In a few days, if all goes according to the Constitution, President Bush and Vice President Cheney will relinquish their powers, and Barack Obama will become President. So, we can all sit back and relax, because Democracy has triumphed again, right?

No, I don’t think so. The length, and width, and depths of corruption, and worse, instigated during the past 8 years will take years of determined effort by all of us to undo.

It really comes down to this: What kind of world do we want to leave for our children? For their sake, we cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that everything will be alright.

During the American Revolution, as the foundations of our country were being hammered together by our founding fathers and mothers, someone asked Ben Franklin what kind of government they were fashioning? Scott Horton tells the story this way:


As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, on September 18, 1787, a certain Mrs. Powel shouted out to him: “Well, doctor, what have we got?,” and Franklin responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Like many of the Founding Fathers, he was intensely concerned that the democratic institutions they were crafting would deteriorate over time. In particular, they were concerned­ and talked ceaselessly during the convention about the risk that, under pressures and exigencies of war, a tyrant would collapse their system into something closer to the monarchy that they had just defeated.

The whole of Horton’s article is well worth reading. Our democracy is not a self-perpetuating machine that can exist without our help to keep it. The damage to our democracy during the past 8 years has been huge, and deep. The Bush administration, quite literally, has been getting away with murder. Democracies existed in Italy, Germany, Argentina, and other places until Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, and others like them, subverted those democracies to seize control. And it happened one small step at a time, in each case. That is why, after Obama’s inauguration, we can’t just let bygones be bygones. Some future president might pick up the tools left by Bush and Cheney, repeating the pattern of Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet, unless those tools are removed and destroyed.

Arianna Huffington put it this way recently:

The night before Obama is sworn in, HuffPost is co-hosting a pre-Inaugural ball at the Newseum in Washington. Just before midnight we will have a Countdown to a New Era. It’s a new era not just because Bush will be out and Obama in, but because taking on the challenges America is facing will require a new era of citizen engagement. …The preamble of the Constitution starts with We the People. And it has never been clearer that we can’t "form a more perfect Union" without the active participation of millions of us.

The Constitution is as much a vision of how things ought to be as it is a description of how things actually are. That means we must constantly be comparing what is with what should be, as defined by the Constitution, which is a remarkably wise document that is not at all out of date.

Book after book after book has been written during the past 6 years about what has gone wrong, and who is responsible for the mess our country is now in. We have discussed most of them on FDL’s Book Salon. Amongst other things, Bush and Cheney have corrupted the Department of Justice, that once impartial advocate for The People, into a political machine designed to support the interests of the Republican party in general, and the Bush & Cheney alliance in particular.

The DOJ has served as a firewall to prevent the indictment and prosecution of administration officials (Scooter Libby being the exception that proves the rule). The DOJ has distorted the laws about torture and warrantless spying on citizens, stonewalled prosecution of lawbreakers to such an extent that it will take years of determined effort to restore public confidence in the Department of Justice once again.

As another example of what has been happening, the administration has in all likelihood been guilty of war crimes (yes, we’re talking Nuremburg here). If you don’t believe me, please watch the special 90 minute program prepared for PBS called Torturing Democracy. Please make the time to watch it. There is a website for the show, too. The program has probably not aired on your local TV, because your station managers probably think it is too "controversial." Yeah, like Abu Ghraib is "controversial."

Please be a good role model for your children and show them the meaning of citizen engagement. Their future depends on it. Democracy takes work, and it requires more than voting once every two years. Now more than ever, American democracy is in need of some long overdue maintenance. Obama can’t do it all by himself, and the last two years have shown that we can’t rely on Congress to uphold its share of the Constitutional balance of powers.

Thinking about what Ben Franklin said about our democracy: can we keep it?

Bob in HI