Guest Post by Allan Brownfeld - THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN POLITICS, WHICH MANY OF THE FOUNDERS FEARED -

THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN POLITICS, WHICH MANY OF THE FOUNDERS FEARED by Allan C.Brownfeld ———————————————————————————————————————- There can be little reason to doubt that American political life is in serious decline. After I graduated from law school, I spent a number of years working in both the U.S.Senate and the House of Representatives. I worked with such Republicans as Charles Mathias of Maryland, Philip Crane of Illinois and served as assistant to the research director of the House Republican Conference. Board members of the conference included George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, both of whom went on to become president. I also worked with one Democrat,Sen.Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, and was his representative on the Senate Internal Security subcommittee. In that capacity, during the Vietnam war, I wrote the U.S.Senate report on the New Left. In those years, Republicans and Democrats did not view one another as “enemies,” as many do now. I do not remember those members of Congress with whom I worked thinking of those in the other party in hostile terms, as many do at the present time. Instead, they were busy building coalitions on a number of issues. They worked together and were on good terms. Think of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. Together, Republicans and Democrats won the Cold War and advanced civil rights and ended segregation. The chaos in Congress at the present time is clear to all. After weeks without a Speaker, the House of Representatives has finally chosen a Speaker almost unknown to his colleagues, with very little congressional experience. Rep. Mike Johnson, it seems, was acceptable because he was unknown on Capitol Hill. During the roll call vote on the House floor, Rep. Kay Granger (R-Tex.), chair of the Appropriations Committee, rose and mistakenly voted for “Mike Rogers”—-the chairman of the Armed Services Committee—-before correcting herself to Mike Johnson. Rep.Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), in a statement congratulating the new speaker, called him “Jim Johnson.” Sen.Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, told CNN that she would have to Google him. In only his seventh year in Congress, Johnson is the least experienced Speaker in a century and a half. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes that, “…three weeks before the next deadline to avoid a government shutdown, Republicans have elected a no-name speaker with no experience and no agreement on a way forward.” In a recent interview, former Republican Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger recalled that when he first came to the U.S., American politics was in serious decline. John F.Kennedy had been assassinated. A few years later, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered. He recalls that, “We came out of all that. Ronald Reagan provided the leadership to bring us back…We need a new generation of leaders to bring both of the political parties together. There is a real danger in demonizing the other side. It is important to bring people together.” The decline of Congress can be seen in the case of Rep. George Santos (R-NY) who appeared in court in late October pleading not guilty to 23 federal charges. The allegations include 10 new felony counts including money laundering and identity thefts related to his congressional races, coming after a guilty plea from Santos’s campaign treasurer for helping the lawmaker commit these alleged crimes. “He should absolutely resign,” said former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA). Some politically endangered Republicans from Santos’s neighboring districts, tired of being tied to the embarrassing freshman, plan to force an expulsion vote for the full House. This, however, seems unlikely. During more than 230 years of congressional history, just five members of the House : three for disloyalty to the Union during the Civil War and two in the last 45 years after they had been convicted in federal court in felony corruption cases, have been removed. In the years I worked in Congress, I don’t remember any members receiving death threats. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated about 7,500 cases of potential threats against members of Congress in 2022. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger says that, “This has resulted in a necessary expansion of not only our investigative capabilities but our protection responsibilities as well. While that work Is ongoing, everyone continuing to decrease violent political rhetoric across the country is the best way to keep everyone safe.” Referring to the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he warns that this could happen again. Our government, almost 250 years old, is the oldest form of government in the contemporary world. No other people today live under the same form of government which existed in their country 250 years ago. Only Americans. But, historically, we have seen that democratic societies have self-destructed. Consider Athens and Rome. More than 200 years ago, the British historian Alexander Tytler wrote: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury—-with the result that democracy collapses over a loose fiscal policy,always to be followed by a dictatorship.” In Tytler’s view, the average age of the world’s few democracies was around 200 years. Thomas Jefferson thought it would be only a matter of time before the American system of government degenerated into an “elective despotism.” He warned that citizens should act now in order to make sure that “the wolf was kept out of the fold.” As early as 1785, he wrote: “Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume. The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with the three branches of of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only, will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them. They (the assembly) should look forward to a time, and that a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.” In a 2023 report, “Understanding Democratic decline in the United States,” the Brookings Institution declares that, “The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions: election manipulation and executive overreach…Most obviously, after the 2020 election, the sitting president, despite admitting privately that he had lost, attempted to subvert the results and remain in office. But democratic erosion in the U.S. is not synonymous with Donald Trump. Since 2010, state legislatures have instituted laws intended to reduce voters’ access to the ballot, politicize election administration, and foreclose electoral competition via extreme gerrymandering. The U.S. has also seen substantial expansion of executive power and serious efforts to erode the independence of the civil service.” According to the Brookings Institution report, “Against these pressures, the gridlocked and hyper partisan Congress is poorly equipped to provide unbiased oversight and accountability of the executive, and there are serious questions about the impartiality of the judiciary…Globally, it is increasingly rare for an authoritarian to come to power through a coup. Instead, democracies in decline usually experience slow but steady erosion….In the words of political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, ‘The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive…People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy, while eviscerating its substance.’” We have had serious problems in the past and we have overcome them. The first step in restoring the health of our democracy is to recognize the very real threat we now face. Fortunately, more and more Americans are coming to understand the challenges which now confront us.