By Sara Robinson, well worth a read… via Blog around the clock…
America’s founders understood all too well that would-be authoritarians would always be among us; and that holding on to our democracy would involve a constant struggle against their ongoing efforts to control us. That’s what Ben Franklin was talking about when he said that we have “a republic — if you can keep it.” And what Tom Jefferson was alluding to when he told us that “the tree of liberty must be watered occasionally with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” They knew that democracies are not established once, but re-created continuously as each generation reasserts its freedom against fresh generations of would-be rulers. It’s an ongoing conversation about liberty, equality, and power that’s re-negotiated – sometimes more peacefully, sometimes less — every day.
They also knew that our homegrown wannabe kings and dictators have momentum on their side. High-social-dominance (SDO) authoritarian leaders are always among us, always pushing, always scheming, always looking for their next chance. There is no opportunity to take control, legally or illegally, that they won’t fail to exploit, as long as the gains promise to outweigh the costs. As Edmund Burke did not say (but usually gets the attribution for anyway): all that’s required for them to succeed in this endless quest for power is for the rest of us to do nothing.
Unfortunately, the ease and confidence of living in a prosperous society under a strong Constitution makes kicking back and doing nothing a very easy, attractive option. You can be blithely oblivious to these guys for years — until the day comes when you’ve got a fundamentalist school board trying to teach your kids young-earth creationism; or militia guys jackbooting up Main Street at noon and performing blitz redecorating on the local synagogue at midnight; or a born-again president trying to bring on Armageddon for the profit of the oil companies and the acclaim of his Rapture-minded followers. On that day, we’re jolted out of our reverie. Where did all these wackadoodles come from? Of course, they came from us — because we didn’t take seriously the threat they pose to the continued existence of our democracy, or our constant obligation to keep an eye out for the authoritarians in our midst, and take steps to prevent them from amassing followers and power in the first place.
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