America is changing in ways that are important and unsettling for the future of American democracy; and America's elected officials and democracy experts seemingly are too politically timid or too theoretically limited to sound the alarm.
However, candidly examining the realities and vulnerabilities of American democracy is an uncomfortable but necessary enterprise. Election 2012 and the looming legacy stage of the Obama presidency provide timely impetus and urgency to such inquiry.
As Fareed Zakaria explains in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2007):
Silenced by fears of being branded "antidemocratic" we have no way to understand what might be troubling about the ever-increasing democratization of our lives. We assume that no problem could ever be caused by democracy, so when we see social, political, and economic maladies we shift blame here and there, deflecting problems, avoiding answers, but never talking about the great transformation that is at the center of our political, economic, and social lives (16-17).
If Barack Obama -- our just reelected and self-declared transformational president -- will lead Americans in vigorous debate about our trending systemic condition, our nation perhaps can deal successfully with the challenges of the 21st century.
In the rest of this post, I will try to depict the systemic realities of our civic condition.
Systems Analysis.
A quick reference to a field of analysis known as systems theory will help clarify my dying thesis; it also will provide the transformational framework for the remainder of this series.
Systems analysis has proven particularly useful in explaining how various organic entities (such as living animals, successful corporations, and effective organizations) work procedurally and substantively. Technically speaking, a system is a regularly interacting or interdependent group of elements forming a unified, functioning whole; physiologically (the applicable perspective for my analysis), a system is a group of bodily organs that together perform the vital functions of "life."
More pertinent to our discussion, organic systems theory, as presented by David Easton in A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965), helps us understand how nations succeed or fail in the face of significant challenges to their political systems. According to Easton, "a political system can be designated as those interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for a society"; and "in a given society, the systems other than the political system constitute a source of many influences that create and shape the conditions under which the political system itself most operate" (21-22).
Furthermore, Easton elaborates:
One of the important reasons for identifying these essential variables is that they give us a way of establishing when and how the disturbances acting upon a system threaten to stress it. Stress will be said to occur when there is a danger that the essential variables will be pushed beyond what we may designate as their critical range. What this means is that something may be happening in the environment--the system suffers total defeat at the hands of an enemy, or widespread disorganization in and disaffection from the system is aroused by a severe economic crisis. Let us say that as a result, the authorities are consistently unable to make decisions or if they strive to do so, the decisions are no longer regularly accepted as binding. Under these conditions, authoritative allocations of values are no longer possible and the society would collapse for want of a system of behavior to fulfill one of its vital functions (22-24).
This brief review of demand/support balance, the input/output relationship, and our changing systemic environment provides insight for understanding evolutionary developments in contemporary America.
Diagraming the Demise of American Democracy.
Take a look at my "Systemic Model of Dying America," which depicts pertinent elements, variables, and relationships of the changing American system through a diagrammatic illustration of Historical America (as our nation has functioned for the past two centuries) and, hypothetically, Dying America.
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