Commentaries

The Dimming Light of the World’s Beacon of Democracy.
Koh Lanta Island, Thailand, October 10th, 2024.
Salaroche

America has been mired in a smelly Maga rut for almost a decade and forward is the only way out. But “forward” can have different meanings for different people. To the hypnotized Maga idolaters, “forward” means going back to a time when the Civil Rights Act didn’t exist, or even going as far back as before The New Deal was enacted. Just take a cursory read of the infamous Project 2025 and you will clearly see what I mean.

The racist, irrational, separatist, white-supremacist, destructive, anti-Declaration of Independence instincts that sparked the Civil War of the 1860s have reincarnated in the 2020s in the form of an insidious Christian-Nationalist, xenophobic, neo-Fascist movement that currently has American Democracy teetering dangerously on the brink of disaster.

American Democracy has never been perfect, no Democracy has ever been. But the highly-undemocratic unpredictability of the Electoral College makes ours doubly so. Tim Walz is absolutely right in calling for it to be abolished once and for all (see here). As the situation stands today, it can reasonably be argued that American Democracy is much less reliable than that of the Nordic Countries or even than that of tiny Costa Rica, which since the 1950s is considered one of the most stable Democracies in the world.

But, despite its imperfections, the American Democratic System has served to reflect in a mostly-accurate manner the will of the majority of the American electorate and it is NO hyperbole to say that, today, the United States has the longest-lasting Democratic System in the world.

Yet, 248 years after the Declaration of Independence was first published, the widening cracks in our Electoral System have revealed American Democracy is much staler and fragile than any of us might have imagined. Just in the span of these past 10 years, our Democracy has been brought to stagger on the edge of catastrophe with the destiny of the Republic ominously hanging on the November elections.

Just stop to think about it for a moment. November 5th is like a gate that has ONLY two roads on the other side of it: a) The road pointing slightly to the left (there is NO real leftwing political party in America), which essentially leads to a possible restoration or even improvement of our Democratic System and, b) The road pointing to the hard-right, which leads into a spiral of authoritarianism that inexorably leads to autocracy and dictatorship.

While the majority of the electorate is thoughtlessly engaged in the traditional partisan bickering, thereby missing the forest for the trees, from overseas we can see that the stakes are much higher than that, as the dark clouds of neo-Fascism keep blurring the flickering light of our Democratic System.

America has for many decades been a bright beacon of Democracy to the world, so, it is indeed disappointing, and it is ultimately sad, to realize that the number of Americans that no longer embrace the very same ideals and principles that gave birth to the nation, can be counted in the tens of millions.

Over the past near-decade, the light of that beacon has been growing dimmer, to the point that, today, to think that it might be extinguished after November 5th, is No longer a farfetched idea.

Want to send the country, and the rest of the world along with it, down the path of authoritarianism and, ultimately, all the way down to dictatorship? Vote Republican in November.

Want to keep the light of the beacon of American Democracy shining brightly over the destiny of future American generations as well as over the future of the rest of the world? Vote Democrat across the board in November.

Salaroche

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