Don’t be naïve… Democracy is for unicorns

October 20, 2026

Greetings,

A recent Washington Post article described Democrats’ plans to limit the powers of the presidency should they win next week. One snippet stood out to me, even over the sound of unhatched chickens being counted. A Republican strategist opined that “Democrats’ plans will go nowhere”, continuing “They are full of baloney — I don’t think Democrats would ever limit the power of a Democratic president. The idea of Democrats saving democracy, it’s nonsense.”

I have a couple points of agreement. First, I’m glad she didn’t even try to pretend the Republicans were the ones to save democracy, but I also agree the Democrats aren’t the ones to look to instead. They may not have been complicit in the Trump Administration but they HAVE been complicit in the decades-long desecration of the Middle Class that, among many other sins, has offshored jobs, put corporations in the position of writing laws, cored out education, stifled opportunity, and transferred 53 trillion from the bottom 90% of us to the top 1%. Like the Republicans with Trump, the Democrats who didn’t actively enable this destruction did pathetically little to stop it. No, neither the Reps nor the Dems will save us.

The realization that neither of today’s political parties will “save democracy” is bad enough, but unless I’m unfairly misreading the strategist her unstated idea was even worse. She assumed that Democrats won’t rein in power because they’ll want it themselves when the wheel inevitably turns. In her mind, there is nothing higher than narrow, self-serving Party interests. Society is a winner-take-all jungle, not a cooperative fight for survival. No sensible person, certainly not a politician of any stripe, would act to create a neutral system that limited friends and enemies alike. Only naïve unicorns would act for the general good.

But what if someone did? Suppose some unicorns got together to build a political system?

Let’s suppose that we (“we” being the People of the United States in this case) wanted to build a better society. We could start by establishing a justice system that protected the innocent and held the guilty accountable. We’d want to ensure our society was tranquil and peaceful while still protecting against the very real enemies we face in the world. We’d want to promote the general welfare for ourselves, yes, but we’d also want those benefits to flow to our children and our children’s children as well. IF ALL THAT WAS THE GOAL, then we could build some type of government to accomplish it.

Even unicorns have seen tyrannical, corrupt, and wasteful governments of all types, so they’d probably want to design their government to limit abuse and corruption. It might be a good idea to not let any one person or faction take control. Laws wouldn’t come from the whims of a king or Dear Leader but from a legislative body of some type, maybe even drawn from our fellow citizens. The legitimacy of the laws could be determined by comparing them to the goals “We The People” set out. We could decide controversies using not one Judge but several, limiting the influence of any one person and ensuring the best chance of considering issues fairly. If we chose to have a singular leader, they could be limited to executing the laws the legislature set out. Oooh oooh! Maybe these, let’s call them “branches” of government, could be consciously pitted against each other in some system of checks or balances so that no one branch could trample the others.

Unless the unicorns are horribly naïve they’d realize that even good people can become abusive when given power. Maybe they could limit the powers of the overall government so that there’d be lines the government couldn’t cross even in pursuit of good. Maybe they could protect speech, or religion, or assembly. It wouldn’t have to be very detailed… maybe a list of ten or so biggies, then we could add more as the society changed.

Of course, these are all the naïve daydreams of people who don’t understand the world the way the wise Republican strategist does. In the real world Democracy doesn’t work, it never could, and we’re doomed to a zero-sum back-and-forth of petty power struggles with the worst people among us.

But hold on… look at that fourth paragraph above again… why, that’s a thinly disguised version of the preamble to the Constitution of the United States! And that next paragraph… it sums up the 7 Articles of the Constitution in just a few sentences. And hey, isn’t that sixth paragraph a nod to the Bill of Rights?

My point is that the ‘sophisticated’ political class is wrong. Naivety played no part in our nation’s founding, but idealism did. Given the chance, given the choice, the framers of the constitution didn’t build a system that empowered their friends to the detriment of their enemies. They were unicorns, but they weren’t naïve. They knew they couldn’t eliminate corruption or power grabs (that WOULD be naïve!) so instead they built a system of distributed power with checks and balances between the players. And if things went wrong despite their best efforts, the backup they counted on was the interest and active engagement of citizens. The Vote. You. Me. Us.

For more than two centuries the “American Dream” has inspired the world. We’ve been a melting pot that, against all odds, could and did include people from every corner of the earth and unite them by principle instead of blood. We were a country of unicorns, leading through the power of our ideas. Now though, we’ve been reduced to a level of sniping partisanship that could destroy everything we’ve built at home and abroad. We’re told by the most broken and venal among us that this is just reality, that everyone’s in it for themselves, and the people we once loved as neighbors have been plotting our downfall all along. I don’t believe it, and I hope you don’t either. In just a few days, we’ll be called to vote again. I hope we all vote from our aspirations instead of our fears.

Make a great day,