Minding the Gap: The Military, Politics, and American Democracy

LTC Ivan Raiklin, Esq. good to know my friend, good situational read/share.

I grow so tired of the general public conflating the United States with a democracy. That mistake is part and parcel, or should be, of the diagnosis, but the physician is also afflicted with the malady. There is no virtue that inheres in a position because it garners one more supporter than 50% of the population. A feature of a Republic, and what makes it superior to the degeneracy of democracy, is that the minority position always has a voice, and sometimes even prevails. Democratic majorities are mobs that can pillage minorities at will. Democracy is the electoral embodiment of the doctrine "might makes right."

Further we have also, as a society, begun to think that progress and solution is the same thing as the will of the majority, and that the will of the majority is the will of the people. This is especially pernicious. If you are not a part of the majority, you are standing in the way of progress. You are the problem, or part of it. You are not in tune with the will of the people, and you can be safely discounted at best, or demonized and eliminated if need be.

There's more to polarization than people taking opposite sides of an issue. It includes the false choice that there are only two positions on an issue and that one answer is inherently right.