Is Our Republic Failing?
No matter how far left or right you lean, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks the American political system has been thriving since the turn of the century.
The push and pull of liberalism and conservatism at its best functions like the relationship between the oceans and the moon, creating our tides. The tide rises and recedes, but it is always there for fish to rely on its currents.
At its worst, rather than moving with that same push and pull, it looks more like two parties playing tug-of-war with a paperback book, tearing it in half at the spine. So where are we currently? In my hopeful opinion, a few chapters have been torn out, yes, but the book is still intact for now. Maybe we’ll even be able to staple those pages back in the future. Let’s talk about the book.
The ‘book’ is our constitutional republic. It is important to remember that we are not a pure democracy, nor a dictatorship. Rather than letting the majority opinion or a single leader who consolidates power govern our country, written law is what dictates everything via our constitution.
The legislative branch (Congress) writes the laws, judicial branch (Supreme Court) interprets and decides which laws are constitutional, and the executive branch (The President) signs and enforces the laws.
For many of us, knowledge of our political system is a pillar of their grade school education, myself included. For others, in growing numbers, this system of checks and balances might as well be a foreign language.
This is a clear symptom of influencer politics in this country. Rather than taking the word of lawyers, doctors, and professors, people overwhelmingly consume media and ‘news’ from Internet personalities with dubious credibility at best.
Where did this come from? Why are people turning to such unqualified sources? In my opinion, it is due to the severely damaged trust we have in both our media and politicians because of corporations, megadonors, and super PACs. America has been for sale long before this current administration, it just wasn’t as obvious before.
The media conglomerates are all owned by self-serving corporations or billionaires as well. NBC is owned by Comcast, Rupert Murdoch owns Fox, Paramount Skydance owns CBS, Disney owns ABC, Mark Zuckerberg owns Instagram/Meta, Elon Musk owns X and Jeff Bezos owns Prime Video/Washington Post.
The fact that these rich men and corporations own these and are able to interject their agendas into mainstream media is a main reason I started CLIFTN in the first place. I don’t have a poly-sci degree and I am not an expert, just a working class man who has lived here and observed his whole life and if all of this is so clear to me, there has to be many other people like yourself that feel the same.