Trump and the Failure of Democracy

[Trump and the Failure of Democracy (or why You Should be a Republican)]

Trigger Warnings: Deep thinking, stark language, run-on sentences. The following is a thought exercise, not a call for social revolution with a link at the bottom to a GoFundMe page. I invite you to read and consider the following.

Rule Number One of Life: People Are Stupid.

I’m not talking about intelligence. People are misinformed, or dare I say ignorant. Before you berate me or nod your head off in agreement, everyone is included: you, me, your roommate, the ditzy girl in front of you in the Starbucks line and the department head with three PhDs they got just for kicks. There is no one in society who is knows everything. This becomes a big problem when we have a system that assumes that we do when we’re asked to form our government every time we step into the polling booth.

What has amazed me about Trump’s campaign is how much it feeds off of anger. Exit poll after poll says that those who voted for him voted not because they thought he was the best candidate, but because we, as a nation, are angry. What are we angry about? A number of things, be it a Tea Party, neo-conservative narrative of a government determined to suppress traditional values in favor of a Marxist utopia, or a left-wing portrayal of a government bought out by Wall Street cronies who have set in place an oligarchical hegemony.

Lest I seem have leaped onto the social media bandwagon of Trump demonization, let me aim for the other side of the race. I would never place Bernie Sanders in the same category as The Donald, but his supporters have a similar profile as the Trumpets. Many students, I fear, have “felt the Bern” because of his trove of idealistic solutions to the problems my generation faces. Most of these ideas are realistically unfeasible or will never survive any imaginable configuration of Congress. But why has Sanders attracted so many students? Because there is enough ignorant anger among a generation who desperately believe any politician’s propaganda, left of right, and buy into it, hook, line and sinker.

The ultimate fault of a pure democracy is that it gives the average, stupid citizen too much power. People can be easily swayed and bent to the will of those who happen to be smarter than your average bear. Further reading: The French Revolution, Nazi Germany, American Idol. Make no mistake, the United States of America is not a democracy. We are a republic with a few democratic elements. When we decide our leaders each November, we are not trying to ram our opinions through the ballot box. Instead, the original intention of democratically selecting people to represent us in the republic was to say, “Hey, I’m not qualified to run the government. I got my own life and my own issues, I don’t have the time to decide the policies that are best for the country, so I choose this smart person to do the job for me.” This is how the structure of our government was designed to circumvent the negative possibilities of a pure democracy.

“Hold up”, you may be saying, “Do you want to be a slave to our politicians?” Look around you, I respond, next time you’re on your way to class. Does that Arts Management major know how to run the Federal Reserve? Do those frat guys on that golf cart know the best way to fix Welfare? Or, judging by how I’ve written this article, do you want me to be in charge of American diplomacy? If the answer is no, then why are we so insistent that our candidates must radically overhaul the system so “our voices can be heard”? I invited you to separate what you think a democracy is (a Cold War buzzword for a Western-style government, as opposed to those dirty Soviets) and realize the implications of the common person running the country. It has been the stupidity of an angry mob that has carried Trump this far into the election. We, the people, were meant to use our democratic voting right to oust bad politicians and allow new ones to try again, not to hijack our republic and mold it into a chaotic nightmare.

All things considered, maybe it’s time to sit down and reexamine the way we think about the relationship between society and government. I would call myself a Republican in the strictest sense of the word, semantically disconnected from the party that’s about to split itself in two over a reality TV star. Maybe you should think twice about pure democracy, too. After all, in the words of Frank Underwood, “Democracy is so overrated”.