Cultural Survival Skills

Why Democracy Is Failing in America

One of the most vexing mysteries of human history remains how to create a socioculture that offers the greatest freedoms, social welfare, health, personal safety, and economic security for the greatest number of citizens…..for all time.

Psychology, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, Criminology, Political Science, Economics, Military Science, and all the other sciences, are all (separately or together) light years from solving this great human conundrum.

It was therefore with rising hopes that I read Francis Fukuyama’s stunning 1992 book: The end of history and the Last Man. Fukuyama argued that humanity had tried all of the potential forms of government and they had all failed badly. But, generally speaking, democracy had been the most successful and was on the rise for natural reasons and therefore would come to be the predominant organization of sociaocultures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

I read this convincing book in the mid-1990’s, but have since witnessed the steep decline of all of Western Culture and, most personally, United States of America. This decline has been strongly correlated with  the loss of the strong Judeo/Christian influences that Fukuyama judged was historically Western democracy’s superstructure.

I have now read, repeatedly, that history records democracies normally do not last much longer than 200 to 300 years.

It is thought that democracies contain the seeds of their own destruction and they grow, God Forbid, into socialism! Another form of government markedly prone to failure, often replaced by dictatorships or other forms of tyrannical governments.

This is precisely the argument that John Bowman convincingly makes in his 2016 book entitled: Democracy: And Why It Will Fail in America.

What follows are Bowman’s abstracted samples of the six reasons that Democracies fail.  

It is essential that all American’s recognize these common failings in their own socioculture and work to repair them.

1. THE LOSS OF FREEDOM. “The largest, most powerful and richest centralized government in the world increasingly controls all aspects of citizens’ lives, and they find themselves increasingly caught in a web of devised artificial rules and regulations promulgated by legislators and faceless Washington bureaucrats. Governmental regulations have exploded over the past one hundred years, filling volumes and showing no sign of abating.” (Kindle Loc. 4533)
2. INEQUALITY. “Like freedom, Americans are losing equality. Democracy is a political system that is trying to solve an unsolvable equation involving freedom, equality and nature. Each part of the equation opposes the others.; Freedom does not exist in nature and does not bring equality, equality does not exist in nature and often takes freedom, and nature offers neither freedom nor equality.” (Kindle Loc. 4614)
3. INJUSTICE. “With the law detached from morality and just a social fact justified under positive jurisprudence it is only natural that the free-floating concept of social justice emerges.” (Kindle Loc. 4723) “So what is social justice? various sources describe it as public education, immigration reform, equality for homosexuals, economic justice for the poor and working families, a woman’s right to equal pay, diversity, the right to equitable treatment, human rights, equal opportunity, equality, the fair allocation of community’s resources and the right not to be discriminated against based on gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, age, race, belief, disability, location social class, or socioeconomic circumstances. Social justice is a potpourri of wishes and desires individuals or sects that are not equal in all respects espouse, hence its natural occurrence in late democracy. It does not bring justice to all but only those sects claiming justice. it does not account for ability, effort, industry or personal responsibility, all of which it derides as as characteristics and concepts enabling inequalities in society.” ( Kindle Loc. 4736).
4. CONCENTRATION OF POWER. “Jefferson believed that history does not teach us but rather only warns us, and one such warning must be the concentration of governmental power, which is inimical and ultimately fatal to democracy. Tocqueville warned of concentrated power in democracy that suppresses liberty, and George Orwell, in 1984, famously described an omnipresent , controlling, manipulative and surveilling Big Brother government that punished individualism and took liberty.” (Kindle Loc. 4918)
5. RELATIVE MORALITY. “Democracy has caused America to lose her moral compass, and one consequence is injustice, which inevitably leads to divisiveness. One only need to survey the newspapers in late American democracy to see the discord and divisiveness that have become chronic. Divisiveness is democracy’s Achilles heel, and it will be discussed next.” (Kindle Loc. 5112)
6. DIVISIVENESS. “America has become a country permeated with divisiveness. This is not a single-issue divisiveness but rather one that represents deep philosophic differences about the nature of the world, how we ought to live, the nature of man, the constitution of justice, the function of government and what it means to be free. It is a fundamental collision over what it is to be human.” (Kindle Loc. 5122)  “This is a kind of divisive internal strife that occurred in ancient democracies like Athens, republican Rome, northern Italy and France before they failed. It is also the kind of faction that many historic thinkers have warned against. Plato, Aristotle, Tocqueville, Madison, Hobbes and Edward Gibbon are just a few who believed democracy brought chaos, instability, faction and contention.” (Kindle Loc. 5127)

Do you see these things happening in America?

If you do, you must vote against the leftist/radical-liberal/progressive forces of American democracy’s destruction?.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.      6/19/17