{"id":10109,"date":"2006-01-05T09:11:15","date_gmt":"2006-01-05T14:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/05\/10109.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:48","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:48","slug":"grouchy-this-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/05\/grouchy-this-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"grouchy this morning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn have an interesting op-ed in this morning’s Times<\/I> called No More Second-Term Blues<\/a>. In it, they argue for the repeal of the 22nd amendment. Now, I’ve been on record as being against term limits (for any office, but particularly for the presidency) for some time, so it’s nice for me to have an excellent historian such as Mr. Burns agree with me (I’m not familiar with Ms. Dunn’s work; her reputation is excellent also). On the other hand, I found myself reading the op-ed with growing skepticism. Their arguments against the power of incumbency seem a bit weak, and they place a good deal of emphasis (as historians are wont to do) on the history of the amendment, rather than on its merits.\n

Really, though, I was concerned that the column didn’t address what I perceive as a growing, majority or near-majority sense that elections are not central to who we are. I agree that term limits disempower voters, but there is much more than that going on. The last two presidential elections went seriously awry, resulting in what were essentially fraudulent victories for Our Only President. The out-of-cycle redistricting in Texas, along with other redistricting fiascos, further demoralized citizen non-voters.\n

Ten years ago, the combination of the term limits movement and the campaign finance reform movement, together with the increase in non-participation, led me to worry that Americans, on the whole, no longer thought of their elections as being free and fair, in the sense of representing the will of the constituency. Both of those movements have died down, to a great extent, but if anything I think the general disenchantment has increased.\n

In a democracy, the thing that provides stability is not the people’s intelligence, or their knowledge, or even the government’s ability to govern well. It’s the belief in democracy. If the populace in a democracy believes in democracy, then it will ride out almost anything between elections, and it will keep riding it out between elections pretty much forever. If, on the other hand, the populace loses its faith in democracy, it will soon feel that the government is illegitimate, and that the next one will be, too, and then anything can happen.\n

It’s not that repealing the 22nd amendment is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s that repealing the 22nd amendment is like putting out a fire in the boiler room on the Titanic. It might keep us afloat long enough to hit the iceberg.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn have an interesting op-ed in this morning\u2019s Times called No More Second-Term Blues. In it, they argue for the repeal of the 22nd amendment. Now, I\u2019ve been on record as being against term limits…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17651,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10109\/revisions\/17651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}