MAGA Rally

In July 1943, the Writers’ War Board asked New Yorker writer E. B. White to make a statement on the subject “The Meaning of Democracy.” Below is White’s statement:

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. [Italics mine]

In 2016 and 2024, I learned that, according to Mr. White’s statement, we are NOT living in a democracy. I say that because a certain individual was elected president twice by more than half the voters—voters who were not only wrong in electing him, but very probably wrong in their judgments on any subject you care to name.

I suppose I could be forgiving toward the voters who propelled Trump to the presidency, but I don’t feel like it. I have no intention of agreeing that water flows uphill, that the sun sets in the East, or that the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces can declare war at any time against anybody. In fact, I am feeling very non-committal about our country as it begins to celebrate its 250th anniversary as a former democracy.