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It is because I have studied history, because I know that democracy is a fragile thing and has been destroyed many times before, that I am so deeply afraid of the political situation now. Everyone I know sees our rights being eroded, our civil liberties trampled, our public dialogs curtailed and our influence over events derailed. Everyone is worried.
Not everyone can see that this is what has happened before, that the current situation falls into a very old pattern. In my head I see not only the current administration, but the fall of the Weimer Republic and the end of Republican Rome. Marius and Sulla and Pompey leave their echoes today as they dismantled the Senate one privilege and crisis at a time.
Do not be misled by the fact this was two thousand years ago--the Romans of the day were as deeply committed to their democracy as we are to ours; their history of self-rule was far deeper and older than ours at present, and their belief in the rule of Law, of Debate, of the Public Good was no less bone deep because they lived without microwaves and the internet. And yet, in the course of a single generation, the entire structure was dismantled and an Imperial family set in its place.
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Additonally we may not be that far gone yet, We did survive the Guilded Age without becoming a banana republic. I wonder if GW knows that McKinley was shot.
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Americans are both the best and the worst. We stick out our necks all over the place...or is it that we butt into everyone's business? We're tolerant and intolerant. We are so very many contradictory things.
My hope lies in the best in people; in the fact that we've become SO accustomed to freedom that I think truly giving it up will cause a revolt.
My terror and my pity rests in what we have become: a population that lets itself be pandered to, be bought with ridiculously cheap tax-cuts that cost us so much more in the no-so-long run; a population with eroding value in education, altruism, the social contract, and any other values which aren't solely based in so-called Christian morality (which itself is so full of contradictory intolerance I don't know why it doesn't implode) and an growing and utter laziness that would seem so totally at odds with a society which was founded on the Protestant work ethic as to be almost unimaginable.
I hope what is and always has been positive in us as Americans will out over the baser aspects of our current society, keeping us valuing our freedom enough to make the necessary sacrifices needed in the future to protect it, to protect all that is good about the American way of life.
Am I just fooling myself? I've never thought of myself as an idealist.
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But as you noted, the erosion of our rights has been going on a lot longer than just this administration. I fear we're acting like the frog being slowly boiled alive, never noticing how hot the water has gotten until it's too late to jump out.
"My terror and my pity rests in what we have become: a population that lets itself be pandered to, be bought with ridiculously cheap tax-cuts that cost us so much more in the no-so-long run"
Somewhere I've got a quote stashed away that I hadn't decided whether to use or not, I think it's from Benjamin Franklin, about how once the populace realizes it can vote itself money, that's the end of the republic.
You're being an idealist (I should know how to recognize one by now, since I'm called that all the time). I hope you're right. I fear you're not. I don't think we can afford to wait and see based on that hope, because the stakes are so high and it's so hard to see the threshold until long after we've crossed it.
So I'm an idealist, and even I am scared.