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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMichelle Goldberg: Democracy Grief is real
Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
Dec. 13, 2019
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 rights willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time Magazines 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 Im 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.
After Trumps election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with books explaining, as one title put it, How Democracies Die. In the years since, its breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.
In How Democracies Die, Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard describe how, in failing democracies, the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the governments side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful and legal weapon with which to assault its opponents. This is happening before our eyes.
The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately Ive noticed, and not just in myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression. You can see it online, in the self-protective cynicism of liberals announcing on Twitter that Trump is going to win re-election. In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings of political desperation: Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods, I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.
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I know I've been feeling the same way. I'm glad it has a name now...
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)Salviati
(6,008 posts)After all, government has seen its fair share of crooks, thieves, liars, and cheats, just like any other profession. It's that so many people support it with open eyes.
klook
(12,152 posts)33% = 50.0000001% = 100% in Republican math.
Maven
(10,533 posts)The founders never foresaw a scenario in which the Senate would be instrument of tyranny by the minority. Of course, we can also thank them for saddling us with the Electoral College. I'm sure they would think we're insane not to have amended both out of existence by now.
Garrett78
(10,721 posts)...how much the nation and world have changed. For one thing, we've gone from 13 colonies and a population of 2 and a half million to 50 states and a population of 327 million--a population which isn't even remotely evenly distributed across the 50 states.
But just imagine what a disaster a constitutional convention would be. And the reason it would be a disaster is because we have this tyranny of the minority political system. A tyranny of the minority political system that can't really be reformed for precisely the reasons why it so desperately needs to be reformed. It's quite the conundrum. Good luck passing a constitutional amendment in today's US. If one could be passed, it wouldn't be one you and I would find acceptable. It'd be one that Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, West Virginia and the rest of the deep red states have gotten behind.
When nearly 70% of the population is represented by just 30% of the US Senate, as will be the case within 20 years - an intolerable situation - what are we to do?
The Electoral College and the US Senate were ways of giving disproportionate power to slave states. And now it seems we're stuck with those remnants of slavery. What we ought to do is, as the late John Dingell suggested, get rid of the US Senate (and the Electoral College). And greatly expand the size of the US House. Do away with gerrymandering, do away with Citizens United, and so on.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Changes have changed my life, big time. However, belief in democracy is as close as I get to religion, and I'm not about to waste energy grieving that needs to be used fighting to protect it.
DemocracyMouse
(2,275 posts)why isn't she leading instead of raining on the party of activists.
Support action or kiss your democracy goodbye!
wendyb-NC
(3,304 posts)I agree totally.
DemocracyMouse
(2,275 posts)Talk of despair is contagious 😷. Shame on anyone who treats Democracy as a consumer product. As if the local store is out of your favorite cigarettes.
We make the democracy, we don't consume it.
SargeXXX
(48 posts)Pepsidog
(6,254 posts)more to stop it. Most stick their heads in the sand and dont want to discuss it. Im a nut job, my kids think.
PatrickforO
(14,559 posts)It has been a hard three years since Trump took office. His people have been like wrecking balls, destroying everything that we hold dear. I cannot help but grieve for my grandchildren and their children. What the hell kind of earth will they live in? Will they have to breathe through some filtered mask? Will they be safe? Have enough? Will they be able to have a say in the policies that affect them?
Sometimes in darker moods it seems to me that, like the ancient Hebrews, we will have to write a Book of Lamentation to commemorate the Trump presidency and its fallout.
But we cannot lose hope. We all must keep resisting, keep fighting the good fight. Because it is a good fight. If we believe in holding the welfare of the people over party and profits, then we have to organize and make that happen.