This year is yet another year of political upheaval. It is, of course, an election year, which always encourages folks to express more extreme views of their politics in order to attract voters. It is also a year of war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is giving a new generation visible examples of the damage that an autocracy can create in the world. And, of course, it is yet another year of pandemic—perhaps the last year when this particular pandemic will yield as much power as COVID-19 and its cousins have done in recent years, but still it is a dangerous year. It is also a time of ongoing and ever-increasing social, environmental, and technical change, when we need to look at the long-term implications of our actions and attitudes. And, it is a time when technology and social isolation have combined to create a multi-lane media highway for unsupported opinion, false and purposefully mis-leading information, and, ultimately, lies about the issues facing us and how we might best work to build a better world, greatly expanding the chasm between the two main political communities in the United States.
It is not an environment where the goal of an election is to choose between nuanced differences among candidates in order to vote intelligently in the primary elections. The parties have chosen to depict almost all candidates as representing an extreme. And, since every member of the Congressional House of Representatives is up for re-election, it is a challenge for every voter to discover what the candidate truly stands for. That makes this spring a good time to step back and consider some of the basics.
Some Definitions
Perhaps the most basic definition of government is that government is how individuals work together to build and maintain a community—to help each other survive, essentially. Living in community with others is basic to being a human being. Biologically, we must care for our children much longer than most other species. Families become central to the health of individuals over many years. As families inter-mingle due to parenting and sharing work, communities inevitably evolve. The relationships that individuals make with other individuals in order to ensure their common safety and health are what define “community” at the most basic level. A community provides its individual members with protection and with help—whether it be garbage collection, medical care, education, safety, or simply the trust of neighbors—that allows individuals to thrive.
There are many ways that individuals have organized communities over the millennia. Some early American communities even changed their governing structure several times a year as the focus shifted seasonally from agriculture to hunting. That said, today several models stand out. Here are definitions of terms that are tossed around a lot these days:
Let’s start with “community.” The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines community as “the people with common interests living in a particular area” or “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (such as species) in a common location” or “a social state or condition” (among other, more specialized definitions).
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary also defines democracy at a couple of levels. The most basic: “government by the people especially: rule of the majority.” However, the idea of majority rule can be interpreted in several ways. Imagine belonging to an unpopular minority and being “ruled” by the majority—not something that takes a great deal of imagination for many citizens. So, there is also this more refined definition: “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”
Americans live in a constitutional democracy—a republic in which qualified individual citizens may vote at local, state, and national levels for a governor or president and for members of federal and state congresses. These elected representatives then are empowered to work together to make and implement laws of all sorts. While there is no Constitutional limit to the number of political parties who may put up candidates for office, two parties have tended to control the majority of elected officers over the years. Since the 1850s, those have been the Democrat and Republican parties.
The Democratic Party, says the dictionary, is defined as “of or relating to one of the two major political parties in the U.S. evolving in the early 19th century from the anti-federalists and the Democratic-Republican party and associated in modern times with policies of broad social reform and internationalism.”
The Republican Party, on the other hand, is defined as “the one of the two major political parties evolving in the U.S. in the mid-19th century that is usually primarily associated with business, financial, and some agricultural interests and is held to favor a restricted governmental role in economic life.”
Many liberal Democrats maintain that the Republican Party, under the continued influence of Donald Trump, is moving beyond fiscal conservatism and toward fascism. Merriam-Webster defines fascism as “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control” and a fascist government as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” That aside, Republicans tend to celebrate individualism in the sense that individual citizens (and their businesses) should be responsible for their own actions and let others—from individuals to businesses to social and ethnic/racial groups and other societal groupings—be responsible for their own actions.
At the other end of the spectrum, Republicans argue in their political ads that liberal Democrats are pushing the country toward socialism. Merriam-Webster defines socialism as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods” and “a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.” My sense is that the Democratic Party’s sense of itself today reflects its heyday as the political home of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the advocate for social change since then—things like labor unions, voter’s rights, support for access to higher education, civil rights, and health care access, most recently, the Affordable Care Act. These days, critics of the Democratic Party tend to gather these actions together in the term “woke”—trying to deal with embedded societal problems like racism, sexism, etc. However, the Democratic party is far from promoting socialism per se.
In the middle of this is an ongoing cultural struggle between a strong sense of individual freedom, which dates back to the years before the Revolution, on one hand, and, on the other, the need to identify one’s self as a member of a community. For two centuries, we have celebrated the wisdom of the Constitution that “all men are created equal,” but have had difficulty agreeing on the definition of “all men” for that entire time. Similarly, we have had difficulty agreeing on what our obligations are to the other citizens that we hold as being “equal.”
Somewhere in the middle of all this is a tradition of shared willingness to meet and work together across our differences—for individualists to pay taxes for roads that help others get where they want to go and for governments to let some societal practices succeed or fail based on individual, rather than government support—but also to agree that some things can fare well only if we work together and use our government to help those who need help and, in the process, improve life in the community. Safe roads and bridges come to mind, along with K-12 schools, clean water to drink, access to medical care, safety from crime, and other things that protect our shared rights as citizens.
Currently, however, the more extreme views are capturing the headlines and the attention of voters in both parties. To some degree, this focus on the extremes can be attributed to the rapid change in technology. It has become something of a truism that, while technology can change very quickly, it takes much longer for society to adapt to that change. We need to develop the means to ensure that receivers of “news” are better able to distinguish between fact and opinion and, even more important, are better able to judge whether information is true or false, direct or misleading.
The technology that, increasingly, we use to gather information has not been with us for very long. Earlier technology—broadcast radio and TV, mostly—was subject to the “fairness doctrine,” created in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission to (1) ensure that broadcasters presented controversial issues and (2) that they fairly reflected the differing viewpoints on those issues. That policy was withdrawn in 1987, by which time many more media channels were available to the public and the political parties had already begun to use talk shows rather than just the news to promote their positions on social issues. Time has come, some would argue, for us to better distinguish between “news” (which I would argue is best when it is objective) and “talk” (which should be required to label itself as an “op/ed” medium) and to announce on their programs whether they are “news” or “opinion.”
There is much for all of us, regardless of age or position, to learn about how to function as voters and citizens in this always-new environment that technology has given us.
