DEMOCRACY UNDER ATTACK: DEFEND AND EXTEND

 Democracy is now under attack around the globe.
It is being attacked both from without and within free, or partially free, societies.
The attack from without is centered in Russia, which is currently not a free country. It can be argued that Russia has been the locus for reaction and autocracy since just after Waterloo. Anyone remember Alexander I's idea of a Holy Alliance against liberalism and democracy?
But wait: don't the Bolsheviks and the USSR make an exception to that? I'm still pondering that, because I'm not sure the answer is yes. Bolshevism's original stated intent was a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' but whatever there was of democracy in that was very autocratically stifled by Stalin, if not earlier by Lenin. Both men had highly autocratic ways of governing.
Before I go any further, let me be clear. Real democracy proceeds from the bottom up, autocracy from the top down. Keep this in mind as we proceed.
The Russian Revolution may have started with a democratic impulse, but was imposed in the same old autocratic way that has characterized Russia ever since the Mongols conquered it and held it (except for what's now Belarus and most of the Ukraine, which became part of a Polish-Lithuanian kingdom) for two centuries. So right now, the Revolution doesn't look like too much of an exception.
And other autocracies, most notably China, are watching democracies to see how we react to this revival of autocracy and all its ways of increasing misery among most humans for the sake of elevating a handful of mostly exceptionally vicious bipeds.
An earlier post of mine recalls Lord Acton's phrase: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Rarely have humans said or written anything as true. This being the case, autocracy in all its degrees from familial to imperial is at least partially based on a lie: that humans who have had much power ought to keep holding it because they know how to use it. Much depends on what 'knowing how to use it' means. Other than that, autocracy is no more than the embodiment of Thucydides's dismal observation: "The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must."
That's all autocracy is.
Democracy is based in the truth that we are all equally corruptible by power, be that power political or economic. Cultural power is somewhat different as its power to coerce is much more elusive and limited than is the case for political and/or economic power. Cultural power depends at least partially on how desperate one is to be considered one of the 'cool kids' and/or one of the Good People. I frankly don't give a defecation about that, so, at least for me, cultural power is more like smoke and mirrors. And here's a poke for those anxious to think of themselves as Good People: don't most of you also call yourselves Christians of one kind or another? And doesn't our common faith tell us that we are all SINNERS?! At least that's how I understand it and I am a Christian. And I tell you as Christians we are called on to do right, love mercy, etc. and concern ourselves with how we can help other humans and other creatures to live and flourish alongside us--NOT to concern ourselves with Looking Good. Unless, of course, y'all are among the hypocrites of whom Our Lord spoke disparagingly!
Democracy is NOT based on any airy-fairy notion of how 'naturally good' we all are. To use Rachel's word, that's bullpuckey! Democracy seeks to arrange power so that we all have at least a little power but no one has too much. No one person or small group should have enough power to, essentially, privatize the public realm for themselves.
Democracy is also under assault from within, from those politicians bought by billionaires who love to think of themselves as Nietzchean supermen (Like the Nazis loved to.) and by their shills at businesses such as Faux News. The whole staff, with Tuckums and Vanity Hannity in the lead, like to think of themselves in the same way when all they really are is bullies' toadies. What they live on is the same type of patronage that kings and nobles used to give to those who flattered them enough.
Democracy is also now threatened by a slower sort of rot from within. It begins with taking democracy and its forms for granted. This is aggravated dangerously when too many of an ostensible democracy's citizens have to spend most of their waking hours just keeping roofs over their heads and food on their tables. That is now the case here in the US of A and it looks like the same thing is happening back across the Pond in the Mother Island. I hope it's not also happening in Israel.
In fairness, it must be said that democracy also demands more of us. We need to beware of those who would divide us by flattering some and pointing at others as the source of all or most of our problems. We need to check sources when we hear or read things that sound preposterous and figure out how 'interested' those sources are in persuading us of this or that. Democracy needs a large number of citizens engaged with its processes at each point. It also needs an understanding that rights, of both citizens (humans) and of other creatures and life-forms is NOT a finite pie to be divided.
We are now at a point where, to preserve ourselves and civilization, we need to establish Nature as having certain rights as well as ourselves and our pets. Autocracy allows, yea demands, we all not grow but remain overaged children looking to our daddies for our wants and needs. Democracy is the opposite: it needs us to continue to grow as human beings. Under a democracy, when we provide nourishment and services for each other via government, we need to remember that the government is NOT a Big Daddy but OUR government. Government is how we join together to give one another what we all need to live decent lives and which we cannot give each other any other way.
Democracy also needs respect. Respect for its forms, respect for one another as human beings, respect for nature. And also respect for expertise legitimately gained. But we also need the experts to be able to put their expertise in language all or at least most of us can understand. We are right to be suspicious of anyone who claims to be an expert at something but only comes out with a lot of ten-dollar words which s/he probably doesn't know what they mean either. (I'm looking at YOU, Newtie!)
Also, democracy requires that we insist on real answers from our representatives. Anyone going around a question ought to be voted OUT at the next election! Let our questions be answered, but if that representative can tell us WHY s/he answers the way they do, that too deserves respect even if we don't agree with that person's conclusions. And we need to be alert for clues that 'special interests' might have their claws in our representatives too.
Some will claim that they have the right to espouse ideas which give more rights to some than to others. I say, if anyone is whining about their rights not being respected while they seek to abrogate the rights of others ought to be shut down there and then for the lying hypocrites they are. My personal belief is that no one who attacks equal rights or the rule of equal justice under law OR the very rule of law itself ought to be allowed to hide behind those rules when they're cornered. Let anyone who so chooses make a counter-argument to what I write here!
Anne Appelbaum is right: we need to fight for democracy, liberal and social. We need to enforce democratic ways and means domestically and, at least at times, globally as well. There may be a tightrope between the capability of doing that and having an oversized and too-powerful military-industrial-security complex, but we need to walk that walk if democracy is to be defended and extended. In hope, let me remind my readers that real democracies do not go to war with each other.
This is one of my longest posts, but it seems to me to require that this much be written. Read, digest and share. Let's all do what we can to defend and extend democracy so more voices can be heard.