By David Brooks on December 19, 2023
“Democracies unravel gradually and then suddenly,” writes Lisa Allardice, modifying a Hemingway phrase ever so slightly, in her Guardian review of the recent Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland under a fascist regime. That sentence sums up the non-fictional conjuncture of another country, the one that has always boasted of being the world’s model of democracy.
That gradual process in the United States has accelerated during the last 40 years under that model, by definition antidemocratic, neoliberalism, with a political leadership increasingly distant from the people it claims to represent. Gore Vidal said that there is only one party in the United States, the Property Party, and it has two right wings: Republicans and Democrats.
It remains a democracy where there is no direct popular vote to elect presidents, where several states have laws explicitly designed to suppress the vote of the poor and minorities, and an electoral process tainted by money (more than $14 billion flowed into the 2020 federal elections).
Former President Jimmy Carter, who for decades was dedicated to promoting and monitoring free elections around the world through his Carter Center, commented in 2015, after a Supreme Court ruling approving unlimited money in elections, that America is now just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery.
Carter warned in January 2022, a year after Trump’s attempted coup, that “I now fear that that which we have fought so hard to achieve globally, the right to free and fair elections…has become dangerously fragile here at home.”
Polls and approval ratings of U.S. political institutions continue to register massive disapproval of the political leadership. A 2021 Survey Center on American Life poll found that nearly seven in 10 Americans believe that American democracy only serves the interests of the rich and powerful.
Today, 65.5 percent versus 26.3 percent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction with a majority disapproving of the executive branch, according to an average of polls, reports RealClearPoltiics. Worse, approval of congressional performance plummeted to just 13 percent in the most recent Gallup poll and a 58 percent majority disapprove of the Supreme Court’s performance.
These indicators of the serious deterioration of the political system, and its disapproval by the demos, are accompanied by an increasingly undemocratic economy, with inequality in both wealth and income reaching levels not seen since just before the Great Depression. The three richest men in the country have more wealth than the total wealth of 50 percent of Americans .
Meanwhile, Trump, who is tied or beating Biden in recent polls at the beginning of the election year, offers an increasingly explicitly fascist option, with promises of repression of dissidents and enemies inside and outside the United States, xenophobic anti-immigrant campaigns, attacks on civil rights and civil liberties; all while his loyalists threaten political violence and his allies continue with censorship and even book burnings.
Alarm bells are ringing again, but with even greater concern, about the extinction of democracy with a possible return of Trump, and not only among liberals and progressives.
Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who was the third highest ranking Republican in Congress, warned this week: we are sleepwalking toward dictatorship in America. Robert Kagan, a neoconservative political analyst at the Brookings Institution, offered the same warning in the Washington Post about a Trump comeback, stating that there is a clear path to dictatorship in America and it is getting shorter every day.
Will the (self-proclaimed) beacon of democracy continue to be lit?
Source: La Jornada translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English