What passes in the US for a "free market democracy" is enough to reduce anyone to a hopeless puddle of befuddlement. Some people, somehow, have not only managed to assemble relatively decent personal "BS detectors" but have also honed their ability to communicate some clarity to the rest of us. Charlie Pierce of my own Commonwealth (God Save It!) is one of those.
Read
Pierce's blog post about the purpose of super delegates, a recent invention of the Democratic Party. Spoiler Alert: it never had 'nuthin to do with democracy (intentional double negative because it was all about democracy, but . . .) This is stuff that teachers need to grapple with (if only in their own serious reflections) because it has profound affect on what and how we teach . . .
Knowing a little history truly is a
dangerous thing, but a good start would be to have every high school graduate learn that the Madisonian master plan of 1787 was designed to limit most possible dangers from any possible emergence of a specter which has always been so fearsome to landed or moneyed elites - and to the majority of skilled mandarins that serve their interests.
Hamilton was forthright in his belief that the people were "a great beast". He was more qualified to say stuff like that then were Madison, Jefferson, or Washington, all slaveholding plantation lords. Hamilton, emerging from truly humble beginnings, could claim a familiarity with the common sort that would have rung quite false in utterances from natural-born members of the "master class".
Speaking of "false ringing", the most insidious injuries to possibilities for democracy come from shallow, thoughtless, and completely groundless romanticizing of the ideal: so lamentably prevalent in high school civics lessons and campaign stump speeches. Democracy may well sometimes win truly inspiring victories once or twice in every few generations, but mostly it's a slow, dirty, frustrating, heartbreaking, and thankless slog against the sharp-elbowed opportunists, the superciliously privileged, the well-financed exploiters, the drunken street bullies and brawlers, the false-hearted demagogues (funded by the aforementioned exploiters and bolstered by the aforementioned brawlers) but mostly against the crisscrossing currents of confusion, contradiction, cant, ignorance, desperation, despair, and distraction that is
the sea we little fishies
swim in.
Hearkening back to "BS detectors", it's often the most unschooled, and the least "formally articulate" who have the best internalized warning systems. That might be because such are more needed for survival when one lacks the systemic credentials. Or it might also, sadly but credibly, be because schooling never successfully suppressed their native wit or deluged them with intensive, sense destroying, indoctrination. How many "dropouts" (and even graduates) look back at (at least some of) their schooling as a farrago of stultifying nonsense?
But the Madisonian plan could never - and was never designed so as to totally -foreclose the possibility of democracy. The reasons for that are profound and not categorically uplifting. Suffice it to say that democracy (whether in the good ole' US of A or in the "golden age" of classical Athens) has always been deeply rooted and intertwined with war and militarism. (So even when a veteran, who fought in a war you have reason to believe was motivated by criminal imperialism, says he fought for "your" freedom, he's still somewhat correct - even if you are too!) On a less dismal note, the possibility of democracy can never be totally foreclosed because of the profoundly unknowable, unlimitable nature of human existence based as it on foundationless quantum characteristics of the building blocks of "nature" which, as we are slowly learning, constantly generate new possibilities from what appears(to us) to be "nothingness".
So, yes. Our leaders will betray us, and they will keep on betraying us, again and again - and again, even in the unlikely event that we could ever contrive to give them good reason to safely trust us as a reliable bulwark to protect and defend the ideals associated with principles of self rule. (Sing along now! Did anybody seeeee my good friend . . . ?)
If democracy is not the road itself, it is a goal that shimmers only faintly on a far horizon. But the Madisonian architecture of our Constitution, by limiting both government and democracy, may still well be humanity's last best hope for democracy and for meaningful self rule. if democracy had no possibility here, our leaders would not work so hard to head it off. And the failures and consequences of their fatuous attempts are glaringly manifest in this, absurdly disconcerting, election year.
