A consensus in our fractured body politic is that democracy is in peril. Yet a 2021 poll found that 42 percent of Republicans viewed Democrats as a "serious threat" to democracy, while 41 percent of Democrats so regarded Republicans.
There are palpable threats to democracy: voter suppression, gerrymandering, intransigent and obstructionist legislators, unbridled cowboy capitalism, dark campaign money, and foreign subterfuge. There is a crucial distinction between these real threats and the baseless belief that the 2020 election was fraudulent, the belief of 72 percent of Republicans. In a 2022 poll by the COVID States Project, one out of 10 insisted that violence against government was needed "right now."
Democracy confronts a crisis perhaps not witnessed since the Civil War. The fates of ancient Athens and the Roman Republic, along with the cautionary counsel of our Founding Fathers on the fragility of democracy, are instructive.
In the first democracy, Athenians resolved to make Athens great again after its humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War by executing Socrates for teaching his students to ask questions. Much later Socrates was appreciated — posthumously exonerated and venerated as a hero equal to the courageous Athenian hoplites who defended Greece against the formidable Persian Empire at Marathon. But with the death of free inquiry personified by Socrates, democracy perished in Athens.
Our own democracy depends on citizens apprenticed in schools of free inquiry. Can democracy survive when civics education is subordinated to training workers for servitude to commerce? Or when history is sanitized into comfortable fairy tales by "patriotic" curriculums reminiscent of Soviet agitprop? And when teachers are surveilled and purged of deviations from such? (See PEN America's 2021 report "Educational Gag Orders.")
Can democracy endure as our news sources devolve into profit-driven consumer commodities, audiences entertained by charlatans concerned only with ratings and ingesting only what satisfies the appetite and confirms partisan biases? Ignorance renders citizens easy prey to demagogues like Sinclair Lewis's Sen. Buzz Windrip in It Can't Happen Here and Andy Griffith's charlatan in A Face in the Crowd.
For half a millennium, the ancient Romans had a republic that was one model, albeit flawed, for our constitutional government. The demise of the Roman Republic was, unlike the violent deposition of democracy by the Jacobins in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution or the Nazis in Germany's Weimar Republic, more insidious but no less lethal.
Senators who assassinated Julius Caesar were not motivated to save the Republic but to avenge Caesar for his reforms that benefited the plebeians at the expense of their patrician privileges. Caesar calculated that with his largesse to plebeians, he could control opposition senators and seize power as king. After all, Caesar had his Senate sycophants who, according to historian Will Durant, "patriotically denounced the destruction of a liberty that had fattened their purses... Liberty had become license. The smell of money and an ill-informed citizenry," pliant from bread and circuses, doomed the Republic, replaced by dynastic, deified imperial rule, partially the cause of Rome's decline.
Ignorance renders citizens easy prey to demagogues like Sinclair Lewis's Sen. Buzz Windrip in It Can't Happen Here and Andy Griffith's charlatan in A Face in the Crowd.
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Today scholars of our own "imperial presidency" contend that the expansion of unchecked executive powers — secrecy, unilateral use of war powers, and executive orders/"privilege" — have undermined the constitution to the detriment of democracy. And now, as in imperial Rome, the culture offers ample ways to distract and amuse ourselves as Gucci-accessorized new barbarians pillage with impunity.
Be clear: Common Athenians and Romans, either actively colluding with Athenian aristocrats and Roman patricians or passively acquiescing, were the willing or unwitting executioners of democracy. Then and now, that citizens would consciously subvert their own political power by opting for authoritarian rule seems folly.
Ancient thinkers were skeptical that citizens could remain rational to govern themselves, especially during crises. Our Founding Fathers feared that the republic would succumb to the irrational, the dark visceral of our lesser angels.
Thomas Jefferson believed, according to Fears of a Setting Sun (2021), that if "luxury and privilege were held at bay and... citizens properly educated," the republic could weather a storm. When truth is relative to one's tribal affiliation, what constitutes "properly educated" remains divisively acrimonious. James Madison feared a tyranny of a majority.
That the Jan. 6 insurrection is regarded by Republicans as "legitimate public discourse" confirms these early trepidations. And it is untenable to espouse democracy while practicing a "freedom for me but not for thee" ethos. Recall the tensions inherent in the antebellum South's "peculiar institution" that ignited the Civil War.
If history instructs, and given our immutable nature, we will again drift into a new conflagration. After it is extinguished — and if the democracy recovers — we will profess that we have learned from the past and, with the predictable onset of historical amnesia, wonder how it could have ever happened here. ♦
John Hagney is a retired history teacher, spending 45 years at Lewis and Clark High School. He was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar Distinguished Teacher and published an oral history of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms that has been translated into six languages.
