Democracy SOS

From 2016 through 2020, and then with ever increasing momentum since the election, we have learned how fragile our democracy is. We have come to understand that many of our democratic processes simply depend on people doing the right thing. Whether it’s our Department of Justice, the Centers for Disease Control, or our elections process, we depend on the service of professionals who are committed to the functioning of our democracy, even if their candidate loses this particular election. A system where the president demands personal loyalty from civil servants or refuses to accept election results isn’t a democracy – it’s more like a banana republic.

After four years of our president claiming that no election he lost could possibly be honest, his supporters were primed to believe anything. The absurdity started election night. Anyone who didn’t sleep through 2020 knew that Republicans told their people to vote in person on election day; Democrats told their people to vote by mail. Simple physics dictated that the Democrats’ votes would come in more slowly. But sure enough, the polls in California had barely closed when people who knew better started screaming “now we can see the Democrats stealing the election,” based on nothing but the fact that Democrat votes were – inevitably – coming in later.

Until January 6, the defeated presidential candidate and his team pressured politicians and election officials to interfere in the vote count. Republican and Democratic election officials certified that the election they were responsible for was honest; dozens of recounts and audits showed it was a good count; more than 50 judges appointed by the 45th president and others scornfully threw out their lawsuits, and, finally, the defeated candidate’s lawyers admitted that their own claims were baseless. But it didn’t matter: the “Big Lie” kept spreading.

In the end, our democracy survived the 2020 election – just barely. Conscientious people, many of them Republicans, honored their oath of office and did their jobs. State legislators pressured to throw out millions of votes and choose their own winning candidate felt constrained by the fact that state law gave them no authority to do this. Some politicians discovered they can’t simply replace a secretary of state who refuses to manufacture votes. And enough Republican election officials resisted the temptation – and pressure – to refuse to certify election results.

Fortunately, on January 6, enough people agreed that a routine opening and validation of certified election results didn’t provide an excuse to invalidate an entire national election and the system – finally – did what it was set up to do. But even then, over half the Republican members of Congress voted to throw out millions of votes and have their own national election with an electorate of only 538 people.

After our close call in 2020, many state legislatures have begun to remove the protections that saved the 2020 elections. State legislature can’t override the will of the people and simply pick the winner? Politicians can’t get rid of state and county election officials? Don’t worry, we can fix that. Does anyone believe that if Republicans control both the House and Senate on January 20, 2025, that there is any chance a Democrat will be elected president, no matter what the vote is?

A big part of the problem is that we have a population that has little knowledge of how and why our government works or how to know when they are being fed false information. It’s not true that “Our schools don’t teach government or history anymore,” but they certainly don’t teach the right things.

Our students need to understand why checks and balances are so important, why it matters that power is dispersed so that different agencies and branches are a check on each other, why a president who demands total loyalty is a bad thing. They need to understand why compromise is so important, why people who say “We’re not here to compromise, we’re here to get things done” don’t understand our government and will never get things done.

People need to understand what the government does. It is so easy for a person who uses the Internet, drives on roads, takes the mortgage deduction on their taxes, uses libraries and weather reports, vacations in national parks, and applies for Pell grants to get their kids through college to say “I worked for everything I ever got, I never took a thing from the government.”

Finally, there is a real “critical thinking” deficit. People don’t know how to evaluate information and spot the real “fake news.” It is ironic that schools do such a poor job of civics education when the original purpose of free public education was to prepare children to be informed citizens.

Our democracy is in deep trouble. We need a better educated public that is willing to fight to save it.

Leon Reed is a retired US Senate aide (back when the Senate was a functioning legislative body) and history teacher. He is the chair of Gettysburg Democracy for America.