express support for any political position without getting myself in trouble at work. A reminder that I came up in journalism when it was an article of faith that people in my profession should not be members of a political party because that at least implied bias. And I have been registered as non-partisan since the mid-1980s.

The thing that really set me off was listening to a program on NPR the other day called “The Middle” that purports to be a kind of remedy to the one-sided slant of every other NPR program. It, no surprise, totally fails to do that. Side note: This is not a party position but the establishment of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was a mistake from the get-go and the U.S. is not supposed to have state-supported media. It’s time to just bite the bullet and defund NPR and PBS.

Anyway. The conversation was about listener impressions of the first 100 days of the current administration. And I lost track of how many times someone used the term “our democracy” with, obviously, no real idea what that means.

First, some of y’all need to go back and take a remedial civics course. While our form of government (on the national, state and even local levels) uses democratic elections to choose representatives to various government bodies, our form of government is a constitutional republic.

What is the difference? It’s pretty simple. Written rules. In the case of the nation and various states, those rules take the form of a constitution. In the case of most cities, including Boulder City, it takes the form of the city charter. These are rules (often very old) that define what exactly government can and can’t do.

Why is that important? Because every democracy in the history of the world that has tried to do without one (with the exception of the United Kingdom whose “constitution” is understood through tradition but not actually written down as a single document, but Brits are… different) has either failed or has devolved into a dictatorship. A constitution protects the rights of the minority and makes sure things do not just descend into mob rule.

If I had been smart and had put the band’s original ground rules in writing as a kind of constitution, then the situation I just lived through might have been avoided. Because mob rule is what it became. And because the ground rules were not written down, they were easily ignored which gave me, really, little choice but to vote with my feet and leave.

When people scream and moan about fearing for “our democracy,” I have to wonder just what they actually mean. You can’t moan and cry about losing democracy because a majority of people democratically elected someone you don’t like. Well, you can, but it really reveals a special kind of ignorance. (It is an ignorance that is equally present on both sides of the political aisle, BTW. Republicans did it when Clinton beat Bush. Democrats did it when Bush2 beat Gore. Republicans and the Tea Party movement did it when Obama was president and Democrats —and some establishment Republicans —have now done it twice when Trump won.)

And if you are among the screamers freaking out as people you despise for their politics take an axe to government spending, maybe stop screaming, “hands off” and offer an alternative. But the alternative has to take one huge fact into consideration.

The country is in debt. A lot of debt. $36 trillion. Just for effect, what does that actually look like?

$36,000,000,000,000.

And we are adding something like $2,000,000,000,000 more to that total every year. Assuming we were able to eliminate that $2 trillion annual deficit and identify another $100 billion a year to put toward the debt (which is a fantasy, but go with me here), how long would it take to pay off?

Three hundred and sixty years. Keep in mind that the country will be 250 years old next year. So it would, under that scenario, take 110 more years than the country has been around to pay off its debt.

Assuming a life expectancy of, say 80 years, if we could start paying off the debt right now, your great-great-great-great grandchildren would be the ones who finally saw the debt retired.

Hmmm. Wonder if they are gonna get a vote?