Winning

SUCCESS, we probably all agree,  requires hard work. It begins with attitude, the belief that anything is possible, and that we can and will make it happen. Then the other components fall into place, if we allow them. The focus derives from motivation, and the preparation proceeds naturally because we enjoy taking batting practice, hitting a hundred backhands, writing and memorizing the speech which will move millions for concerted, strong action. To govern our own lives requires hard work. And it is always easier to allow someone else to govern us, to do the work, while we passively accept the results, secure in our knowledge that whatever happens, we can avoid responsibility. Franklin warned us that a democratic form of government requires constant upkeep, like a fragile, complicated machine which functions beautifully only when overseen. Autocratic forms of government have endured for centuries, even millennia, but systems in which the people govern themselves never have, and, it may be, never will. In her perceptive new book "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism" scholar Anne Applebaum warns us that even people long accustomed to governing themselves can grow collectively weary and frustrated with the hard work, and often find it tempting to revert to simpler, more autocratic forms of governance. It happened in ancient Greece and Rome. after the decline of the Roman republic and rise of the Roman empire in the first century before the advent of the Christian religion, western civilization remained content to accept autocracy, to be ruled rather than to rule itself. finally in teh fifteenth and then sixteenth centuries flickers of discontent with oppression swelled into the rebirth of democratic institutions first in the British isles, than the new world. Thus the United States of American has always been seen by the observant as a tenuous experiment. A democracy must constantly reinvent and strengthen itself with exercise and fresh air, having the courage to change its institutions and to improve them as time and circumstance require. That we venerate a two hundred year old constitution rather than changing and improving it would be abhorrent  to Madison and Jefferson, who knew the dangers of stagnation in culture and society. We have grown lazy, content, and are no longer vigilant, and are showing an alarming tendency towards authoritarian rule. Our American democracy, designed as a plutocratic republic to safeguard against mob rule, seems to be slipping into the trap into which Greece and Rome fell long ago. It isn't too late to restore some measure of popular sovereignty, but soon will be, unless we change our direction.