The USA began with an ancient idea for a new world, a form of government whereby We, The People, would exercise authority through elected representatives as a constitutional republic. But ideas, like people, grow old and are susceptible to change, even corruption.
In that sense, a democratic form of government and distance running aren’t all that dissimilar. Both require consistent attention to thrive. Both ask, with an unblinking eye, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? Neither running nor democracy is like a bank account where interest grows absent infusions of new capital. Complacency and inattention, therefore, are the bêtes noires of both.
Whether as citizens or as runners, what we do today must cohere with what we did yesterday and must do again tomorrow, as a body will lose the training effect with an unchanging string of the same training, much less none at all. So we have to do more than simply rinse and repeat. New methods and stresses must be utilized to tax systems and reanimate growth.
So what then of an idea as hoary as a constitutional republic in America?
The fate of any form of government is never free from assault. Ours stood paramount in the mind of President Abraham Lincoln as he delivered his 1863 Gettysburg Address amidst America’s (first?) Civil War: “…testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
To date, this nation, under that conception, has endured for nearly 250 years. But over the last quarter century, the number of individuals dissatisfied with democratic politics has risen from a third of the people to more than half. It is a worrisome trend.
When such surveys began in 1995, over 75% of U.S. citizens felt satisfied with American democracy. The first fissure formed following the 2008 financial meltdown, when corporate greed was allowed to run amok unchecked by government oversight.
Satisfaction with democracy has continued to deteriorate year-on-year ever since.
Today, fewer than 50% of Americans see favor in how we are governed, marking the first time on record that a majority of U.S. citizens are dissatisfied with their system of government.
This disfavor isn’t singular to America. Many large democracies, including Australia, Mexico, U.K. and Brazil, are now at their highest-ever level of dissatisfaction, as well.
What’s tainted the democratic form in the USA, in part, has been the cynical way insiders on both sides have gamed the system.
Whether it’s gerrymandering congressional districts to lock in incumbency; using the filibuster to block majority rule; the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling opening unlimited corporate campaign financing that skews elections to the most wealthy among us, the powerbroker practitioners of democracy have used the levers of power to strip the system of its intended applications and tilt them to their individual advantage, thereby extending their own cynicism to We, The People, at-large.
But we are not innocent by-standers, by any means. We have allowed these corruptions to multiply through complacency and neglect.
And that is where democracy has failed foremost, in the expectation / requirement that We, The People, will maintain diligence in vetting candidates, holding leaders accountable, and becoming conversant with the issues facing the country we are constitutionally designed to govern.
Instead, we have (not surprisingly) succumbed to expedience and solipsism, choosing not to pay close attention as special interests purchased our franchises and representatives on the cheap.
The responsibility to maintain attention in today’s hectored, heterogeneous society has, arguably, become too great a burden to demand or expect as the country grows both in size, political disparity, and complexity, even as the world around it continues to shrink via technology while simultaneously competing for limited resources.
Perhaps it is why America’s Founding Fathers deemed only land-owning white males to be eligible voters. Remember, it was only such men who were originally considered being “created equal”, none others. America’s inclusiveness only developed over time, and not without temporary disruptions to the system.
The founders concluded that only people with a financial stake in the game would vote with a keen eye, and a close reading of the ballot, even if it was the only to maintain their own status quo. When you open the polls to a universal franchise, they believed, the vast majority of citizens would only skim the issues, at best, and vote only for president or other easily accessible ballot choices, and most likely from the standpoint of emotions.
As Len Niehoff, University of Michigan Law School professor has said, “We have become a nation of magical thinkers, making decisions based on what we hope is the case and whom we want to believe. When confronted with opposing evidence, we do not engage with it. We dismiss it and stick a label on it: “fake,” “phony,” “biased,” etc. And then we mistake that label for evidence.”
This lack of interest in exercising oversight would slowly cause the system to fall into disrepair as special interests would move in to fill the void by buying up the corrupted officials who realized that nobody was actually paying attention back home. As allegiance to civic responsibility waned, the greater the likelihood the focus of the special interests and their political enablers would succeed. And here we are.
Surveys show that regular folks everywhere have grown increasingly tired of enduring it all, to where they yearned for a forceful leader to cut through to the heart of their perceived grievances and discontent. Enter the “only I can fix it” candidate in 2016.
America was in search of certainty, someone with the moxy to assert the self-assurance America craved, while paying less attention to whether the candidate had the skill set to actually pull it off. Turns out just saying it was enough. Even later, when the skills proved lacking (in fact, venal), and the talk turned increasingly toxic and aggressive, it didn’t matter. The message of grievance – “I want my country back!” – was enough for the people’s hope to follow it. Because what else was on offer they could look to?
Considering our contentious and increasingly polarizing elections, America seems poised at the bank of its own Rubicon, if not already begun to wade across.
What remains true is that a strong middle-class stabilizes both the nation’s politics and its economy. Give a person a meaningful job and his/her political temperature will fall.
But when jobs get shipped overseas because businesses can pay someone in China or the Philippines or India a fraction of what they’re paying in America; when there’s no longer an allegiance to anything greater than shareholders; yet people clamor for the cheap goods their lost jobs produce; and politicians, whose responsibility is to the greater good, but whose campaign donations come from these same businesses, we find the politician’s true constituency is the Donor Class, not the Middle Class.
As one might expect, political polarity leads to poles drifting apart until the middle eventually gives way. Finally, when the poles bend too far under their accumulated weight, they come into contact with one another from below. And when poles collide, worlds divide. That’s the current danger that confronts us.
One answer, it seems, is to do what we can to re-build the middle class. Not to take from the rich out of spite or rancor, nor to redistribute to the poor out of charity, but to strengthen the spine of the nation out of necessity. But the empire of capital has its own destiny, too.
Unbridled capitalism in a globalized market, in its relentless search for low wages, longer hours, and more pliant workers, eventually excites social resentment, revives class warfare, and solidifies the barriers between.
To move along constructive lines, corporate America would need to subordinate short-term goals and profits to invest in such long-term social necessities as education, environmental protection, the extension of health care, the rehabilitation of infrastructure, and redemption of urban centers. Workers would have to be seen as assets and members of the larger, corporate family, not simply costs to be lessened.
And it was that way the 1950s when America was riding high as both manufacturer and consumer, while the rest of the world was digging out of the ruins of World War II.
But through America’s help, the rest of the world eventually caught back up. Meaning capitalists today are not likely to subordinate anything of their own accord, because their fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders and the next quarterly report, not to the long term interests of the general public. That’s where government is supposed to step in.
Government has a larger portfolio to consider than the next quarterly report, even if it’s only the four-year election cycle. But the hand of government cannot be onerous, either.
Long-term perspectives demand public leadership that educates as it leads. Yet the likelihood of finding a one-size fits all leader who can achieve equanimity in such an integrated world is slim at best in a time of such profound polarity.
The question is, can We, The People, in any accepted way, address issues that confront us today? Issues that could never have been foreseen by the Constitutional Convention, which drew up rules for a four million person, mostly homogeneous society in the 18th century, one in which the phrase “all men are created equal” literally meant ‘all land-owning, white men’, not women, not poor whites, and certainly not blacks or Native Americans.
What is incontrovertibly true is that democracy is a more difficult form of government because of its broad participatory nature and calls for citizen responsibility. And it’s true, dictatorship and monarchy are much easier governing models.
But what is the predicate for our form of self-government? Some would say an educated populace. Ever since California passed Proposition 13 in 1978 to limit the rise in property tax rates, taxes that went to fund what had been considered the gold-standard in public education, the funding for public schools has diminished.
Nearly two generations later, we see the results. In June 2023, we learned that math and reading scores among America’s 13-year-olds had fallen to their lowest levels in decades, with math scores plunging by the largest margin ever recorded. Now extend those falling scores for another 20 years and see what kind of citizens we will have produced.
Part of this decline in scores is the residue of the coronavirus pandemic that closed schools for much of 2020. But there is more to it than that.
When entire generations grow up being told how special they are, how everyone is a winner, and their every whim is a gift; when standards and even the definition of words (male & female, to name two) are altered to assuage those misconceptions, is it any wonder people come to their maturity with a skewed worldview?
Imagine the USA, the modern avatars of the democratic form, being tired of governing itself? Maybe I’m being too harsh; old people have that tendency in their dotage. But it could also be argued that democracy, in such a complex time, demands more from human nature than the Ribtaker designed for that mortal system to manage. Maybe not the concept of democracy so much as how it’s being conducted is what Americans no longer cotton to.
Whether it was the Brexit battle in Great Britain, what’s called “authoritarian capitalism” in China, or the expanding populist nationalism of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and, yes, Donald Trump in the USA – or even the anti-Macron element in France – everywhere we look we see nations pulling back from a democratic globalist agenda as long-held systems come under strain from the twin poles of advancing technology and retreating opportunity.
Time to be honest and wonder if such a thing as a federalist-based United States is still viable. Because right now everyone is reading the Constitution like Paul Simon sang in his song The Boxer, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
When My Truth trumps The Truth, the seeds of dissolution have not only been firmly planted, they have begun to sprout. The only question remaining is when we will reap the bitter harvest?
By my reading, we may have taken to the fields on 5 November 2024.
END
tonireavis.com 
This is a great take Toni. Thanks for this nuanced perspective
I can’t wait for the concentration camps to open. You people are batshit crazy.
Dems love Democracy until it doesnt go their way. To show how fast and how quickly America has fallen California voted in FAVOR of banning Same Sex Marriages in 2008! Just 16 years ago. Proposition 8
November 4, 2008
Eliminates Rights of Same-Sex Couples to MarryResults
ChoiceVotes%
Yes7 ,001,084 52.24%
No 6,401,482 47.76% a majority did not want Gay marriage. Dems ran to the Supreme court to get it over-turned. This happens again and again and again.
Blacks voted in majority for Kamala. So did hispanics, so did Indians , so did Jews, so did Arabs. Whites were the only racial demographic That voted in majority FOR Trump. Whites were the only Demographic that Trump DIDNT thank! Both parties bought and paid for by billionaire Jews, the new plan for white genocide as Trump says is to replace us Legally.. Trump said he wants to put Green cards on the back of millions of college Diplomas of people from India.. Can see the crap hole that is now Canada to see how that will work out.
Great analysis Toni. Glad you called out “untouchable” Prop 13. Caste should be required reading but of course now more likely to be banned in even more states. Proud of you.
I’ll bet the lefties love the filibuster now. The democrats need to run decent candidates.
Democrats have lost their way and the working class. They need to forget about whose woke and pay attention to whose broke.
Until then it’s just the wine and cheese elite who’ll vote for Marxism.
Thanks for your service to our sport though
Toni – your blog echoes many of my own feelings. I posted something similar…our country is extremely divided in how we think and what we believe. We are RED states and BLUE states and we don’t want the same things. We don’t believe the same things or have the same worldviews. The Bible Belt thinks separation of church and state is a loose recommendation.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that PA, WI and MI are swing states given how their industrial economies were gutted by Wall Street. I travel the country quite extensively for work and find so many of our larger cities, especially ones like Baltimore, St Louis, Cleveland quite depressing to be in. You can just tell they used to be much better places to live. If you haven’t, I recommend reading These Are the Plunderers which dives into how private equity ruined our economy for the middle class. Our politicians sold us all out for corporate profits.
We are a Constitutional Republic, NOT a “democracy”.
Thanks for the correction.
TR
The US is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy or constitutional democracy as you wrote.
Thank you for the distinction.
TR
I suggest a good read to better understand of how we got here and possibly where we are going from a historical perspective, Caste, The origins of our discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.
I agree. Excellent book. Thanks for recommending it.
Toni
A very thoughtful piece which I enjoyed reading. I disagree with the the conclusion, however.
Much of Toni’s piece correctly points out how the middle class has been abandoned. Ironically, it is Trump – a billionaire or at least a guy who wants us to believe he is one – is the only one focused on talking about helping the middle class. The Democratic party has been more obsessed with jailing Trump and identity politics. And identity politics really leads to so many problems for them – open borders (can’t stop the undocumented as that’s viewed as racist), defund the police and making it illegal to arrest shop lifters (again don’t want to be viewed as racist) and men in women’s sports, (don’t want to be called a bigot). I’d argue it led to Kamala being the nominee as well as she was a deeply unpopular VP who was polling at 2% in 2020 but she got the nod because she was the VP and they didn’t want to be accused of being sexist or racist.
Trump says he wants the factory jobs back. He wants the US to make products again. Meanwhile, the elites with their PHDs in econ laugh and say that the jobs are never coming back and tariffs are stupid. One of the women on the View today was ranting the other day as she said something along the “experts claim Kamala’s economic plan” will be better. Better for who? Maybe for the person trying to buy the latest toy for $15 instead of $50 but if your factory job in Wisconsin is gone forever, it’s not better.
As Toni said, the middle class is hurting. Yet the Dems were telling us ‘But inflation is down” now. Yes for the last few quarters but things are 20% more expensive than 4 years ago. And a new house – which is people’s #1 expenses – is about twice as much as it did 5 years ago if you are financing it as a new buyer (price is like 33% more and the interest rate is more than double).
So we need more cheap housing. Do you realize how much cheaper housing would be if there weren’t 10+ million undocumented people here taking up housing? Do you know what that many undocumented workers looking for jobs does for the bottom of the labor pool in terms of wages? If you are in the midwest and blue collar, of course you are infuriated. We have billions for wars and the undocumented – who are literally being housed in hotels in NYC – but no one did anything when your jobs were shipped overseas or big pharma got you hooked on opiods.
Then when you want to try to get a new job or get your kids into college, they put you at the back of the line because of some injustice you had nothing to do with 150 years ago?
Plus they kept your kids out of school for 2 years even Covid is like the cold for kids and banned you from social media if you dared suggest that Covid came from a Chinese lab. And the party of “Your body, your choice” and”Science is real” yard signs, initially told everyone to not buy masks as they didn’t work, then insisted we do. Also Biden and Harris both said that they wouldn’t take the vaccine as they didn’t trust Trump’s claims about it, but then they forced you to take it or lose your job.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? It’s certainly a non-zero chance and I’ll admit he did act poorly on January 6th, but do they not realize how authoritarian they’ve become? And isn’t their credibility already long ago shot?
In additionn to the crackdownn on freespeech in regardds to Covid,they’ve been trying to jail Trump repeatedly for things they wouldn’t dare jail anybody else for. You don’t go after Trump for business crimes he did 15 years ago simply because you don’t like him. You don’t try to jail him for security stuff if you aren’t going to prosecute Biden or HRC for very similar offenses. That’s bananna republic type selective prosecution. Plus you threw out your credibility when you told us for 8 years Trump was in the pocket of Putin but then your Russia investigation never showed trump to be in Putin’s pocket. In fact, only after Trump left office, did Putin dare to try to take over another country. Meanwhile Joe Biden’s crack addict son is pulling in millions from Ukraine and China?
And the stifling of free speech has bee mindblowing as well.
The average non-college educated worker long ago determined they were tired of being lectured by the DC elite. Their credibility went out the window well before they put tampons in men’s restrooms and told us men can get pregnant or before they thought a ton of 60k should hae no problem accepting 20,000 immigrants from Haiti.
I LOVED oni’s next to last line of; “When My Truth trumps The Truth, the seeds of dissolution have not only been firmly planted, they have begun to sprout.” I’d argue the Democrats equally orr probably more guilty of this as the Republicans.
These links show you how their version of the truth often turns out to be fiction.
https://www.facebook.com/RepSteveScalise/videos/789272158406827/?fs=e&s=TIeQ9V&mibextid=0NULKw&fs=e&s=TIeQ9V
https://x.com/theamericangrl/status/1333834394059071494?s=46
https://x.com/farzyness/status/1854523815335739583?s=46
https://x.com/catturd2/status/1552992321523912704?s=46
https://x.com/theamericangrl/status/1333834394059071494?s=46
-RJ
This is excellent, Toni. One of the best critiques I’ve read regarding why we are where we are today.
Toni, this is an incredible piece of work. It is the most intelligent, poignant, and eloquent piece of writing I have seen, thoroughly examining and explaining Tuesday’s implosion. I couldn’t agree with you more. But where do we go from here?
I agree with some of your commentary. Just wondering why you didn’t feel the same in 2020? I’m left wondering where the 20 million Biden voters went or was that a mirage that doesn’t follow any statistical model whatsoever. If anything, this election proved that democracy is still alive. If anything, this election proved that Citizens United isn’t the boogeyman you think it is at all. When the candidate that raised and spent over $1 Billion (due to largesse from large corporations and private donors like Bill Gates, George Soros, dark money from Europe, etc.) is defeated by the candidate who spent just over $300 million, I’d say that is a win for democracy.
You are right on with the media but not in the way you think (or that I understand you to think). When the “impartial” news media (CBS, ABC, and NBC) has 85% of their stories about one candidate skew negative while 92% of their stories for the other candidate skew positive, you have to believe that the electorate is starting to see through the supposed “impartiality.” If anything, this election was a shining example of democracy and a referendum on insanity. Now (hopefully) we can get the cancer of DEI training out of the government, restore Title IX to it’s original mission and get men out of girl’s sports and locker rooms. Now if someone, anyone, would address government spending and the national debt, we’ll be on our way to a much better country.
Good points. But I do believe much of this election was another thumb in the eye to the status quo and powers that be. Dems are no better than Repubs, in that regard. The system isn’t serving the intended constituency.
Yes the president elect is a chaos agent. And I think that’s what people were voting for, because this system isn’t working for them. I just wish it was another agent, one with a more moral center. Thanks for contributing.
I think the Citizens United unlimited spending is more pertinent to the congressional elections rather than the national office. The fact that Harris was a complete Unknown entering the race after Biden dropped out meant she had to spend a fortune to get known in a short period. Trump didn’t have to spend very much because he’s been in the public eye for 40 years. So the fact that she spent 1 billion & he spent 1/3 that really doesn’t tell the full story.
I agree with ridding women’s sports of men, or what’s the point of having women-only sports in the first place?
Toni
Agree with you on the last point 100%. However, she was the VP for 4 years and when asked, said she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden. She was also a presidential candidate in 2020. All the polls showed her handily defeating Trump as soon as she got in the race and well past the Democrat convention. The problem with Kamala wasn’t that people didn’t know who she was. The problem was that as they got to know her better her favorability rating went down. The greatest thing she had going in her favor was no Primary and a short window because any longer and it would have been worse. She had the media, celebrities, and every institution pulling in her favor. She couldn’t have asked for a better situation.
More billionaires supported Kamala by far. ActBlue has become a dark money funneling/laundering organization. If there is anything similar on the right I would hope it is exposed and eliminated. I agree with you though, I would love to see more money removed from politics. Even at a local level, money corrupts.