Democracy is a very fragile form of government. Democracy is defined as “a) the rule of the majority and b) a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation involving free elections.” It is obvious that our nation is slowly drifting away from these hallowed ideas of government by the people.
Joe Biden won the popular vote of the 2020 presidential election by more than 7 million; 51.3% of the citizens who voted chose Biden over the former president. That was a majority!
Even though many Republicans still believe the baseless claim that the presidential election was “stolen,” it was not! I think it is safe to say that after losing 86 lawsuits to contest election results throughout the country, there was no fraud.
I suggest you read “The making of a myth” in The Washington Post. It is a fascinating report on the origin of the “stolen election” mantra used by Trump. The idea was conceived a year before the election by a Republican fundraiser.
The cornerstone of democracy is free elections and peaceful transitions of power. Six months after Joe Biden won a free and fair election, former Security Adviser Michael Flynn endorsed a Myanmar-style coup in the United States, stating, “It should happen here.” To me, it sounds like a call to rebellion, which by the way is an act of treason. Unfortunately, even if Flynn did not really mean it (he did), there is a sizable bunch of naive, uninformed “Trumpers” who could take those words very seriously, as seen on Jan. 6, 2021.
Again, remember that democracy is based on the will of the people. Most Americans believe the world’s oldest and richest democracy should make voting as easy and accessible as possible. In response, the Republicans introduced at least 404 voting-restriction bills in 48 state legislatures and have enacted new voting laws in 12 states.
When most Texans think that laws controlling gun ownership are needed (there were more than 600 mass shootings in 2020 and already 232 this year), the Republican-controlled Senate passes a bill that allows Texans to carry handguns in public without obtaining a license or training. When more than 60% of Americans believe that global warming is real and getting worse, many former elected government officials laughed at the scientists and ignored the data. In fact, it seemed the former administration tried their darndest to undue many of the initiatives that were in place to fight climate change.
Rome did not fall in a day. It did not fall in a decade or even a century; it was a slow, progressive decline of the strengths that made the empire. Romans who lived around 200 A.D. may not have realized they were living during the decline. The same might be happening to us today. This chapter on America has not been written yet for the history books. I pray we all come together to preserve this idea of democracy, the will of the people, the “great experiment.” If not, future generations will spend countless hours analyzing what went wrong, just as we do with Rome.
Scott Sherman lives in Brownsville.
