Our real situation

Sam Smith – In the over 60 years since I covered my first Washington story, I can’t think of a moment when I was as dubious about the future of America as I am right now. Yes, there were tense moments –such as with Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy - but the difference with today is that during such times we still had vigorous cultures of decency to take on the evils around us. Now those defenses seem to be  disintegrating and we have much less to battle the wrongs around us.        

As Senator Angus King put it in a interview recently with the Portland Press Herald’s Colon Woodard:

We are in a moment when democracy is in danger, when autocracy is on the march around the world….Our system is an anomaly in human history – the norm is authoritarians, kings and pharaohs and we are seeing (democracy) backsliding into authoritarianism before our eyes…. The idea that it can’t happen here - that’s just not so… We have a lot of people who are just not committed to the idea of democracy..

Consider that·        

·       - Our intellectual community  has offered little guidance and the academic institutions that harbor them have become increasingly dependent on sources of money rather than wisdom.

·       - Our media is treating the greatest domestic threat to our democracy since the Civil War as it was just another story (or on Fox News as a pretty good idea). Further, they sell massive  advertising to the corrupt and evil.

·       - Corporate values have superseded constitutional ones ones.

·       - Lying by public officials has become normal behavior.

·       - The Internet has not only provided a haven for evil, it has boosted identity politics at the expense of the coalitions that once had the strength to move us in a better direction.

·       - Civics is declining as a subject to study in our schools

·       - As more churches lose parishioners, these churches become more cautious about involvement in community issues. 

·      - The young have the numbers but not the will to change things.

·      - With few exceptions Republican non-participants in the attempted coup are eerily silent as are many Democrats.

·      = The formal investigations Congress and at the Justice Department are being conducted with the caution one might expect in a legally complex civil case rather than an assault on our whole system of government. This may produce worthy results but in the interim contributes to the.public and media distance from the crisis. This is not another matter corporate misdoing but a threat to our whole way of living.

·       = Not only has President Biden failed to describe this as the crisis it is, there are few Democratic politicians who will even speak as bluntly as Angus King. 

What is frustrating to this arthritic old guy is not only do I not have a solution, but nobody else seems to either. . There would be tremendous potential to finding an an approach if the young would organize as they did in the 1960s. Or if the Democratic Party would take its name literally. Or if we replace our misguided obsession with ethnicity with coalition based action on the other divisions in our country, such as the mistreatment of the lower classes. Or if the media would tell folks how bad a time this is. Or if the 2024 election became an open, and not just a hidden, contest between democracy and fascism.

 I don’t know how this will all work out. The one thing I do know is that we don’t have much time.