The problem with living in a country whose democracy is in danger of coming apart at the seams is that no one knows exactly what it will look like when and if the seams finally burst, or how toxic the sociopolitical stuffing that emerges will be. I suppose January 6 was a quick peek inside the maelstrom of a fallen democracy, and the 60-odd court challenges to the 2020 election were a gentle pat compared with the sledgehammer to the head our institutions will take if Crazy Orange Grandpa and his enablers wind up in the White House instead of the Big House, where they all belong.
With the pandemic largely in the rearview, we’re trying to regain some semblance of normalcy, despite the coming political earthquake. We do the most normal things we can in the most normal ways we can, mostly because 1) people still need to pay their bills, and 2) it cuts down on all the screaming.
But acting as if things are normal at this point seems irresponsible and poisonous. Our crumbling democratic infrastructure this week includes, just for starters, a defence reauthorisation bill – normally passed with wide bipartisan support – held up by conservative culture warriors over a provision that pays the expenses of military personnel who must now travel to find an abortion provider, and a presidential impeachment inquiry occasioned without the customary vote of the entire House of Representatives by Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
This, sadly, has become business as usual. Most Republican legislators have had nothing to say, for example, over the antics of Alabama senator and former football coach Tommy Tuberville, who single-handedly has held up the promotions of hundreds of top military personnel over, again, the abortion travel-expense issue. But they have loudly objected to a recent relaxation of the Senate’s dress code, so at least their priorities are in solid order.
All of this federal mayhem provides a lovely smokescreen for the work Republicans are doing at state level to consolidate control over the one thing that can keep them from gaining unrestrained power: free and fair elections. And democracy’s customary last-resort saviour – our judicial system – has been populated at every level by so many right-wing ideologues that we can’t count on it to save our collective bacon.
The classic example of speech not protected by our First Amendment is yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. But if the theatre is indeed on fire, isn’t yelling “fire” at the top of your lungs the responsible thing to do? That’s our problem now: not only are not enough people yelling loudly enough about the fact our democracy is on fire, but also one of our two main political parties is more interested in pouring petrol on it than putting it out. The danger is real and imminent. Trump made the mistake last time of picking a few key team members who were more loyal to the nation than to him; he won’t make that mistake again. And he’s got a road map to his desired destination, thanks to a host of recently elected leaders who have used their power to abandon liberal democratic principles and institutions.
These days, democracies die quietly. Because we’re human, we think the way things are is the way they’ll always be, and that’s what the forces pushing authoritarianism are counting on. Picking through the available literary metaphors, we’re Nero, fiddling while our Rome burns, when what we need to be are Dr Seuss’s Whos – as in Horton Hears A – collectively shrieking at the tops of our lungs to wake up the tens of millions understandably unexcited about Trump-Biden 2.0.
Timing and location are everything, and right now, we have dangerous people in the most dangerous places at the most dangerous time, and nothing short of an ear-shattering, incessant national alarm is going to do any good. I have no solutions, but I have a loud voice. And it’s screaming time.
