Schrödinger’s Democracy

When the US Republican Party embraced the racially inconvenienced and outraged Southern Democrats in the 1960’s, little did we know that the great party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan was selling its soul for thirty pieces of silver. It was slow cooking, but it finally boiled over in 2016. Trump’s democratic coup became transparent within minutes of his election: his was the 5th cancellation of the popular vote in US history. 

But unlike the previous ones, Trump’s electoral college victory saw an unprecedented number of cancelled popular votes: more than 2.8 million. By comparison, the previous highest cancellation was in 2000, with less than 0.5 million votes eliminated by the electoral college. It finally made a lot of Americans take notice after November of 2016: what is this thing called the Electoral College? And more importantly, why does it seem to favor a party riddled with racism and xenophobia?

Those questions should have been asked a long time ago. You would figure that after the Civil War - a bloodbath that claimed the most American lives of any war to date - SOMEONE would have said, “Hey, has everyone forgotten that this Electoral College thing is directly based on slavery math??“ 

Ah, the irony of defeat. The South actually benefited from the Electoral College math, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when their former slaves went from counting as 3/5 human to being whole. “Three-fifths human”. Let that sink in for a moment. The founders of our enlightened democracy had signed their names on one of humanity’s most influential documents, a majestic declaration that did not stutter when it stated the following words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That all men are created equal. Perhaps Napoleon & Snowball the pigs snuck into Independence Hall one fateful summer night, and upon the freshly inked declaration scribbled the words, “but some are only three-fifths human”. Or perhaps this was to be a paradoxical experiment in democracy. One worthy of inspiring Erwin Schrödinger to come up with one of quantum physics most famous thought experiments: “Schrödinger’s Cat”.  In a Schrödinger Democracy, it is possible for ALL men to be created equal, while SOME are simultaneously only three-fifths equal. 

In the aftermath of the Civil War, having lost their Schrödinger Way of Life, the South figured out a way to disenfranchise blacks for the next one-hundred years. With defeats like these who needs victories.

One-hundred years later puts us in 1965, the year after the last of the Civil Rights Acts was signed and sealed by the federal government. What was supposed to be the beginning of a brave new post-Schrödinger Democracy turned out to be, apparently, the year America ceased to be great. It was the year a political mass exodus began, when those who hated the slave-freeing Republican Party now had a new party to hate: the Black-enfranchising  Democratic Party. 

The mother of all ironies is that the party that did so much for this country, one that four-score and seven years after the birth of our nation called out the illegitimate use of the word “freedom” in our Declaration of Independence, was the same party that in 2016 set us back to 1963. 

Mystery solved. We now know what that doggone, dog-whistled year was when America was last great. In a surreal back-to-dystopia twist, Nineteen Sixty-Three was to be the last year when discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin was a God-given right. 

Let this now be self-evident, as we move on and try to make sense of this fine clusterfuck we’ve gotten ourselves into: that what could otherwise be a universal beacon of true greatness on earth, our American Democracy’s tragic flaw boils down to the dumbest of all human fears - the boogeyman of skin color.

It’s hard to judge the distance between brink and precipice - it’s not what we do best as humans. Which brings many of us to our current state of discomfort: how far or how close are we? Either way, here’s a little trail of breadcrumbs our founders left for us. It almost immediately follows their aforementioned words of wisdom that all men are created equal:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...”

Are we there yet?