The Death of Democracy
Bad news for old people: fascism is arriving before you die
I used to tell friends that a short-term future isn’t the worst thing about getting old. Impending death, I argued, will spare us experiencing the complete collapse of democracy and the establishment of a fascist state. As usual, I was wrong. Nursing home residents clamoring for hospice beds know democracy’s end is now, not nigh. We’re done.
Unlike most people, I’ve been obsessed with politics since I was 16, thanks in large part to a high school history teacher who took me under his wing during a time I was bullied. One day, I pulled a book off the shelves that changed everything: “The Communist Manifesto.” If you’ve read this book or anything else by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, you will be shocked how applicable their observations 174 years ago still are. (That is not to say that totalitarian communism worked.) In college, I was co-chair of my school’s chapter of the most radical student organization in the U.S,, Students for a Democratic Society. Weirdly, I was further radicalized when I saw that women were expected to serve the coffee to us male rebels and that homosexuals, as we were still known, were silly accidents of nature at best.
Throughout my life, I never lost my sense that things can get better. I was an avowed socialist, but I worked in liberal Democratic campaigns. Did things get better? Occasionally. But the same man who gave us the Great Society and Head Start accelerated the genocidal Vietnam War. Bill Clinton turned his promise of gay military service into the closet called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Then something really shitty happened. I noticed that the Democrats, although being nicer and full of promises, had become cowards. In the 2016 election, I supported Bernie Sanders and often pointed out that much of what we hated about Republicans was also true of Democrats. There was, for example, Obama’s habit of prosecuting whistleblowers and reporters with ferocity even the horrid George W. Bush officially eschewed. When I pointed out such things on Facebook, I enraged some “friends” who accused me of concocting lies. I sent them Google pages providing hundreds of articles confirming such. They still denied it. By favoring Bernie over Hillary, they said, I was guaranteeing Trump’s election. I said bullshit. Many unfriended me. I was horrified and hurt.
Unfortunately, things aren’t changing. Biden has accomplished some good work, but he is — as every Democratic outsider predicted — adhering to the fantasy that he can bring back the old days when all the politicos lunched in the same dining room and salivated over tasty bits of compromise. He’s done shitty things like promising a substantial cut in student loan debt and then trying to shove it aside. He’s blown COVID-19 management. He’s refused to use the executive order. His and the party’s meek effort to rein Manchin and Sinema in leads me to wonder if those two volunteered to be the scapegoats; after all, the Dems are as indebted to corporate money as Republicans. Such questions are prohibited by the kindhearted, cowardly members of the party, two of whose presidents, LBJ and FDR, understood that, at the least, there comes a point when a democracy’s survival itself demands the establishment of relative equity.
If things don’t change, fascism will be official by the midterms, and the Democrats can bring back a zombie charm-school leader like Hillary to compromise.
Cliff Bostock, PhD, is a former psychotherapist who now provides life coaching to creative clients. cliffbostock@ gmail.com, 404-518-4415, cliffbostock.com