It Could Definitely Happen Here
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It Could Definitely Happen Here
Many Americans struggle to accept that democracy is young, fragile, and could actually collapse – a lack of imagination that dangerously blunts the response to the Trumpist Right.
New piece:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/it-could-definitely-happen-here -
I wrote about the disastrous mix of a deep-seated mythology of American exceptionalism, progress gospel, lack of political understanding, and (willful) historical ignorance that has created a situation in which a lot of people simple refuse to take the Trumpist threat seriously.
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There is a pervasive idea that in a country like the United States, with a supposedly centuries-long tradition of stable, consolidated democracy, authoritarianism simply has not realistic chance to succeed, that “We” have never experienced authoritarianism.
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But the political system that was stable for most of U.S. history was a white man’s democracy, or racial caste democracy. There is absolutely nothing old or consolidated about *multiracial, pluralistic democracy* in America. It only started less than 60 years ago.
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And because the anti-egalitarian, anti-pluralistic ideas didn’t just vanish into thin air with the passage of civil rights legislation of 1964/65, the conflict over whether or not democracy should be allowed to endure and prosper has been the central fault line in U.S. politics ever since.
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We must not assume directionality in history at all. There is no arc, and there definitely is no ironclad law of the universe that says “We” can’t slide back – or slide forward into a new kind of authoritarianism.
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That is why Reconstruction is such a key historical reference. America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was quickly drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and escalating white reactionary violence. It took a century to get the country back to that level of democracy.
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People need to accept that things can change – in either direction: It really could get much, much worse.
But it could also get better. There is nothing inevitable about either doom or progress. We are neither fated nor guaranteed to experience the status quo for all eternity.
