John Locke, the founding father of modern democracy based on principles of humanity, wrote that all individuals are born with “inalienable right of life, liberty, and property.” These sacred inalienable rights are universal which ought to be respected and protected by everyone. These rights and principles of humanity are backbone of our democracy and undermining them undermines the soul of democracy.
Democracy without principles of humanity is nothing more than a shell democracy carrying out charade of elections.
Biden is a willing accomplice of Netanyahu in crimes against humanity by continuing to supply mass civilian killing bombs to Israel despite 33,000 deaths of innocent Gazans, imminent danger of famine, and Israel facing Genocide charges at ICJ. Biden has not only undermined bedrock principles humanity and our modern democracy, but also our national core values.
Vote for Biden is not a vote for Democracy unless one happens to believe that the basic foundations of our modern democracy and humanity, such as human rights, liberty, and Justice, are no longer relevant. Or one believes that Palestinians have no such rights.
Biden is at least as much threat to our democracy as Trump. Fortunately, our democratic institutions, especially judiciary, are strong enough to withstand any dictatorial assault on our democracy as they did during Trump’s last term and will do so again if Trump is re-elected. But unfortunately, our democratic institutions are not equipped to foil assault by Biden on our principles of humanity, which are foundations of our modern democracy as envisioned by John Locke. It also undermines our credibility as well as our national interests in the world. Such a damage is hard to repair.
Democracy, which used to depend on Lock’s “inalienable right of life, liberty, and property” is today at risk because the truth of free society depending upon the moral psychology of the citizens has been forgotten, ignored, or denied. Today, the cultural climate has drastically changed and new phenomenon of ” personal identity politics” has begun to emerge. Political campaigning focused not on the nation as a whole but on a self-identifying concept of what is “good for me” instead of “what is good for us ” is being promoted with the help of manipulative use of social media. Whether it is, Biden, Trump, Netanyahu, or Modi, social media is helping almost every leader of every country of the world by the unnoticed outsourcing of information to IT such as Google and Wikipedia without filtering the fake elements. The citizens of the world are paying the price of abandoning a shared moral code based on “we the citizens of a moral civilization.” Thus, there is no shared morality, there is no society rather there are today a leader’s individual “identity politics” where “I” is taking precedence over the “We” resulting to weekend relationships from marriages, families, nations and entire global societies. The only way to care for the democracy is to recover the sense of “shared morality” that binds human beings together in a bond of mutual compassion and care. MIRZA IQBAL ASHRAF