The State of a U.S. Democratic Republic as We Enter 2017

The official form of government in the United States is still a democratic republic. Over the past two decades, our form of government has been shifting away from this. As we see with the growing gap in wealth between working-class people and the wealthiest people, where the influence of the working class and middle class has dwindled and the voice of the poor is even less influential, we also see the increased power and influence in governance that has occurred. Wall Street (and similar financial institutions worldwide) caused the Great Recession, and yet, they are being given additional abilities to run the same bad-debt practices that caused the recession, especially in the U.S. That requires tremendous influence. This form of government is a plutocracy.

U.S. governance has been moving closer and closer to a plutocracy, capping that achievement with the recent federal elections. We now have “a society ruled by a few of the wealthiest citizens.” This is not debatable: We now have a White House with cabinet and staff members with the highest level of wealth in the history of the country— by far. It’s a matter of definition, not debate. Whether this is good or bad is up to each of us to decide.

The tattered remnants of our democratic republic form of government include that the majority of Electoral College electors got to vote for who our president and vice president would be. The democratic republic, in this case, breaks down at the state level, where there is not “one person, one vote.” Most states have a winner-takes-all model for selecting electors. States with large populations have a proportionately lower number of electors than states smaller populations. If California had the same proportion of electors as Wyoming, it would have 199 electors. It had 55. Is this what citizens want as a way to elect a president and vice president? Perhaps. After all, in the Senate, every state has the same number of senators. But in the House, the number of representatives per state is loosely proportional to the size of the state's population.

Another way in which the democratic republic remains is that we elect members of Congress to act on our behalf, and we can contact them with our position on issues. To the extent that they don’t represent our positions, we can work toward electing someone who better represents our positions.

The current state of the U.S. democratic republic form of government can easily be summarized in terms of whether ordinary Americans are willing to do their job as citizens. As Thomas Jefferson said, "If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."

Too many Americans are poorly informed. Many are quite ignorant about the rest of the world-- even in their own Western Hemisphere. With the amount of misinformation and ill-logic that is readily available, few take the time to check the facts. The sheer magnitude of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that have been believed without question is staggering. Finding the facts means going to primary sources. What did this politician say? Read the transcript; don’t believe someone’s paraphrase that is likely to be slanted. Read Reuters and Associated Press factual reports rather than news sources that have their own obvious agenda. Never believe a politician. The adage is this: How do you know if a politician is lying? His mouth is open.

Someone said that the House of Representatives has a bill that’s going to do X, Y, or Z? Look up the bill. They are all available at congress.gov. Do not trust your friend to summarize for you; don’t trust social media; definitely don’t trust a Super PAC “newsflash,” no matter how much they represent your political ideologies.

When Americans are unable or unwilling to search for facts, we cannot have an effective democracy. Perhaps we’ve never had a perfect democracy, but when the Oxford Dictionary chooses “post-truth” as the 2016 international word of the year, we are definitely headed in the wrong direction. When we have verified facts and someone in the White House comes up with the term “alternative facts,” as if that were a thing, we are definitely headed in the wrong direction.

This is the state of our U.S. democracy: Citizens leaping away from informed participation in their government.

Fighting for Freedom of the Press through Reliance on Investigative Journalism

In his January 11, 2017, press conference, the president-elect, Donald Trump, would not answer a question from a CNN reporter because he does not like the coverage he gets from that news organization. This is a violation of the First Amendment, and yet journalistic colleagues did not unite against this violation of the rights of Americans to hear answers to questions that represent diverse interests. The president-elect and his staff have previously denied press credentials to entire news outlets even before they could ask the tough questions that Trump assumed he might get. It’s not just Trump’s insistence on not being shown in a bad light that motivates his refusal to respect these journalists. Trump's primary desire is to punish those he sees as opponents. He's quite above board about his determination to "get even." This will continue to result in Trump’s pre-emptive strikes against the First Amendment unless we find a way to stop them… or to work around them. In reality, we must do both. If President of the United States Trump is allowed to violate our right to a free press, we must fight that all the way to the Supreme Court.

Investigative journalism is so fundamental to dealing with this next administration, and yet it is under fire, in part, because news consumers are not willing to put their money behind their claims to want such responsible journalism and more factual information. With an administration that refuses to answer questions or even to listen to those questions, journalists now have a much more challenging job: finding and nurturing confidential sources and getting access to reliable documents and other forms of information they then need to verify.

I've come to believe that we exacerbate the problem of a healthy free press by referencing sensationalized and unverified information on social media. We're stealing eyeballs away from reading responsible, factual journalism-- even our own eyes. Reuters, Associated Press, verbatim transcripts, and verbatim documents: We need facts on the “front page” and opinions based on facts in the editorials and opinion columns.

Journalists need to step up, as do we. It's not just supporting the ACLU’s prosecution of First Amendment violations or paying for a newspaper subscription so that journalists have the resources to nurture those confidential sources. It's what we choose to share on social media. The supply of responsible reporting will increase if the demand does.