Democracy
"Democracy is a thing that we have to do on purpose."
Texans, this is my Number One Issue. Because, as important as all the other ones are, we’ll never have a prayer of addressing any of them without Democracy.
If there’s anything on which most of us can agree, it’s that our politics are broken. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will all acknowledge that our political discourse has become divisive and extreme — to the point of precluding solutions to the challenges we face. Those who vote and those who do not can agree on one thing: it doesn’t seem to be working. The will of the people is being thwarted.
But there’s an enormous peril lurking in the perception that our politics aren’t working. There are those with such lust for power, they would leverage that perception into the claim that democracy itself does not work. Notions such as this cannot be allowed to take root. Disaster has befallen every society where it has.
Let’s be clear: democracy works, but only when me make it work. Republican democracy is not the default setting for human forms of government. Authoritarianism is. Democracy is a thing that we have to do on purpose.
Democracy — self-rule — requires extraordinary vision to establish, and steadfast vigilance to sustain. Once lost, it may not again be recoverable for centuries. Ronald Reagan used to say that America is never more than one generation away from the demise of liberty. My fear is that today, it is even less far off than that. It is imperative that we fix this. The good news is that I totally believe we can.
