Pundits continue to worry about democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, but it's in the United States that democracy seems to be in real crisis. Just three items from the news (you can no doubt find another dozen exemplars of crisis by reading today's paper) that suggest how distanced we are becoming from our own democratic soul:
First, the Wall Street Journal takeover by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The Founders knew that the greatest threat to liberty was media concentration. We can afford ill-tempered and extreme and biased voices joining the political and civic argument, as long as there are plenty of them. The point is diversity and pluralism -- no monopolies in the nursery of democracy that is the press.
Yet here is the owner of hundreds of newspapers and media outlets, including the London Times, the New York Post, Fox News, MySpace and myriad other operations, buying the world's premier business newspaper with its truly global reach -- 2 million US subscribers alone, way more than the New York Times.
But because we fear concentrated democratic power in our government more than we fear concentrated private market power, we refuse to use the laws to prevent this demolition of media pluralism. We allow private monopoly to subvert public freedom.
Second, the huge arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Though it still natters on about democracy in the Arab world, the Bush administration is not only putting its faith in the Arab world's most authoritarian regime (much more so than Iran!), but is arming Wahabbist fundamentalism's biggest sponsor. Wahabbism is that variety of Islamacist extremism that is taught in the hate-mongering madrasses in Pakistan and elsewhere where incipient terrorists learn the ideology that of terrorism.
Third, the interminable Presidential race cum circus swirls on -- the election is still a year and a half away! -- with little or no reference to serious issues or responsible political debate. The campaign is too long, too trivial, too dominated by big money to nurture real democracy. Candidates with innovative ideas like Kucinich are ridiculed; serious arguments among frontrunners (like the one between Clinton and Obama about whether the U.S. should talk without conditions to rogue state leaders) are transformed into personality conflicts and then reduced to questions of cohunes or cleavage. Campaign financing reform is dead in the water, and fitness to govern has now become synonymous with a candidate's capacity to extract dollars from American wallets.
Most democracies have three month campaigns preceding national elections. Our Presidential campaign begins right after the previous election, lasts two to three years, and basically never ends. It tries our democratic patience, distorts our democratic instincts and confounds our democratic desires. It is a disaster for democracy.
So, yes, I am worried about the fate of democracy in the Middle East and the Third World. But as we enter the dog days of August I am even more worried about how it's doing here at home.