By Philip S. Hall, Spearfish, S.D.
Democracy is a wonderful, empowering and uplifting gift that we the people have given ourselves. However, it is as fragile as it is beautiful.
At times our democracy has depended on the just-right person appearing at each of several precarious moments in our history. Such was the case at the dawning of our democracy, specifically July 3, 1775, when George Washington accepted the daunting task of commanding the Continental Army.
History suggests no other man could have welded our citizen-farmers into an army that eventually, after a long struggle, defeated what was, at the time, the best trained, best equipped army in the world. Washington was able to give us our nascent democracy because he was a selfless man of uncommon integrity and honesty.
Not quite a hundred years passed when, in February 1861, seven southern states succeeded from the Union, threatening to rip apart the United States of America. That likely would have happened had it not been for our newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, a man of conviction and tenacity with an unfailing moral compass.
The next threat against our democracy came in 1932 when our country was nearly washed from its moorings by a worldwide depression. Unemployment spiked to 24 percent and ten thousand banks failed. To compound the economic crisis, the American West beyond the 100th meridian entered into a decade-long drought.
In response, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt thought outside the box to develop innovative, bold programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps that provided jobs to 300,000 unemployed young men; the Emergency Relief Administration that bought emaciated cattle from bankrupt farmers and ranchers; and the Works Progress Administration that put 3.5 million people to work, primarily at infrastructure projects.
When Roosevelt announced plans to implement graduated taxing to redistribute wealth from the ultra-rich to the poor, DuPont, J.P. Morgan, and other ultra-rich tried to launch a military coup that would remove Roosevelt and install a fascist government. They were nearly successful in doing so.
It seems threats to our democracy arrive every other generation. In 2020, we are facing yet another threat. This threat is not because there are differences of opinion on the usefulness of trade wars, whether the current changes in our climate are human caused, or even purported disregard of our hallowed constitution.
Rather, our democracy is endangered because our elected officials at almost all levels of government have become so polarized that they spend their time and energy launching vitriolic diatribes against each other instead of finding bipartisan compromises that address the people’s pressing issues.
They can do this because we, the citizens of this country, have entrenched ourselves into two tribal camps, Fort R and Fort D. We have surrounded our ideological fortresses with alligator-filled moats of emotion that effectively fend off logic that would expose inconsistencies in our beliefs and keep out information and objective evidence that would reveal the flaws in our belief systems.
The price of democracy is eternal vigilance. If our democracy is going to survive, we, the citizens, must come out of our ideological fortresses of self-centered interests and support at all levels people who are committed to governing by the rule of law, solving problems by finding consensus, and upholding the institutions that enable us to have a democracy.
We have done it before. We can do it again.
Philip S. Hall, Ph.D., of Spearfish, is a licensed psychologist with experience working with troubled children and adolescents. This article was originally published in the Feb. 26 edition of the Rapid City Journal.
