Gongol.com Archives: December 2023
December 11, 2023
The first votes of the 2024 Presidential election are about a month away, and as usual, the effect of the first event is to heighten the attention paid to the race. The early caucuses and primaries are also a good reminder about where voting fits within the structure of a healthy society. ■ Liberties are like the bricks or stones that make up a wall, and democracy is like the mortar. It's possible to stack bricks or stones without any mortar, but to do so takes extraordinary care, and the right push can cause them all to topple. Similarly, liberties are the big, important things that underpin human dignity. ■ Conversely, one can build a wall out of mortar alone, but it isn't very strong on its own -- it cannot go as high and it is easily cracked. Democracy is the same; it can gain traction quickly but end up backsliding if the necessary framework is missing. ■ The quest for civilization depends on building with both elements. Human liberties really are the big things to be secured: Freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of association, and the like. It's plausible that these things could be guaranteed under something other than a democratic system of government, but they would be incredibly unstable. Democracy is what binds the guarantee of popular opinion to the security of the most valuable liberties. ■ That's why we should always take threats to democracy seriously, not lightly -- but also not hyperbolically. The language of "the most important election of your lifetime" is almost invariably a mistake, because democracy is a chain that is tested most where it is weakest, not where it seems to be "most important". ■ Democratic weakness usually comes not from being wrong, but from being indifferent, complacent, or cynical. If every error or difference is amplified out of proportion, then people can become exhausted with the process and lose sight that their small, mathematically insignificant contributions at the ballot box are the mortar holding together the bricks of their liberties.
