At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Mrs. Elizabeth Powell of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
In some versions of this story, Mrs. Powell responded, “And why not keep it?” Franklin replied, “Because the people, on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.”
This sentiment, expressed in Franklin’s last statement, was that there was a slippery path from democracy to monarchy. Adherents of this view believed that the people could become prey to a demagogue who would become a dictator.
Levitsky and Ziblatt, in their 2018 book How Democracies Die, argued that these suspect demagogues might be populist outsiders—anti-establishment politicians who claim to represent the people and wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite. Such populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. “They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury the elite and return power to the people.”
When these types of populists win elections, they often assault democratic institutions. Five of the fifteen presidents in Latin America elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2012 were populist outsiders.
All five of these presidents ended up weakening democratic institutions, and that appears to be what is happening here. The new administration is currently assaulting several democratic institutions.
Exhorting us citizens to stand against such assaults on democracy, Robert Reich offers guiding principle statements from Theodore Roosevelt: I offer two.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
Remembering the resolve of DuBois and other African American leaders in the 1910s, we must “close ranks for democracy.” Masha Gessen offers the words of famed poet Langston Hughes in his 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again,” which ended with the following lines:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!