When growing up on weekends, I played in many basketball games on a beat-up concrete court in a worn-out park. We never used a referee so the success of the game depended on how closely we voluntarily followed the rules. We called our own fouls and when it was an obvious foul, we usually got our way, depending on just how passionate (loud) we were about how hard we were fouled. On close fouls—those that could go either way—we usually didn’t call them, but if we did, we tended to rotate the call from one side to the other.
The point is, we knew what we had to do to be fair so that we could keep everybody somewhat happy so they would return each weekend to play another game.
Our democracy today is very much like playing in a pickup street game of basketball.
Democracy, unlike basketball, is a more difficult game to play. It has many unwritten rules that strongly influence the quality of the game. Many of the players of the game seem to not even realize how important these unwritten rules are to its success.
If the players in a democracy don’t adhere closely to the unwritten rules, the game could turn into what we used to call in the streets, a free-for-all. It was a game interrupted constantly by arguments over what was or wasn’t a foul. Sometimes the argument would turn into a fistfight, which meant, for several weekends at least, the game was over.
What are the unwritten rules of democracy? There are two main ones.
Unwritten rule number one: when one party loses, it must willingly give up its power to the winning party.
Unwritten rule number two: the losing party must help the winning party govern.
Without these two rules being agreed upon and followed by all participants, then, like the very selfish arguments of street basketball, chaos ensues. The limits of these rules can be pushed, but never broken.
The players in our democracy today are not playing fairly. One party refuses to help the party in power govern the country. It’s true that many of the participants of this uncooperative party are not educated to the degree of understanding both the written and unwritten rules of democracy, but it rests upon the leaders of that party to educate their members as to what is demanded to make the system work.
What does one party, party B, gain by not following the rules? Do they really think that when party A is out of power that A is going to cooperate with B, when this is the group that refused to cooperate when party A was in power? Of course not. If things don’t change and change soon, there will be no game to be played that we call a democracy.
There is absolutely nothing to gain by breaking the rules of any pickup game, basketball or democracy; both depend on the integrity of the participants to make the game play efficiently. Push the rules to the limit, but never cross over the line. Of the two, democracy is the most difficult to play. Ask the countries in the Middle East that believed that the tough part of a democracy was simply overthrowing a dictatorship and declaring that democracy was now in effect. The only alternative to democracy is some sort of dictatorship (by whatever name it goes by) that governs through the use and threat of force and violence. This is a form of government in which everyone eventually loses, even the winners.
I used to be very angry at Al Gore for not resisting more vigorously the theft of the presidency by the Bush people. Raise hell, scream and shout; but don’t give in so easily; but as I think about it now, I realize that Gore was only following the unwritten rules of our democracy. Initiated by the thieves who sat on the Supreme Court, he knew that if he kept yelling for a foul to be called, our American street game would turn into a brawl and would collapse. So he acquiesced rather than reveal our democracy as precarious, at best.
Unfortunately, the other party has been taken over by a bunch of ignorant bullies who are corrupting our democratic street game by refusing to follow the unwritten rules that they probably don’t even realize exist. I wonder if Gore wishes now that he had taken his appeal to the very limits of protest and pushed the envelope. Perhaps he could have been that one loudmouth in every pickup game who steps up and demands that everybody play by the rules—he could have been democracy's loudmouth; he knew the importance of the unwritten rules. Where is the loudmouth street player for the game of democracy now when you need him…or her…the most?