To get through the night …
Nothing keeps sleep at bay these days like huffing up a few articles about democracy’s doomsday.
Barton Gellman, America’s ranking Cassandra, anticipated “the death of the body politic” in a recent essay in The Atlantic. Donald Trump is staging a comeback, Gellman wrote, and crafting ways to subvert the vote if it doesn’t go his way. If Trump makes it back to the Oval Office via an epochal cheat, the levees of democracy will have been breached. Injustice will roll down like a mighty stream.
Destructive forces—specifically, my brain-gnawing panic—reliably converge upon me at 4 a.m. Danger, death, destruction. And of course, disease. For an extra shudder of predawn dread, I study the hockey-stick surge in covid cases.
Cassandra, let’s recall, was right. But it’s also prudent to rest up if we’re going to brace for America’s Armageddon. So I offer these thoughts for the new year not as a guarantee of hope, but to slow my own insomniac roll. And maybe yours. First, there are true signs of light in the gloom. Americans are back to work, and wages are high. Unemployment in the U.S. is dramatically down. The stock market is buoyant.
So don’t count American democracy out yet. Trump’s Drive to End Democracy is not yet a juggernaut. His promiscuous endorsements of puppet candidates in state and local races, where they could help him overturn election results in 2024, have yielded mediocre results. He is 0 for 2 in congressional endorsements, and many of his other down-ballot darlings are lagging in polls. Even the GOP’s big winner in Virginia, Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, got there by distancing himself from the Marquis of MAGA.
On V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index, which rates the political freedom of nations on metrics like rule of law and civil liberties, we aren’t hitting the valedictorian marks of Denmark, but the U.S. is still humming along, roughly tied with Japan.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is, if not devouring the long-running anti-democratic attempt to thwart President Joe Biden and install Trump as our forever president, at least eating away at it.
What’s more, the Justice Department has charged at least 727 participants with crimes related to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and criminally indicted Stephen K. Bannon for blowing off a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee. Mark Meadows, another Trump factotum, has been held in contempt of Congress for the same reason. Both men could face prison time.
So yes, the nation has suffered a huge number of casualties from covid. And we have sustained a serious blow to democracy with Trump’s effort to disenfranchise and defraud us.
But key to those statements is the use of the past tense. We have suffered. We have sustained. British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once wrote, “There are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, fear of which is wrecking his life, has already occurred.” Americans need to be told this now.
Let’s be impressed, all things considered. We’ve home-schooled kids, learned to socialize in masks, endured quarantines and gotten inoculated; we’ve economized, cared for others, sought and rethought work; we’ve drawn close to loved ones and consoled the bereaved. We voted in the fairest election in American history. And, in spite of some, um, challenges, we inaugurated a new president.
The breakdown happened, and, as a certain anthem goes, the flag was still there. Sometimes, that minor miracle must be enough to get us through the night.