PLATTEVILLE, June 3 — The issue date of this newspaper is my birthday, 11 years after I wrote in this space of your favorite weekly newspaper about that birthday that ended with the number 0.
I was going to devote this space to some sort of self-indulgent birthday present such as a treatise on the three cool Steves from the movie “The Tao of Steve” — Austin of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” McGarrett of “Hawaii Five-O” and McQueen the actor — and where I fit in on the spectrum of cool Steves. (Spoiler alert: I don’t.) Or add my own list of Steves from the entertainment world — Bochco of “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue,” Cannell of more 1970s and 1980s detective shows than you can count, Lukather of the rock group Toto, Lawrence of the crooner era of music (birth name Sidney Liebowitz), and of course Spielberg, to name four. Or point out that I was born on an historic American day, the day of the first U.S. spacewalk, as were Mike Gordon of Phish, Broadway actor and composer Jeff Blumenkrantz, and bodybuilder Suzan Kaminga, and a cousin of Mrs. Editor. (The number one song for all of us was, by the way, the Beach Boys’ “Help Me Rhonda.”)
But then I got our Letter this week asking people to send Letters to their favorite weekly newspaper answering the question “What does democracy mean to you?”.
That’s an interesting question with individual definitions. I will take a stab at it first with what democracy means and doesn’t mean. It means in a general sense that you get a vote on who represents yourself from local to federal government. So does everyone else who bothers to vote, including those whose political views are opposite of yours. The winner of any election is the candidate who gets a plurality of votes; in a referendum the side with the majority of votes prevails. You do not get more of a vote or less of a vote than anyone else. In a democracy you are not guaranteed the result you prefer.
Democracy also requires protections of your rights. The Declaration of Independence lists “certain inalienable rights” that include “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and how the British violated those and other rights. Ten years later came the U.S. Constitution, which originally laid out the structure of the federal government to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
It took the Bill of Rights and the rest of the constitutional amendments to spell out more clearly our rights and what the federal government cannot do to us — restrict our speech, worship, or right to air grievances against that government; restrict our rights to own firearms; subject ourselves to unreasonable search and seizure or incriminate ourselves; unfairly put us on trial and subject us to cruel or unusual punishment; restrict our ability both based on our sex or skin color; and so on. “Rights” do not mean anything that has to be taken from someone else (for instance, taxes to fund a government program).
The Constitution also includes a mechanism to make changes to it, even to undo changes demanded by the majority. (Someone once observed that in a pure democracy 50.1 percent of the people could vote to imprison 49.9 percent of the people.) So the 18th Amendment started Prohibition, and once it was seen to be a spectacularly stupid idea, the 21st Amendment undid Prohibition, though it didn’t undo the organized crime that followed from Prohibition.
Nothing about the right “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” is dependent on the definition of “grievances,” which it turns out is usually based on disagreement over the previous election results. So if people who disagree with the 2016 and 2024 election results want to pick, say, Flag Day to protest the winner of those presidential elections, and run the risk of making observers think they’re protesting the country or its flag (because Flag Day happens to be the same day as the current president), well, that’s their right. (A right that based on previous Letters opponents of the current president might not want to grant others, based on reaction to such events as the 2023 pro-Trump rally in Cuba City or the 2024 anti-Trump get-out-the-vote rally in Belmont.)
In contrast to the phrases “United We Stand” and “E Pluribus Unum” we have usually been a more divided country, outside of national crises or tragedies, than some Americans would believe or wish. (Read about previous presidential elections.) Our democracy has been messy far longer than the decade since the current president decided to run for office for the first time, and our democracy will remain messy after he leaves office. One feature, not a bug, about how our republic is set up is that change cannot be accomplished overnight, and may even take years, whether Americans like that or not.
