“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” — James Bovard, “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty”

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

Our Founding Fathers designed our nation’s democratic system to handle all this.

We have elections and a representative government designed to meld many disparate views into policy that serves the public good.

We have checks and balances designed to ensure one area of government can overcome any faults in another — again, to serve the public good.

And we have a criminal justice system — one in which the accused are considered innocent until proven guilty — designed to execute justice blindly, to ensure that no amount of power can excuse wrongdoing and that our government hands down punishment to serve the public good only.

That’s the design.

But the society we’ve made for ourselves is testing that design more forcefully than at any point since the Civil War.

Our views today are so disparate that we can’t even agree what reality is or which sources of information to trust.

Because of that, so much of government has become so partisan that many — not all, but many — of the checks and balances have broken down, because you can find someone in each branch of government who seems willing to act on partisan impulses instead of serving the public good or following the rule of law.

And, no matter how you feel about the prosecutions of former President Donald Trump, no one can question that it tests the justice system’s ideals of fairness and blindness.

In the face of all that, the overwhelming majority of us believe our democracy is in trouble.

USA Today reported this week that seven out of 10 Americans — including 74% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans, and 66% of independents — agree with the statement “democracy is imperiled,” according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll.

At least we agree we’re in trouble.

And that offers some hope.

First, it’s worth noting that we as a nation have been to all of these places before, if not all at once.

Up until about 100 years ago, all newspapers — the main and, until the invention of radio and television, practically the only source of information — were partisan. They wrote from a particular ideological bend and attracted readers from the same ideological bend. A lot of towns had multiple newspapers, at least one for each major political party and sometimes additional papers for particular groups of people — farmers, for example, or unions.

The media landscape, as it is today, was fractured, and people then, like now, didn’t always agree on what constituted reality.

Like today, that often led to periods of great partisanship and fighting among the political ranks (remember that Capitol Hill has been the site of multiple duels and congressional debates used to come to fisticuffs). And, like today, that often led to a breakdown of the checks and balances, as judges, lawmakers, and government executives paid loyalty to their party rather than their republic.

And, while Trump is the first former president ever charged with a crime, we have tried a vice president: Aaron Burr, vice president to Thomas Jefferson. We also tried the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. (Both men got off scot free thanks largely to the political questions surrounding their prosecution).

The nation and its norms have survived it all, and we’ve lived also through periods of relative political calm and seen glowing examples of bipartisanship.

We owe that, I believe, to the American people, who eventually tire of strife and begin to demand peace.

So, while our nation faces great struggles today, I believe it’s a good thing that overwhelming majorities of us recognize those troubles and worry about the consequences. If seven in 10 of us see our democracy in trouble, seven in 10 of us can demand solutions, and no politician on the planet will ignore seven in 10 Americans for very long.

We’ll still run into hardships, largely because, while we agree there’s a problem, we won’t agree on the solutions. We probably have at least a couple more presidential election cycles of these hyper-divisive politics.

But we can come out the other side OK if the American people tire of folks taking our democracy to its edge and demand resolution.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.