As the old cliché goes: “Democracy stinks, but every alternative stinks worse.”

This initiative is a solution in search of a problem.

Trump has disavowed democracy in the U.S. so this will be three authoritarian superpowers aligning against the world’s democratic countries. Notice that Putin didn’t invite the EU or any democracy.

IMHO, Putin will offer to stop offensive military operations if Ukraine cedes territory Russia controls. Trump will give Ukraine an ultimatum - take the deal or the U.S. will provide military support to Russia. The EU will be forced to intervene with as much military assistance as possible. So, Putin has manipulated Trump into starting WW3.

Current status of French democracy

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,

Tom

Digging Deeper…

Trump’s opponents are planning efforts to reverse his changes to presidency, Naftali Bendavid in Washington Post, Oct 2026

As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System, Pew Research Center, Aug 2022

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure, Nick Hanauer in Time, Sep 2020

Ignorance can be bliss- How a “Veil of Ignorance” can help us all, Tom Dwyer Automotive, Oct 2025

Ronald Reagan’s last speech as president, Jan 1989

“4^th of July”, Tom Dwyer Automotive Radio spot, Jul 2010

Tom’s Tidbits- Cynicism isn’t the path, even in today’s world.  This is., Tom Dwyer Automotive Services, Jan 2026

Americans fight for your country; Canadians are cheering you on! So brave to do this especially since Trump has his jack boots disguised as ICE Agents

Let me begin with a scene I'm imagining, not one I've lived through.

Picture a young woman in a small town, voting for the first time. Her family has opinions, as families do. An uncle forwards her a video that says one candidate has done wonderful work. A cousin sends a message saying the same candidate is hopeless. Her neighbour says, "Just vote for whoever your father votes for." She wants to decide for herself, but she doesn't know where to look. Which claim is true? Which is just noise?

I keep coming back to that picture. We often say that democracy is about the right to vote, and it is. But I've started wondering about what comes just before the vote. Does everyone get an equal chance to understand the choice in front of them?

We learn in school that Indian democracy rests on three pillars: the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. The press is often called the fourth. I'm not trying to take anything away from journalists. I'm only asking whether ordinary people can easily check, for themselves, what their representatives promised and what actually happened afterwards. If it takes hours of searching across scattered websites, videos and social media arguments, then many people simply won't do it. And who can blame them?

That thought is where this idea started. What if there were one trustworthy, non-partisan place where a person could find verified information about elections, candidates and parties? It could bring together things that already exist but are hard to piece together: the Election Commission of India's election information, candidates' declared affidavits, parliamentary records, government reports, court judgments, and reports from independent organisations. A person could see what a candidate promised, what was done, what's still unfinished, and what the official record says.

I want to be clear about what this is not. It wouldn't tell anyone whom to vote for. Its only job would be to help people decide for themselves.

It would also need to be strict about the difference between an allegation, a verified fact, a court finding, a promise and a completed piece of work. Those are not the same thing, and blurring them is exactly how information turns into propaganda. Every claim should link back to its original source, and corrections should be visible. I'd also be wary of giving candidates a single score or rating. A representative's work has many sides, and a number without an explanation just asks people to trust it blindly. I'd rather people see the evidence and judge it themselves.

But I don't want this to become just a website. That's the part that worries me most.

We talk a lot about Digital India, yet not everyone has the same access to the internet, a smartphone, or the comfort of reading long official documents. Someone in a remote village may face all of those barriers at once, along with the barrier of language. I thought about this while remembering the film *Newton*, which follows an election official trying to bring voting to a far-off forest area. It's fiction, and I'm not using it as evidence of anything. But it stayed with me as a reminder that democracy has to reach people who live far from where decisions are made, and that "having the right" and "having the means" aren't always the same.

So if this ever becomes something real, I think it should start with people, not software. It might begin with visiting communities and simply listening. Sitting with first-time voters. Holding informal discussions in village halls, libraries, colleges and community centres. Running small sessions where someone explains, in the local language, how to register to vote, how an EVM works, what NOTA means, and how to spot a misleading election message. Helping people find official information in a form they can actually understand. Printed guides in regional languages could sit alongside a simple multilingual website, so that neither one is the only door in.

And I don't think we'd need to start from zero. India already has voter-education work, including the Election Commission's Systematic Voters' Education and Electoral Participation programme, known as SVEEP. There are surely other organisations doing good work that I don't know about. Perhaps the real question is whether existing efforts and public records could be connected better, with more attention to how candidates have actually performed and to people who can't easily use digital tools.

The part I most want to get right is the listening. I don't want to assume what people need. How many people really struggle to find reliable information about their candidates? How many depend mostly on social media or conversations with neighbours? Would they prefer information in their own language, or on paper, or from someone they trust in person? I honestly don't know. I'd want to ask, especially first-time voters, people in rural and remote areas, people with limited digital access, and people who don't follow political news much. And I'd want to ask without judging their politics. People should be partners in shaping this, not just an audience to be educated. If they tell us this isn't the problem they face, or that something else matters more, then that's what we should learn.

If it works at all, I'd hope for a few simple things. Voters who feel better prepared. More attention to what representatives do between elections, not only during campaigns. Communities who find it easier to question those who represent them and to say what matters locally. I'm not claiming this would fix governance or settle every democratic problem. It might not. It's one possible small step.

There are real risks, too. Any system like this could be biased, captured by political interests, or become another source of misinformation. That's why I think its sources, methods, funding and correction process would all have to be open for anyone to examine.

I'm sharing this while it's still unfinished because I'd rather learn before I build. Here is what I'd really like to hear from you:

Have you, or someone you know, ever found it hard to get trustworthy information before an election? What did that look like? Where did people turn, and did they trust what they found? Are there organisations, groups or programmes, in your town or elsewhere, that already do this kind of work well and that we should learn from? And if you wanted to try something small and honest in your own community, such as a conversation circle, a short session for first-time voters or a printed guide, what would be a respectful way to begin?

Your experiences, doubts and criticisms are all welcome. I'd like to understand what's practical, what's not, and what I may have missed entirely.

If this made you think of a story, I'd love to hear it.

I can also put this in a file if you'd like to keep or share it.

Yeah, Jon Ossoff👏🏻

This article really sums up what more of us should be asking ourselves when we vote. Are we voting for character or our team?