Frank's Musings

Has our liberal democratic government become too institutionalized? Do we rely on our institutions not just to carry out the will of the people, but to form it?

Americans have become very dependent on the ubiquitous media for their opinions and therefore unresistant to propagandized political messaging from the federal government. When a media-savvy group can win the approval of an electoral majority, it is also able to subvert democracy’s foundational principle—that rule should ideally be entrusted to most of the people.

The recent No Kings rallies are reminiscent of the antiwar marches against Nixon and Ford’s Vietnam policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Both then and in the 2020s Americans show they have not abandoned their personal commitment to assuming responsibility periodically for directly reviving individual participation in managing self-government.

Tariffs were the most common source of government revenues before the liberal enlightenment that motivated many democracies in the nineteenth century to use tax receipts to correct obvious inequities between the lives enjoyed by wealthy and poorer citizens. Now that social welfare programs have become popular and expensive, raising enough tax revenues in socially equitable ways would impose more of the burden on the class of high income-earners who support the current President and his collaborators.