Democracy is more than choosing leaders

George Washington’s actions after winning the Revolution shocked world monarchs more than the Revolution itself did. But his successor, John Adams, terrified them.

It shook the world when George Washington declined to run for a third term, and voluntarily stepped down after serving as president for eight years.

No one thought a national leader could do that. Emperors don’t do that. Kings don’t do that. Not even conquerors do that, and Washington was seen (by monarchs around the world) as little better than a general who’d seized power by might of arms.

Yet he stepped down. Voluntarily. That shook them all.

A still larger quake stunned the world’s monarchs four years later. It gets less press though, because it frightened them more, and it still does.

The first incumbent US president to be defeated at the polls and denied a second term was John Adams in 1800.

For the first time in human history, a nation’s leader was deposed by means of a scheduled election.

George Washington chose to step down. John Adams wanted to remain in office. The People chose to remove him.

And then he left. Peacefully. Because The People voted him out of office.

Until then, no one was certain this was even possible. The People not only chose their president, they then chose to remove one. And then he left. He didn’t even call out the army in an attempt to keep himself in power. He just left.

This had never happened before. It proved, beyond a doubt, The People were in charge in America, not the “rulers”.

In America, The People are the government.

This is the true attainment of democracy — not only that we choose our leaders, but that we can remove them.

Make no mistake: Trump’s brownshirts and his supine fascist Republican Party are trying very hard to un-do this historic achievement. The possibility that a president who was voted out of office might not leave would mark a final failure of the American experiment.

2020 was a test to see whether government of the people, by the people and for the people shall perish from the earth.

We took the House in 2018 and deposed a would-be king in 2020.

We did it with ballots, not bullets.

Don’t ever say your vote won’t count. Vote in every damn election. Your vote is the power that terrifies tyrants.