Since Francis Fukuyama’s persuasive 1992 thesis that mankind had reached the “End of History,” the idea has been brought up of the United States one day becoming what most Americans never thought it could become: an autocratic, paranoiac, highly-partisan, extremely-polarized, and post-truth country.
Skeptics and naysayers of this portent dismissively rejected it out of hand. I myself felt greatly dubious about such a possibility occuring in the United States, the greatest and most stable democracy the world had ever seen, the gold standard of a free and just society.
But there was something deep in the recesses of my mind that kept nagging at me over the years since what turned out to be Fukuyama’s premature conclusion, something that doggedly beseeched me to consider that the glorious reign of American democracy would at some point in the future come under a serious, even existential threat.
With rising socio-economic inequality, the metastasizing of virulent nationalism and tribal/identity politics, and increasing disillusionment with the American Dream, we all should have seen the anti-democratic storm coming. And this was before the Covid-19 pandemic came along.
In 1935, as America was struggling to get through the depths of the Great Depression, Sinclair Lewis wrote the ominously prescient “It Can’t Happen Here,” a trenchant work of fiction that envisioned the rise of a neo-fascist political leader and state in the United States. It is a novel that has found renewed interest in today’s charged political climate.
While Lewis’s alarming literary scenario never came to pass for some eight decades, its once-incredulous spectre has by now transgressed the boundaries of improbability as it bespeaks the actualization of the worst of America’s political pathologies in the Donald Trump era.
On the cusp of the most momentous presidential election in the history of the United States, the optimal conditions for democracy’s demise are upon us. When seasoned observers expect that the November 3, 2020 election is going to be one of the most consequential that the United States will have ever experienced, they could not be more earnest in their dread and consternation as to its potential outcome.
The ideal, well-prepared, coherent ending to presidential elections that American voters were accustomed to began to fray with the 2000 Bush-Gore recount. This took a dramatic downward turn with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Strongly suspected Russian interference marred the integrity of Trump’s win and set the stage for future electoral malfeasance and manipulation by the incumbent. This is exactly where we stand now in the short period before November 3.
To compound the fears of electoral foul play by Donald Trump—a man whose name is synonymous with miscellaneous fraud and malignant narcissism—with the intention of forcing a contested and chaotic election, you also have the growing risk of violence surrounding the ballot. The recent case of right-wing militias in Michigan planning to kidnap that state’s governor Gretchen Whitmer attests to the prospect of election-related turbulence.
Now one can be forgiven for thinking that these dire forecasts are being erroneously blown out of proportion and with little chance of happening. America after all, is not some wobbly, coup-ridden banana republic that you historically find so readily in the developing parts of the world.
Keep in mind however, that similarly disdainful sentiments were expressed when Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016. Few professional commentators pictured him in the White House as they assumed Hillary Clinton would win the election.
In short, the implausibility of a Trump presidency turned into reality and the rest is downright calamitous history. Therefore—especially in the socio-political climate we currently live in—who dares to say with smug certainty that the commensurately far-fetched recourse of civil strife and upheaval will not transpire in the upcoming weeks?
Any attempts to disregard this real danger comes at great risk to America’s security and freedoms. To thinly stretch the ability of the nation to safeguard its security and these freedoms, not to mention the nation’s unity and harmony, is to put the United States and its citizens on a knife’s edge.
In his bestselling guide on repelling autocratic rule in America, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” respected historian Timothy Snyder warns of the pending mobilization of paramilitary groups. This is underscored within the backdrop of the November 2020 election and the damage these groups can do in it.
Snyder writes, “Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh.”
The New York Times quoted Joan Donovan from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University apropos to the election. She acknowledged that “I’m worried about political violence” and fretted that “people who are armed are going to become dangerous, because they see no other way out.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Bush-Gore debacle in 2000, I can remember my uncle telling me that if this post-election mess happened in the Philippines where he was from, there would have been dead bodies everywhere. In the Philippines, electoral violence is almost a given. But to see it in America is to tragically succumb to what Timothy Snyder calls the “politics of eternity”:
“eternity places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood...within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do...Progress gives way to doom...Using technology to transmit political fiction at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”
ALLEN GABORRO
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