I applaud Tom Weiner and Allen Davis for addressing the serious issue of democratic backsliding in their April 7 article, “Our democracy is in peril.”
I’m teaching a class, “Democracy vs. Autocracy, A Global Struggle,” at Keene State’s Cheshire Academy for Lifelong Learning (CALL) that touches on many of the same themes. On the Weiner/Davis article, I agree with all the points they made, but I would also posit that the seeds of democracy’s decline in America go back at least 50 years with the growing distrust in government caused by the tragedy of the Vietnam War, Watergate and President Ronald Reagan’s “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” inaugural address.
Furthermore, our overly militarized response (both foreign and domestic) to 9/11, the rise of incendiary talk radio which morphed into the shameless, poisonous talking heads of today’s cable news networks, the economic shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, globalization’s broadening of the urban/rural fissures in U.S. society and the malignant influence of internet-peddled disinformation have all significantly challenged democracy. Taken collectively, these and other factors have polarized our citizens to an extent that one side sees the government as the root of all evil, while the other sees Washington as the only hope for rectifying the wrongs they attribute to their opponents. So you have political elites on both sides of the aisle pandering to bases that view their political foes as existential threats.
Explaining how we got into this mess is one thing, figuring out how to get out of it is a challenge of a different magnitude, for which Weiner and Davis provide some worthwhile recommendations. Given the complexity of the issue, it sounds like a subject for a future CALL class.
Robert Beck
Peterborough