Saving democracy from the Republican Party

Letter to the editor in today's NY Times:

“What Really Saved the Republic From Trump?,” by Tim Wu has it exactly right. 

Federal criminal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials standing up for democratic norms formed a red, white and blue line separating democracy’s safety from its demise.

But it was not just people in government. It also was citizens, joining together to speak and act, rallying behind the people in government who spoke truth to power. 

What saves the Republic — now and going forward — is a shared commitment to the democracy we love.

Dennis Aftergut

San Francisco

Rob's comment:

Tim Wu and Mr. Aftergut emphasize the positive, that American democracy was defended---this time.

But Wu also chose not to emphasize who/what exactly was threatening democracy, though he did mention them:

The bigger and more important failure was Congress. Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). 

The flaw is vulnerability to party politics. It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.

Well, yes, But the problem isn't just a Republican Senate. 

More importantly, it's the Republican Party's proto-fascist political base, since more than 74 million Americans voted for Trump and will presumably continue to support anti-democratic policies in the future.

Lincoln was much better than Mother Teresa

Letter to the editor in yesterday's SF Chronicle:

Inevitable imperfections

What former President Abraham Lincoln said about laws also speaks to the question of whether his, or anyone else’s name, belongs on a school or other public feature:

“The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.”

It would be confusing to name every public feature after Mother Teresa, so if we are to put anyone else’s name on public buildings, we’re going to have to accept the inevitable imperfections of those we honor and, adopting Lincoln’s view, must apply — and continuously reappraise — our best judgment in weighing their achievements against their faults.

Bill Koopman

Palo Alto

Rob's comment:

As the late great Christopher Hitchens pointed out, Mother Teresa was far from perfect:

Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan...

George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

Hitchens wrote a book about how immoral Mother Teresa's Catholic fundamentalism was: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

See also God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.