Troubling Times

Photo by Elliott Stallion 

I’ve always believed in democracy, even with its messy and snail-like progress. That happens when people have a say in how they are governed. Democracy prevails because activists and leaders, people with contrasting beliefs, compromise to preserve it. Everyone is unwilling to dismantle or replace it. Only in the Civil War did our most polarized extreme beliefs bring us to a destructive brink. Democracy requires that citizens at all levels continually seek to perfect it. To flourish in an evolving world, democracy itself must adapt because it is a living organism. To replace democracy with something else, you must kill the host.

Today, democracy is on a ventilator. A demagogue clearly wants to kill and replace it with authoritarianism. He’s offering rapid change and simple solutions, by injecting a cancer that spreads through the echo chamber of online communications technology. This cancer, metathesized by extreme white nationalist firebrand politicians, pits citizens against each other, destroying recognition, respect, or value in the common good. The weapons are fear mongering falsehoods and manipulated laws. At local and national levels, biased election processes and managers usurp sound, if imperfect, processes. From this emerges an abyss of emotional extremism, a breach through which a demagogue steps.

As a country, we find ourselves in a place, once again, with no middle ground, no room for compromise, fear of losing power and hatred of ‘the other’. Will we have Civil War again? I pray we do not, but it may be too late. The war has begun. Years of online communications misinformation battles may soon morph into physical violence beyond January 6th. Our nation’s terrorists are internal. The question is, “Will we, the people, settle for authoritarian leaders captaining the ghost ship of our democracy?”

These were my thoughts when I opened last Wednesday’s New York Times to find Thomas L. Friedman’s recommendation to look to Israel for a solution “Biden-Cheney 2024?” Do our leaders on the left or right have sufficient ‘balls’ to let go of contempt for each other and come together to save our democratic institutions? The article presents an interesting case for encouraging them to try. But , we know, they failed.