Every voice must have expression for democracy to work | GARY COSBY JR.

A man named W.H. McKellar, writing in "The Rotarian" in 1939, said this: "Optimism laid down the railroad, but pessimism made it practicable with the air brake and the block-signal system. Optimism designed a ship to sail daringly into the skies—and fall perhaps at times. So pessimism designed the parachute."

McKellar's point is perfectly applicable to our situation today. We have a two-party system in government with largely opposing points of view on almost all issues, but, as McKellar indicated, if we have one, the other becomes a necessity.

The idea of a democracy, either a representative democracy such as ours or any other of the several forms of democratic government, is that every voice gets representation. Even severely opposing voices are necessary to the functioning of a democratic society.

My primary job is as a photojournalist. I can tell you from long experience that shadows enhance and define light, but without light, one can have no photograph. In like manner, a photograph of pure light with no shadow is inconceivable. It would be nothing but vaguely differentiated degrees of brightness.

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In philosophy, we know of the concept of yin and yang. In nature, we have the concept of male and female, and in Christian spirituality, we have the concepts of light and darkness and, given our human natures, it is very difficult to see God without first having a perception of Satan. Our entire concepts of good and evil, dark and light, yes and no, and even Democrats and Republicans depend upon the presence of and balance between the two concepts.

In fact, democratic government without balance ceases to be a democracy in any fashion, save perhaps in name only. We see something of the sort in Russia, wherein the leader is an autocrat whose will is carried out as if he were a tsar, though he bears the title president and has no possibility of being unseated in a fair election.

Thus we come to the danger of a democracy and an imminent peril our nation is currently facing. That peril has a name: extremism.

If you look at past presidential elections from the standpoint of percentages, the normal margin of victory is small. The population is pretty well balanced between left and right, in terms of actual voting.

Looking back over recent elections, the winner rarely gets more than 52% of the popular vote. Richard Nixon won with almost 61% of the vote in 1972 before the Watergate scandal brought about his resignation. Ronald Reagan is the only president since to even approach that number, winning in 1984 with almost 59% of the vote.

Most wins have been much, much closer. George W. Bush and Donald Trump both won the White House without winning the popular vote and they are the only two men since the 19th century to have done so. Most winners garner just over 50% of the popular vote and this is not just a modern trend. This has been common throughout U.S. history.

What this means is the population of this country is pretty evenly divided about political ideas and it infers that all those ideas must be represented in the halls of government for our nation to function as a democracy.

One of the great dangers facing our country today is this burning desire evident in both national political parties and their supporters to more or less crush the other party. The public animosity between right and left, while certainly not a new phenomenon, seems to be peaking and in so doing opens our nation to internal strife. Internal strife, not the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans or the Iranians is our greatest enemy and the only enemy that has any potential to defeat us.

Short of a civilization-ending thermonuclear war, the United States will not fall to an enemy military action. The logistics for a  military conquest of that magnitude simply do not exist in our enemies to pull off such a victory. We, however, are more than capable of doing it to ourselves.

A person's political ideology is not and cannot be more important than the nation as a whole. If we elevate one ideology to a place of unassailable superiority in our culture, we have doomed ourselves to fail.

Take a look back at one of the primary causes of the American Revolution, which was taxation without representation. Our voices were not being heard in the courts of King George and the resulting tyranny could not be tolerated.

In that history lesson lies the greatest danger to our democracy today. We could literally defeat ourselves when no other nation could do such a thing. And don't think for a minute that other countries are not trying their hardest to sow discord in our nation through fake news postings on social media designed specifically to divide us.

America is great and strong precisely because of our diversity and for us to continue in strength every person must have a voice and each voice must be heard in our halls of government.

Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: For democracy to function, every voice must have expression