Democracy in Action

My dad grew up in Spain under the Franco dictatorship. To this day, Spaniards of that era still remember the day, Feb 23rd, 1981, when armed Guardia Civil officers stormed the Congress of Deputies in an attempt to overthrow Spain’s first democratically elected government.

But Spain was a fragile nation in 1981, still reeling from the trauma of a horrific civil war and 4 decades of military dictatorship that had left it alienated from its European neighbors newly formed Union. While frightening, the 1981 Golpe was comprehensible, the growing pains of an infant democracy.

Never in my life could I have imagined experiencing anything remotely like that here, in the United States.

America… the shining city on a hill. The beacon of democracy. The place people from all corners of the globe would look to as the example of what could be. Today, I find myself wondering can we be?

These stories now seem more like myths. The shining city on a hill leaves a shadow that drapes over the marginalized and masks the inequities and corruption on which it stands. The beacon of democracy disenfranchises voters and wages unauthorized wars.

But I see another America too. I see a resilient democracy that has withstood astounding attempts to tear it down. Yes, the baseless claims of election fraud are maddening and the militant attack on the peoples’ House and process unforgivable, but we are still standing. Our judges dismissed egregious lawsuits, our Congress reconvened to complete the constitutional process that certified our election and our voices were heard, whether they came from the ballot box or the mailbox. The system endured. It did precisely what it was supposed to do. It is bent, very bent, but it is not broken.

Nonetheless, a failure of this magnitude will take a long time to recover from. How did we allow the President and his enablers to peddle outrageous lies for months, plunging an already vulnerable population of loyalists further into his deluded alternate universe? Why were local police so woefully unprepared and underequipped to defend themselves and the entire legislative branch of our government?

And how can so many, too many, observers justify an armed insurrection at the State Capitol incited by the President by comparing it to some of the BLM protests that fractured into looting and violence? There are no moral equivalencies to be made here and continuing to obsess over the hypocrisy we’ve seen from both sides is not only unproductive, it’s insanely dangerous.

We must dig deep to evaluate the myriad forces that brought our democracy to its knees, because all know that this damage didn’t happen overnight. Decades of undemocratic actions by all players have eroded public faith in our institutions, turned believers into cynics and fanned the flames of conspiracy theorists. We are no longer the example for other nations, we are the clown.

Following Watergate, trust in government plummeted from its New Deal era high and never fully recovered. Perhaps it’s my youth speaking, but a few bandits breaking into a political campaign office feels like a joke compared to hundreds of armed insurgents storming the capitol. How much lower can we possibly fall? I hope I never answer that question. Yet in the midst of this darkness there are glimmers of light. Each election cycle the electorate grows. The 2020 election saw the largest voter turnout yet and our Congress is increasingly becoming more representative of the constituents it serves. It will be up to this new generation of leaders, and the young voters who put them there, to continue this upwards climb. We are by no means out of the woods yet, not even close. At this juncture it’s vital we hold on to this momentum and continue moving forward. We’ve seen how fragile our democracy really is - how much of it rests on traditions and norms and how difficult enforcing them can be. Upholding democracy is hard work. It requires the consistent engagement of an informed electorate. But if this is the system we want (and I’m pretty confident most of us do) then we cannot afford to be apathetic, lest we relinquish our power to those who aren’t. If there’s one lesson that I’ll carry with me it’s that democracy doesn’t happen every 4 years. It happens every single day.