There are few things as subtle as when democracy dies. In its ending, democracy suffers not a calamitous shock but a series of minor crises, each one inflicting a deeper wound than the last. Institutions begin to weaken; strongmen gain power; conspiracies spread about even fundamental truths.
The terminal illnesses that eventually take democracy down are chronic in nature, and their symptoms are often missed until it’s too late: an election result denied here, a failed institution over there. Sooner or later, one wakes up and realizes they aren’t even living in a democracy anymore.
Democracy does not die in darkness; it dies in plain sight, often with citizens too busy to notice.
On Tuesday night, it is quite possible that the democratic experiment known as America will begin to fail, if it hasn’t already. The country no longer has two parties—but one party committed to democracy and the other committed to excusing insurrection and sedition. It’s like 1858, with the parties reversed, and the issues being whether America will continue as a nation that follows the rule of law, fair and free elections, the peaceful transition of power, or will succumb to the temptations of cult and one-person rule.
With a slate of election-deniers, the Republican Party will likely strike a near-fatal blow to democracy if and when it takes back control of Congress. There will be talk of impeachment. There will be zero accountability for the individuals who tried to steal the 2020 presidential election. There will likely be foul play in the next presidential election. America is not only a house divided against itself; it is a house that is on fire, and the arsonists are about to be in charge.
I don’t think the Democrats effectively made their case this time around. Biden had multiple wins—infrastructure, student loans, climate action—yet his message was muddied. The left, post-Obama, has been terrible at communicating its story. For example: Biden has taken much stronger action on China than Trump, going so far as to ban exports to China of U.S.-made semiconductor chips and other technologies, and yet, not a word. He’s done more for the middle-class and working-class than almost any president since Roosevelt, and yet, his poll numbers continue to sink.
After this election, people will ask: Did the Democrats speak to people’s fears about the economy, rising prices, the grocery store bills that keep getting more expensive? Did they speak to people’s fears about crime, instability, and violence around them? Living in America, walking these windy streets, there is an uncertainty in the air, a kind of existential tension, with rising hatred and extremist ideologies baking in the minds of the most heavily-armed population in the history of the world. One wants to hope, but fear often overwhelms hope.
Looming over all this is the former president, and perhaps next president, Donald J. Trump. According to testimony heard by the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump knew the mob had weapons and encouraged them to march to the Capitol. That is, the sitting president had the specific intent to facilitate an armed insurrection against the people’s constitutionally-elected government. The whole thing is stunning not only for the bald attempt to sabotage American democracy, but also for the collective shrug that’s followed.
Tyranny in a democratic republic, observed Alexis de Tocqueville, “leaves the body alone and goes straight for the spirit.” America’s institutions are withering because its spirit has begun to wither. Tyranny is an attack on the mind as well, on the energy expended in re-establishing basic facts, on the exertions needed to defend fundamental principles of constitutional government. Tyranny, when it emerges in a democracy, first exhausts the people, extinguishing their belief in the system—and then consumes their institutions.
The individuals who are likely to be elected on Tuesday are the very ones who will administer the next presidential election. Local offices, secretaries of state, governors—the important positions that determine whether proper procedure is followed, or else, a few ballots here, a few ballots there, and we have ourselves a banana republic. It is stark to even write this, in what is the oldest democracy in the world today, and the largest successful republic in history. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Donald Trump told Georgia’s secretary of state in 2020. He almost got his way. That’s the warped, truth-denying, anti-democratic, hallucinatory world of double-speak we now live in.
Around the world, people will be watching America tonight, and for the next two years. This beautiful, boisterous, and ailing country will now face its own darkest hour, at least in modern times. The sunset of democracy may be near, and it will be up to ordinary people to push back against the forces of fascism and tyranny, which nearly won this battle before, and may win it again.