That’s Not The Way To Run A Country

You won’t often hear me say, or see me put in writing, the first part of this statement very often:

Rick Santorum is right; but not for the reasons he thinks that he is right.

This last week the staunch far-right Republican was quoted as saying:

“Pure Democracy is not the way to run a country.”

He is making this statement from the Republicans’ oft claimed “Constitutional Originalism” viewpoint. At the time the Constitution was written and ratified, the statement was true in all ways.

It was ratified in May of 1787. That was 206 years before the first smartphone was designed by IBM and sold by Bellsouth. It was 184 years prior to the Kenbak-1’s release as what the Computer History Museum recognizes as the world’s first personal computer in 1971. It was 116 years before the Wright brothers took their first flight in 1903. It was 99 years before Karl Benz’s company patented the first automobile powered by a gas engine and Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for a telephone. 1876 was also the same year that Samuel Morse invented the telegraph and the coding system it would use, but it would be another 53 years before a system was built to connect Washington D.C. to Baltimore, MD, which are only 40 miles apart, the rest of the country’s major cities would not be interconnected for many more years and then those lines only connected cities along the railroads.

Radios didn’t really find their ways into homes until the 1920s, the first televisions would be decades after that.

Hell, the Pony Express didn’t even start until 1860, 73 years after the ratification of the Constitution.

When the Constitution was finalized there were a total of 39 representatives from 12 of the 13 states that would become the United States of America. Only 9 of those states agreed to ratify the document, which created the necessary 2/3rds majority. All of those states were Atlantic coastal states, few extended west beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail.

Even within such a small portion of what is now the United States, getting the candidates’ information on every issue to every voter in time for those voters to then leave their homes and begin the multiple day (each way) journey to the nearest place a polling center could be set up was literally impossible. It was also impossible to guarantee the integrity of the ballots long enough for them to be properly transported and tallied on a national level.

Laws could be written, debated, rewritten, voted upon, and enacted long before most average citizens would even hear they were under consideration. They had to have enormous trust in their elected officials.

The framers, understanding that, while also having no advance knowledge of the technological marvels the future would hold, did not build a true democracy, they used the Constitution to establish a democratic republic.

This allowed local voters to elect a local representative that they trusted to best represent them and their interests in the far away national capitol. Attempting to have the entire populace vote on every major law or issue would be even more difficult than having them vote for candidates.

James Madison explained the republic:

“It [the difference] is that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person: in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, must be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.”

While Alexander Hamilton explained how the representatives in that Republic would be chosen through a system of democracy:

“But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”

Thus the grand experiment began.

Unfortunately the working parameters and the control group of that experiment were flawed from the start.

Women, people of color, Native Americans, slaves, etc… all had their voices in that democratic process blocked out, and therefore had no true representation. The same is true for all the people who just lived too far from the town centers to be even slightly well informed and too far from the polling centers to participate.

It would take centuries of time, at least one major civil war, and multiple culture war efforts to truly begin the process of leveling that playing field, and still the “Constitutional Originalists” like Rick Santorum are aggressively fighting against those reforms every step of the way.

This is why Ohio Republicans this week announced that they are planning to pass a law that invalidates the state’s use of democracy to decide the law pertaining to womens’ reproductive rights, specifically abortion access. Since the elected representatives did not write the state constitutional amendment which the people they were supposedly elected to represent voted to approve, they have announced they will be re-writing it in congress and legislating how it can be enacted, if at all.

It is also why not long ago, the Republicans in North Carolina’s state congress began stripping away gubernatorial authority immediately after the state’s voters elected a Democrat party governor with the ability to veto, when necessary, their attempts to legislate problematic policy.

Modern Republican leaders are consistently choosing authoritarian governance over democratic choice.

For a lot of years, we were making progress toward addressing the inherent problems in the social contract we call our Constitution. That progress was far too slow, but it mostly moved in the correct direction. The law finally recognized the right to vote for all people. It would take longer for that right to be enforced and protected, and others still work to strip those protections away.

This brings us back to Mr. Santorum’s quote above. In order for a democratic republic design to be the right way to run our country, the people must be able to maintain faith in both the system of selecting their representation and the fact that those representatives will work with integrity to represent the needs and wishes of all their constituents to the best of their ability.

I believe a properly working democratic republic is still the ideal system of governance for America.

For it to work properly though, we need to update our social contract.

It must recognize that when we say “all people,” we as a nation mean more than just “White male Christian landowners,” and include all people regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual identity, or any other factor that could be used to arbitrarily oppress a specific group of people. It also shouldn’t diminish any group to only 1/3 the value of another when they do get a voice.

It must recognize that we currently have the means for instantaneous information exchange on mass scale and scope which could be used to keep voter’s informed as well as collect their votes. However, we must ensure broadband access and the means to use it are available and affordably accessible to all voting eligible citizens as part of that process. There must also be some way of vetting the veracity of the information as it is distributed.

It should reflect that there is little need for our elected federal officials not to spend the vast majority of their time in the states they represent. The vast majority of their work can be done via secure telephone, video-conferencing, email, and intranet document share. Doing so would serve to increase accountability through the Freedom of Information act because there would be an email trail and video logs of meetings, eliminating the secretive backroom swindling that historically causes so many problems. Specific committees could meet in person a few times a year, in much the same way major national and international corporations manage to operate. They could even rotate which state would host those meetings so they could all be in better contact with the people they represent than they are when sequestered in Washington D.C.

It would be a relatively simple thing to allow people to vote online. If done properly, it certainly wouldn’t be any less secure or trustworthy than paper ballot voting. It would also eliminate lines and counting delays, under-staffing of polling stations, early call manipulation, on-site voter intimidation and suppression, issues with absentee ballots, shortages of ballots at polling centers, and more of the many problems inherent with paper ballots. It would allow people to vote regardless of work schedules, mass transit schedules and routes, and polling locations.

Even with all that ability, true democracy — a system giving every single person a vote on every single issue and decision — would absolutely be untenable and no way to maintain international diplomacy or national security.

However, that’s not what Republicans like Rick Santorum mean when they say “Pure democracy is not the way to run a country.” That is why they have spent years attacking election oversight and the Voter’s Rights Act while they gerrymander voting districts. They want to remove the voice of the people from the process as much as is possible for them to do in order to establish an authoritarian Republic.

And that, my friends, is absolutely not the way to run our country.

P.S. You can either thank or blame (whichever you feel is appropriate) my friend digital raconteur and pizza chef, photojournalist, filmmaker, and Assistant Professor at University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media, Michael Fagans for initiating the discussion that inspired this article but you have to blame me for the opinions, views, and grammar. You can blame spellcheck for the typos.