Commentary

When the Americans proposed to establish a government of, by, and for the people, the old European monarchies laughed at the absurdity. Maybe that can work in some ancient Greek city-state, but the world since the fall of Rome has run on a different principle. It was sometimes absolute rule and sometimes rule was constrained by landowning elites. But the notion that people can rule themselves seemed absurd.

A century and a quarter later, America had clearly revealed itself as the superior and most magnificent society and system on planet Earth. It became the source of the most freedom, most innovation, most prosperity, most evidence of rising living standards for everyone.

It was when this became obvious to the world, starting mostly following the horrors of the Civil War, that the old-world monarchies gradually fell apart. The Papal States were swallowed by a unified Italian state. The Habsburgs faced decline and sometimes devastation as in Mexico with a failed experiment to impose a king. The Holy Roman Empire had a century before already becoming an elite cocktail party. The British Empire was previously showing signs of decline.

By the first decade of the 20th century, the pattern had been established and the consensus was clear. The future of the world would look much like America. It would be of societies ruled by the people through the franchise with power restrained by constitutions. Technically, this was never pure democracy; it was a republican form.

In the grand sweep of time, however, the notion of large societies ruled not by autocrats and elites but by people, occupies only a tiny sliver of history. It is our history and our time, so it appears distorted and permanent to us today. It’s not. It’s actually fragile and could fail. That’s the actual lesson of history.

There was a point that went unnoticed in the 18th and 19th centuries when old absolutist forms were being replaced by democratic forms. It was frequently argued that monarchy and absolutism had no rational basis at all. Why should a son and then his son, ongoing forever, be considered a legitimate ruler? This is just an accident of birth. It has no rational basis.

Fine, but what did democracy offer? Rule by the people, but how do we discern the people’s will? We need a system of voting. We have to decide who qualifies for the franchise. Then we need a way to authoritatively verify that these voters are who they say they are. Then we need a system that is transparent and clear, not manipulated by technological tricks.

As for qualification, the 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat was clear. No one who is receiving government benefits should be allowed to vote. This is because their vote would be determined by their selfish interests rather than the public interest. The United States did not have such a rule but we did restrict the franchise to literate male heads of households. That gradually broke down at the same time the European monarchies fell. This trend was based on a confusion that democracy meant maximum population participation.

Meanwhile, the system itself is seriously under strain. Consider what we just found out about Alaska’s vote for the Senate. National Democratic operatives hatched a secret plan to boost the Senate campaign of Mary Peltola, a Democrat. The scheme was to split votes from Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan by recruiting someone else named Dan J. Sullivan, whose name would appear on the ballot.

This is a wicked little hack, but only a small look into all the ways in which democracy in America has been attacked at a fundamental level of its very integrity. You have to look closely at the laws and regulations but eventually you find that many so-called blue states like California have found ways to give illegal aliens the right to vote in national elections. Voter ID rules are still overly lax in many states.

Then there are the voting machines. We are being asked to trust that they do not deliver false reports. Can we really? Watching what happened in 2020 in the United States, it’s not so clear. And we all watched with our very own eyes precisely what just happened in Brazil where the left-wing party suddenly made 10 million ballots appear in the last two hours of counting, during which time a reliable judge kept open polls that would vote his preference and closed polls that would swing the other way.

It was a brilliant trick but probably too brazen. No honest observer anywhere in the world thinks this was a fair election. And then consider Israel today, said to be a stable democracy. In a contentious election that had roiled the country for years, the final results were inconclusive. No one knows for sure who won. This will be disputed for years—a dispute over math!

The United States faces midterm elections with a bit more confidence in election integrity than we had in previous years thanks to rule tightening in many states. Still, there is a great deal of public incredulity. We are no longer sure that the system works. And this doesn’t even touch on the long-running controversies over precisely where we draw district lines.

The U.S. system was fundamentally distorted by the 17th Amendment, which changed the Senate from being a body to represent whole states of the union to one that mostly reflects the politics of big cities. This is all due to a small change: from a position elected by the state legislature (which represents the whole state) to making it an office voted in by the majority of people. With a word change, the bicameral Congress established by the Founders was at an end.

All these games that people are playing with the democratic idea are highly dangerous. They threaten to undermine the entire experiment. More and more, I’m seeing podcasts and public intellectuals look to the system in China, a one-party dictatorship, as the best path for any society. It saves resources and the people are free to do what they want, so they say, provided they never speak against the party.

I’m seeing this trend in public life today—the celebration of dictatorship as a viable alternative to democracy—and it deeply concerns me. It’s time that we took it seriously. The rise of the socialist movement in the United States barely hides its lust for dictatorial power. The lessons of history mean nothing to these people either because they know no history or they do not care. Despite all their talk of the people, these candidates and pundits are all backed by powerful foundations and hidden corporate interests. What they will bring about is not some shared utopia but a corporatist dictatorship that will end in catastrophe.

There is so much at stake here. We need to fix our elections. We have to tighten the franchise. It should be illegal to play games with ballots. We need better systems of monitoring. We need clarity on the meaning of citizenship. The Trump administration was right to challenge birthright citizenship and the Supreme Court majority was wrong to side against the administration.

This is no longer a parlor game or a simple struggle about which party gets into power. This is a historical battle over freedom and the form of government that best guards that freedom. The Founders were right to establish the system they did. But now we have to make good on that promise. It’s more fragile than we think. If the machinations continue, we could lose it all. No one knows what comes after.

Democracy Is Under Threat