The current polarization and assault on democracy underway in the U.S. is likely to be transitory

8

guarantor of democracy.

There was a time, when the world seemed at risk of being overrun by fascists or communists, that the military and industrial strength of the United States was very important, but the real issue in those Europe-centred confrontations was ‘balance of power,’ not political philosophy.

In Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, the United States has been instrumental in crushing democracy just as often as it has saved it. The U.S. is not evil, but it’s just another great power – and when it comes to safeguarding democracy, we’re all on our own.

That’s no cause for despondency, because democracy in not a fragile flower. It is the default political system of the modern world, spreading relentlessly since the first democratic revolutions more than two centuries ago.

It has swept all other political ideologies aside almost everywhere except in parts of East Asia and the Middle East. Even most dictators feel obliged to hold fake election every few years to show their ‘legitimacy.’ It has universal appeal because it best reconciles the core human values of freedom and equality. It will survive – and don’t even write off American democracy yet.

Donald Trump has been defeated, although he continues to deny it. He has done much damage to the United States and he will probably yet do more, because the current charade is designed to set him up as the ‘king over the water,’ the legitimate monarch wrongly exiled (if only to Mar-a-Lago). But he is not immortal, and the country effectively is.

Polarization of the kind America is experiencing now is disruptive and tenacious, but it tends to be intergenerational (this episode certainly is), and generational turnover usually erases it in 10 or 20 years. The ‘Sixties’ passed, and in all likelihood so will this.