Writing in the NY Times, Michelle Goldberg has a powerful commentary on where we are at this moment in time.
The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”
Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.
The parallels between the climate crisis and the democracy crisis are difficult to ignore. (Not to mention the links.) It seems like this is the hour Yeats foresaw:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
As with climate, the signs that our democracy was in trouble have been apparent for years — and denialism has been a big part of getting us to where we are now. Charles P. Pierce traces it back to Reagan, although it could be argued the roots go deeper. Here’s Pierce from 2013:
...The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
How have they come this far, to the point where our government is effectively in the hands of an organized crime syndicate? Sara Robinson wrote this in 2006:
...High-social-dominance (SDO) authoritarian leaders are always among us, always pushing, always scheming, always looking for their next chance. There is no opportunity to take control, legally or illegally, that they won't fail to exploit, as long as the gains promise to outweigh the costs. As Edmund Burke did not say (but usually gets the attribution for anyway): all that's required for them to succeed in this endless quest for power is for the rest of us to do nothing.
Unfortunately, the ease and confidence of living in a prosperous society under a strong Constitution makes kicking back and doing nothing a very easy, attractive option. You can be blithely oblivious to these guys for years -- until the day comes when you've got a fundamentalist school board trying to teach your kids young-earth creationism; or militia guys jackbooting up Main Street at noon and performing blitz redecorating on the local synagogue at midnight; or a born-again president trying to bring on Armageddon for the profit of the oil companies and the acclaim of his Rapture-minded followers. On that day, we're jolted out of our reverie. Where did all these wackadoodles come from? Of course, they came from us -- because we didn't take seriously the threat they pose to the continued existence of our democracy, or our constant obligation to keep an eye out for the authoritarians in our midst, and take steps to prevent them from amassing followers and power in the first place.
emphasis added
Again, those words in bold type were written in 2006. We cannot say we did not have warning, that we did not know what they were going to do.
We have discovered to our dismay that the strong Constitution Robinson refers to above is not as strong as we thought it was. We have seen what we thought were strong defenses crumble in the face of the amoral, unprincipled crooks, liars, and worse who have risen to power.
Not least in this descent into authoritarianism has been the role of the press. The end of the Fairness Doctrine allowed Fox and talk radio to become outright propaganda outlets. Media consolidation decreased the number of independent voices even as journalism was compromised for the bottom line. The Judiciary Committee just voted 23-17 to pass both articles of impeachment along party lines — which means the press will frame it first as a partisan vote and secondarily as a constitutional issue.
‘Fair and balanced’ reporting means covering both sides as though they have equal credibility — which they do not. The GOP has engaged in systematic gaslighting for years. But false equivalence and one hand — other hand reporting means shoveling it all out into the media machine without distinguishing between truth and lies, or intent. It’s how right wing talking points get picked up and amplified by the mainstream media even as the right wing calls the ‘liberal’ media biased and fake news.
Make no mistake, we are in a bad place and despair is not a surprising reaction. But it should be used to empower us, not cause us to give up the determination to turn things around. Sara Robinson had this to say as well:
We need to stop this. We have gone on too long assuming that our right-wing opponents are, in all times and places, unchangeable and unchanging. Yes, their arguments are confoundingly short on evidence and fact. Yes, their logic loops are closed up so tight as to be frustratingly impervious to reason. Yes, they absolutely do mean to do us -- and our democracy -- grievous harm.
Here's the good news. That Great Wall that separates our little reality-based community from The Fantasyland Next Door is not a monolith. Nor are the inmates of that Otherworld necessarily locked in there for all time and eternity ….
...I am here to tell you: there are places where it fails. People do cross it, and survive to tell the tale. And, rather than continue to wallow in our frustration, it's high time we mapped those cracks, find effective ways to widen them, and eventually exploit them to help both afflicted individuals and our larger culture break through the insanity.
Goldberg concludes with this:
But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit, and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.
emphasis added
And once more from Robinson:
America's founders understood all too well that would-be authoritarians would always be among us; and that holding on to our democracy would involve a constant struggle against their ongoing efforts to control us. That's what Ben Franklin was talking about when he said that we have "a republic -- if you can keep it." And what Tom Jefferson was alluding to when he told us that "the tree of liberty must be watered occasionally with the blood of tyrants and patriots." They knew that democracies are not established once, but re-created continuously as each generation reasserts its freedom against fresh generations of would-be rulers. It's an ongoing conversation about liberty, equality, and power that's re-negotiated – sometimes more peacefully, sometimes less -- every day.
We have a terrible clarity in that the Republican Party has made it undeniably plain where they stand: on the wrong side of the law, history, and democracy, choosing power over principle. Their deeds have shown us how empty their words are. Whether or not we hate them, they have made it clear they hate and fear us. We dare not allow them to prevail.
The hour is late; the crisis is upon us. We must turn despair into resolve. To become apolitical and apathetic is to surrender. Get out the vote. Do not be afraid to speak up. Find a candidate you can support and work to get them elected — then make sure they continue to give you reasons to support them. Choose the lesser of two evils if you must — but keep pushing towards the light. Run for office yourself or find other ways to engage. Democracy is not a spectator sport and politics ain’t bean bag.