Reflections on a most vexing political genie

 Funny how things come in cycles.

Another year, another (largely) happy birthday.  With all the little horrors screaming out from the great void this year, I’ve been blessed with good friends, good family, and even more reasons to not take them for granted.  But there’s one sore thumb that I wished had stayed the hell out of my sights this time.

Because once again, on an election result taking form within close proximity of my birthday, I find myself royally pissed off.

Not because “my party” didn’t win; while I have my political leanings like anyone else, my personal politics are complex, as I’d expect to be the case for most thinking people, and so I hold no permanent shelter under either “big tents” in this system.  Rather, what pisses me off is that for the second time, I am forced to cast my ballot not on the basis of careful policy consideration, analysis of long-term plans, or even which wedge issue is least likely to make me vomit in disgust at the intellectual aridity in America’s political culture.

No, my ballot was just a contribution towards squashing a nascent autocratic regime.  And that, pisses me off.

It’s not like I’m surprised, mind you.  Great as this country is and has been at times, you can’t throw a stone anywhere in its history without hitting some tragedy or miscarriage of justice somewhere - particularly if you’re poor, and especially if you’re black or brown.  But democracies require one thing above all else in order to exist.  It’s not wealth, it’s not the military.  It’s trust.  People have to trust their ability to have differences of opinion without casting each other to the metaphorical Gehenna.  Likewise, they must trust the institutions which ensure that their voices are heard and that power can be transferred peacefully and equanimously when the time comes.  There may be winners and losers in every election, but as long as the losers trust that there’s a chance to be heard in the next go around, the system will endure in the face of even the most bitter contests.

And this trust is extremely fragile, as history, discrimination, corruption, and a host of despotic “failed” democracies the world over can attest. There are many Matryoshka layers you’d need to unpeel to discover how, in any particular instance, trust erodes and a democracy falls, though a conflict of needs and grievances within a diverse population and the government’s failure to respond thereof are the usual suspects.  But there’s typically one signpost waiting at the end of the road: a charismatic strongman who claims to have all the cures for what ails.  

The democratic experiment is always at war with its opposite - not the Commies, the Facists, or any other specific group, but the authoritarian genie lurking to screw everything over by granting the corrupted wishes of a people who feel wronged.  Now, I have nothing against liberals or conservatives at all, and I freely engage anyone on a host of topics in brisk, lively debate.  I’ve learned a long time ago how to disagree with the idea, but respect the person.

But authoritarianism, coupled with malicious “Othering,” is a malignancy.  It’s a tumor in the body politic, in our shared ethics, in our hearts and minds.  It creeps in, throws open the gates to incivility and impunity, stokes illiberalism by appeal to fear, anger, and pride, and finally turns its wrath to both the institutions designed to check its gluttony, and any group unfortunate enough to be on the ass-end of a majority-minority divide - all presided over by a malignant narcissist who’d think nothing of a few thousand deaths in service to his or her delusions of grandeur.  

Most of you would probably stand bemused and shaking your heads if this concerned some distant drama in a banana republic half-way around the world. But it doesn’t.  It’s happening right in our backyard, and that disgusts me on a profound level.  Because right now there are thousands of people out there - driven by the unsubstantiated hearsay of one unhinged madman who thinks he’s bigger than the office he holds - who are clamoring for a chance to overturn an election result that by every objective measure arrived through one of the fairest and most transparent electoral procedures in recent history.  Call a spade a spade, and call a coup and coup.  And if that doesn’t bother you, whatever side of the fence you’re on, then you’re taking for granted something you understand jack-squat about.

I try not to wade into hot water topics on social media, to protect both my private life and my sanity.  At best, it’s like a game of “Where’s Waldo?” but with logical fallacies embedded in walls of text; at worst, it’s like teaching pigs how to sing. And frankly, most of the trigger issues at play are so small on the grand scale of the life and death of civilizations that you can stack a tower of pennies from here to the moon with the inverse amount of shits I usually have to give. But this is different, so I’m not going to take a limp “both-sides-ism” here.  This isn’t left vs. right, pro-choice vs. pro-life, or boxers vs. briefs.  It’s a democratic system, however flawed and uneven, vs. an authoritarian lurch which if history is any judge, has frightening consequences for the future stability of this country.  And everyone has a dog in this fight, even if you don’t realize it.

So to this cycle’s winners, of whatever political persuasion, I say: congrats, but don’t get conceited.  And don’t bank on American Exceptionalism to fish you out next time, either.  Democracy “may have prevailed,” but mostly because our would-be autocrat lacked the competence to metastasize that authoritarian tumor into Stage IV totalitarianism.  The next strongman in waiting may hone these lessons and find a better way.  And don’t be so naive as to think that this nation is somehow inoculated against it.  The deep divisions of class and race along with our tendency to lash out at the perennial Other makes us ripe for that kind of slide.  Ask socialists during McCarthyism, or poor people and immigrants during the 20th century eugenics movement, or people of color at any time in our history.  Democide is more common in societies adjusting to instability while transitioning into a new political order. So be vigilant and prepare to both improve and fight for our institutions when necessary, for if we do somehow start slumping down that path, it’ll probably look less like Singapore and a lot more like Turkey.

To those who are still coping with this result: you’re hurt.  You’re scared and angry.  You feel that your country’s drifting out of your fingers, that you’re losing out in the process, and that others are unfairly getting ahead.  You want a stronger economy and more “law and order” to feel safe.  I get it.   I’ll invalidate your arguments, but I’d never be able to invalidate your feelings.  And I accept that.  There are many separate groups in this country composed of millions who feel or have felt exactly the same way as you, and that's okay.  But let’s forget about the trappings of politics or ideology, of supposed economic incentives and the ambiguous dog whistle of “shared worldviews” for but a second.  If you can’t see a future past your own grievances, then understand that the current road you’re marching down, in this fractious nation, only has four possible outcomes at the very end: assimilation, segregation, suppression, or genocide.  That’s it.  There’s no work around, no “No, if…” or “Yes, but…”  Those are your options.  History and current events are both pretty clear on that.  And if you’re well on board with it, then just scrub “freedom” out of your lexicon right now.  Because to you, it’s a fetish, an idol; it’s like wrapping a rosary around your steering wheel and expecting to walk off a head-on collision with a train.  You don’t know the meaning of the word, and it won't protect you when the genie decides that your wishes are up and it's time to collect its due.

This is usually the part in these things that you’d offer some grand hope or plan to get people talking and turn this ship around.  But I’m not such a rosy person.  Before compassion and before dialogue, healing and reconciliation demand that we first agree on a shared reality - that when we’re talking about the same thing, we’re actually talking about the same damn thing.  But humans are narrative creatures; we live and breathe by the stories we tell each other and ourselves.  And if that story is self-serving and forms a buttress for our fragile egos, it will blind us to facts, reasoning, empathy, or anything else which can foster dialogue.  And these stories have led us to attacking an institution on the flimsiest of pretenses, and in the process, throwing the whole democratic enterprise for a spin.  Make no mistake, “freedom” and “rights” aren’t on the menu here.  It’s fear and power.  But in the unlikely event that bluster and legal manipulation carry this election, it will set a terrible precedent.  The fact that our elected officials are so spineless that they would rather enable a tin-pot tyrant’s final tantrum and do serious harm to our institutions than publicly legitimize a clean election victory and alienate their increasingly authoritarian base has some potential dictator out there licking their lips.

 I have a hard time seeing a solution out of this, but for the good of the nation, one needs to surface.  The authoritarian genie, once let out of the lamp, won’t so easily be stuffed back inside.