The greatest threat to democracy isn’t what you think it is

The greatest threat to American democracy isn’t ISIS or Russia or even Canada (we’ve got our eye on you) but the latest iteration of the Republican Party. What may have been a grand old party in Lincoln’s days has turned into a rats nest of intolerant, anti-intellectual nationalists with a very undemocratic agenda of handing the reins of this country’s governance over to a handful of fascist billionaires.

Today’s Republican party has been put in a half nelson by rabid Tea Partiers who can’t tolerate the egalitarian nature of true democracy and who seem to prefer a feudal system. This goal just happens to align nicely with the desires of conservative “privatize everything” billionaires who, thanks to the Supreme Court, lavish money on sympathetic candidates and organizations.

Unable to win elections legitimately, Republicans at all levels of government are doing everything in their power to game elections in their favor, from gerrymandering to voter ID laws to election day shenanigans like sending democratic voters inaccurate information about poling places and times. They have to cheat to win, and they are more than willing to turn to the sinister arts of deception to get what they want.

And you can’t reason with these people. They don’t accept the existence of objective reality and have created their own imaginary world based in Ayn Randion greed, selective Christian beliefs and a pathological hatred of government. They are not interested in compromise and would rather die a martyr’s death than give an inch to the non-believers (sound familiar?). Their intransigence in Congress, coupled with their hatred of Obama, has nearly brought our government to a standstill. The popularity of Congress among Americans is at the lowest point it’s ever been.

What can we do when one of the two major political parties in America is a threat to our democratic principals? If America was working like it should, we would be able to demonstrate our desires through the ballot box, but, of course, America is not working the way it should, and the will of the majority is being usurped by the one percent and their truckloads of money. Unfortunately, Americans are too complacent and ill-informed to get up out of their La-Z-Boys and demand change. Until they are willing to stand up and be counted, Republicans will continue chipping away at our democracy until one day — surprise! Welcome to Oceania, Citizen 44659.

There is a serious glitch in the Matrix

Something is wrong. Very wrong. Somehow we ended up with a Congress that is diametrically opposed to the will of the majority of Americans. This isn’t supposed to happen in a democracy, but it has, which calls into question whether we can truly call ourselves a democracy anymore.

The national research firm Hart Research Associates polled 1,101 American voters and found that 72 percent strongly support more pollution controls, 70 percent strongly support protecting public lands like monuments and wildlife refuge areas, and 66 percent support the expansion of wind, solar, and renewable energy development. Sixty percent of voters surveyed also said they strongly supported setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — a number that rose to 82 percent when including voters who said they somewhat support that proposal.

Republicans in Congress oppose every one of the initiatives that the voters favored by a majority. Our electoral system is clearly broken, and it’s not just the whining of sore loser Democrats. The polls bear us out. I would guess that polls taken involving any number of issues beyond the environment would show similar results.

True, meaningful campaign finance reform has always been at the top of my “most important issues” list. We need to overturn Citizen United, but we must go beyond that to do even more to take huge sums of private money out of our elections.

 The glitch in the Matrix can be repaired, but it will take political courage to fix it, and sadly, courage in Washington today is in very short supply.