There are metaphors that stand the test of time.  Theologian Marcus Borg once said ‘a model is a metaphor that works. This is a “Titanic” time in politics. The Titanic’s deck furniture and how it was arranged just before it slipped into the dark cold depths might be a question you want answered if you intended to follow that tragic ship’s fate.  It seems the minority party in America is working on seating arrangements  for a 21’st century Titanic instead of dealing with the iceberg their political operation just snagged. Gender? Racism? Equal Opportunity? Diversity? . . . Oh dear! What’s first and in what order? This Post is about giving our system of democratic government the first and primary priority. If, in two election cycles if we don’t have our democracy back, we may no longer be free enough to even think about those issues. 

The United States has been a value driven nation from inception.   What we now are antiseptically calling norms and protocol were once expressions of the founding values underpinning this country and its government.  Violating what is normally done (norms) sounds far less egregious than violating the values that support a democratic nation’s integrity as a governing structure.  Undercutting a democratic nation’s core operating values becomes so much easier when one renames the violations something like “a norm” or “a protocol”. For instance, turning the White House into a Versailles Palace knockoff, or hotboxing a heroic leader from a besieged country in public, dismissing the discipline of due process all sound like less of a problem when one rebrands those corrosions of a civilized working democracy as an adjustment of normal. “We are just adjusting norms and protocols” so what’s the big deal? The minority party if it expects to pick up its momentum again must first laser the focus on the one issue that impacts everyone in this nation: the dissolution of democracy itself. “Democracy is the big deal“.

A modest proposal for Good

Values, morality and ethics were a large part of the American founding fathers considerations when they proposed a democracy could rule as effectively if not more effectively than a king. They knew, as we apparently have forgotten, that a democracy’s stability depends on values and skills of the population of citizens.  The minority party has to adjust the focus from the seating arrangements of past priorities and take on the structure and course of this entire ship of state. What is the course of the Constitution and Democratic balance of powers? This question must become the absolute center of conversation and investments.  Every other issue is at least second place. The recovering political party needs to hold itself like the original American flag belongs to them and all the American people; not just the current reign of regents. A regent is by definition a person who proxy rules a nation for the King. The American people must talk passionately about their democracy again and why it is the most important issue we have before us.  That would be good.   

To read this Project’s sense of the Next Democracy click this:  https://thegooddecision.org/your-sense-of-democracy/