The Common Ground of Democracy is Sinking Beneath Americans' Feet

In the United States and across the globe people are struggling with forms of democracy which either don’t represent their interests, or are completely gridlocked by partisanship. At The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan explains that democracy has lost its luster. Around the world purer forms of democracy are giving way to more autocratic replacements. Pat writes that the different visions of different peoples shuffled into America’s democracy cannot reconcile.

Yet democracy seems everywhere to be losing its luster….

In Washington, our two-party system is in gridlock. Comity and collegiality are vanishing. Across Europe, centrist parties shrink as splinter parties arise and “illiberal democracies” take power.

Russia and China, which have embraced autocratic capitalism, have attracted admirers and emulators by the seeming success of their strongman rule….

Forty percent of Americans now trace their ancestral roots to Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The Christian component of the nation shrinks, as the numbers of Muslims, Hindu, atheists, agnostics grow. We have two major languages now. Scores of other languages are taught in schools.

Not only do we disagree on God, gays, and guns, but on politics and ideology, morality and faith, right and wrong. One-half of America sees the other as “a basket of deplorables. … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots.”

How, outside an external attack that unites us, like 9/11, do we find unity among people who dislike each other so much and regard each other’s ideas and ideals as hateful and repellent?

Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it.

Where liberals see as an ever-more splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel.