Power to the People Corrupts People

When the democratic process becomes combative and unpleasant, it is basically a sign that the democracy has failed. The political body may still stay together, but it is holding captive a significant amount of citizens who are well aware that they will be forever cut off from representative government. 

Representative government to them becomes insulting, not fulfilling. The idea that they could benefit from representation vanishes, and they begin to feel alienated from the very society that they were born into. This perhaps brings up an interesting side point: democracy works best when it is localized, and when it is happening in a homogeneous body where nobody is being categorically cut out from representation. 

It is probably only in those circumstances where democracy is sustainable over a long period of time, but even then, a single-culture city changes through rifts between rich and poor, young and old, and developments in religion or culture. 

We can sort of conclude that Democracy is on a crash course... but it is resilient, because its system is open to change. It's more of a demolition derby than a one-off crash course or even series of crashes, because the wear and tear makes it necessary to reach for the reset button frequently. 

It's also true that we can look at the way that America has evolved and come to the conclusion that there are perhaps 2-4 Americas that have respectively lived and died, and this is not even counting the American groups that were born & went extinct without ever tasting any of the power. 

When we invariably have one voting bloc or a united group of voters imposing their will on the people, we also begin pitting the people against one another. They see each other as competitors with conflicting interests as opposed to seeing themselves as subjects united with purpose under the same banner. We also create groups among people -- groups of empowered people, and groups of people that are at the mercy of the majority -- the famous two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner analogy. 

It's also worth thinking of the idea that "power corrupts," and "absolute power corrupts absolutely." What happens when we give power to the people? 

Giving power to the people makes our systems more resilient, but it also brings to the people the corruption that power also often naturally brings to individuals. Power to the people corrupts people. And when people have become corrupt, we see toxic democracy -- democracy which no longer benefits its own citizens but turns them into competitive, disparate groups competing to dominate one another.  

When they get a taste of power, the democratically engaged winners believe that they are filling a divine mandate, just like a King whose power has gone to his head, and they think that it is not just their right but their obligation to history to exercise this will. This is especially true when they are confident and their rhetoric is strong -- just like a petty tyrant, they vanquish their enemies, and then they put into the history books how glorious it was. 

The "Republic" that we have built was supposed to prevent this by coming up with inalienable rights for the minority, and this will continue to hold as long as the jurists and the unchanging forces within government are able to withhold the line on democratic will run amok. But we see the rhetoric gets dangerously hot, and the rights of the minority begin to look quite distant and irrelevant when a lot of effort has been made to dehumanize them and write them off as if they already belong in the dustbin of history. 

Naturally, we want the jurists and the Constitution to hold strong and to create a political 'safe space' that endures. But there's an even easier way to take care of all of this...

Skip the promotion of democratic engagement and simply rely on learned jurists, a hereditary executive branch, and localized democratic action that is relevant for each region but does not spill over into the backyards of others and, at the same time, constantly promoting self-sufficiency and cooperation between the subjects of the realm so that they have a sense of interconnectedness and can flourish without recourse to government at all. 

When we remove democratic power brokering on the national level, we can begin removing toxicity from democracy by keeping it localized, polite, and prevent it from coming off its leash and resulting in mob rule.