Introduction: The Hologram of Fading Democracy
This is an existential moment; we retell ourselves identity and origin stories while democracy may be evaporating before our eyes. The idea switches on and off like a fading hologram that looks real but has lost its energy while we hardly noticed. The US, the world’s oldest modern democracy, has now fallen to 26th on the Economist’s Economic Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. (David Meyers. US remains a “flawed democracy” in annual rankings. Fulcrum: Leveraging Our Differences. February 14, 2022). Our lowest score since the index began in 2006, and along with extreme polarization and events like January 6, we have issues with “the electoral process, government functionality, political participation, political culture and civil liberties.”
The Power of Stories
Stories are powerful. National decline is a recurrent theme. I’m reminded of an old TV public service announcement: an egg sizzles in a frying pan, with the voiceover “This is your brain on drugs.” Not sure how effective the message was in its day. But nowadays, online conspiracy and the Big Lie that someone must be to blame have become like digital frying pans, sautéing true believers in the oil of fake news and alternate realities. A recent NY Times “Daily” newsletter discussed The Idea of American Decay (Lauren Jackson. Published Jan. 7, 2022. Updated April 18, 2022). The web cuts both ways. “For decades, academics have warned that partisan gridlock, politicized courts and unfettered lobbying were like dangerous substances—if taken in excess, America’s democratic systems were at risk of collapse.” For just a moment, I felt pleased that my personal instincts and insights lined up with experts’, but then distress and discomfort set in. “…what happens when the idea itself gets mainlined?”.…When a majority of the American public rewrites the story they tell themselves about their country’s standing in the world?” Note another drug culture reference as the country continues to suffer the deadly opioid crisis.
Nostalgia for the Past: The 1950s Dilemma
The flip side of decline narratives is nostalgia for “the good old days,” which often seem to closely resemble the 1950s. I am not among them; I grew up in that era and found it stifling. But the US seemed to be on top of the world, rolling in prosperity and power. A Time magazine cover story proclaimed, “The American Century.” George Lakoff summarized the preferred foreign policy position of “the best and most powerful country in the world,” the global policemen, able to justify “using our military power…” [and covert, undercover, operations], in our “national interest.” (Don’t Think of an Elephant. Chelsea Green Publishing. C2000, 2004). And the rest of the world just had to go along for the ride. What was good for the US had to be good for everybody else? Right?
Learning from History: Weimar Republic Lessons
But, like it or not, those times are now in our rearview mirror. Soren Kierkegaard famously said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Of course, that applies to history as well. And stories do not repeat, except in sci fi time-travel. Perhaps that explains the current popularity of “superheroes save the universe” movies and American “might makes right” gun culture. In real life though, we’re on a one-way street, without certainties or guarantees. And only we can save ourselves, if we pay attention. There are lessons to learn and echoes and warnings and parallels. As well as mistakes to avoid, though we may stumble into them anyway, anyway, human memories being short.
Cautionary Tales of Failed States
And history throws up cautionary tales. The term “failed states” refers to governments that disintegrate to the point they can’t carry out basic functions. Before getting there, they may struggle as “fragile states,” which appear to function, though they’ve lost legitimacy in citizens’ eyes and fail to buffer them from societal and economic shocks. For a long time, we assumed such narratives only apply in the “3rd World”—Latin America, Africa, Sri Lanka recently. But I find a headline: How Democracy Dies in the 21st Century. (Brian Klaas. July 21, 2022). “… the United States has proclaimed itself a ‘shining city upon a hill,’ a beacon of democracy that can lead broken nations out of their despotic darkness. That overconfidence has been instilled into [our] citizens, leading…to the mistaken, naive belief that [other] countries…have something to learn from the U.S. rather than also having wisdom to teach us.”
The Shattered Montage of Reality
I’m fascinated by the many ways we humans can misstep. My husband and I used to talk about whether we, as a species, are smart enough and have the will to try to make things better. We never arrived at a satisfying answer. And that has me thinking about what we can learn from German experience, a time of many missteps. After losing WWI and the Kaiser’s abdication, the country devolved into the democratic Weimar Republic. Shaky from the beginning, it limped along until it descended into the “dark side,” the savage, murderous night of the Nazi era. Hard to pick out the worst of that toxic regime. Instead, I regret all that it wrecked, all that we’ve missed out on. The short 14 Weimar years (1918 to 1933) witnessed a dazzling efflorescence of creativity that still resonates a century later. The Bauhaus modeled workshop training of architects, industrial designers, artists, artisans/crafts people. The literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin originated theories of art, literature, technology and society, media and film still important today. Bertholt Brecht revolutionized expressionist theater. The UFA film studios produced classics like the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), Metropolis (1927), The Blue Angel (1930), before being harnessed to the Nazi state propaganda machine.
Cult of War and Violence
Meanwhile, the public and political sectors were shaky, in ways that look scarily familiar today. The preface to The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg. University of California Press. 1994), described that time and its own discordant narratives. “What appeared to some…as the birth of modernity and the dawn of a modern technological age, seemed to others the epitome of alienation and decadence.” And this with a traumatized populace, “still in shock from the loss of a four-year war and a nearly fifty-year-old imperial identity.” And it happened in the context of “celebration of violence, yearning for charismatic leadership, and communal fantasies of male bonding.” And with paramilitary bands like the “Freikorps” (typically war vets) roaming the streets in support of rightwing political causes, carrying out assassinations, serving as foot soldiers in political coups. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, et al. haven’t gone quite that far yet, but they’ve come close. Humans operate with a limited playbook, and we copy, borrow, steal as needed, often consciously unaware of earlier models.
Germany’s Democracy: A Brief Attempt
Benjamin described how German perceptions of reality morphed into a kind of shattered montage that seems to foreshadow the information overload (too much to take in) of the digital age, “….emerg[ing] around the end of the war, when it became clear to the avant-garde [artists] that reality could no longer be mastered. The only means we have left, for gaining time and keeping a cool head, is above all to let reality have its say—in its own right, disordered and anarchic if necessary… [creating] montages from bits of fabric, tram tickets, shards of glass, buttons matches—and by this means, they said: You cannot cope with reality anymore. You cannot deal with these odds and ends of rubbish any better than you can with troop transports, influenza, or Reichsbank notes.” (Garlanded Entrance: On the ‘Sound Nerves’ Exhibition. 1929.)
This also intersected with the growing cult of war and violence, which Benjamin recognized in Theories of German Fascism (First published 1930). “…The ‘eternal’ war that they talk about so much here, as well as the most recent one—is said to be the highest manifestation of the German nation….” But “Until Germany has broken through the entanglement of …such beliefs…it cannot hope for a future….If this corrective effort fails, millions of human bodies will indeed inevitably be chopped to pieces and chewed up….” And so, it came to be. Benjamin, a German Jew, had no illusions about the threat to him and his work. Stopped at the Spanish border in his attempt to escape occupied France, he committed suicide in 1940.
So, Germany’s first try at democracy never had a chance to take root. It had arrived quickly, without preparation for civic practice. In The German Decision (first published 1931), Heinrich Mann wrote how, “In one historical moment, after the defeat in the war, it appeared as a possible way out, compared to the disaster of the monarchy and the threat of bolshevism [communism]—only a way out, not a goal, much less a passionate experience….simply set itself up…saw foreign democracies resting securely on majorities and took this arrangement to be inviolable….did not even allow the suspicion to arise that they could be defeated, plundered, and deprived of their rights despite the ballot….”
Lessons from T.S. Eliot: The Hollow Men
Admittedly, Germany is an extreme example. But isn’t that the point with cautionary tales? They’re supposed to remind us of where we don’t want to go, of what we don’t want to become. They can also help us avoid complacency and the “American exceptionalism” assumption that we’re immune. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men (1925), reflected pessimism about the post-war world, with the famous line: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” So, we could say that Germany experienced the bang and dragged the rest of the world along—twice. The US, on the other hand, has a much longer history and grounding in democracy, though given recent developments, we’ve been letting that slip. And this makes it reasonable to fear that we could risk letting democracy fade away, again like a hologram, there but not quite real any longer.
Facing the Real Threat: Democracy’s Fade
As Klaas wrote in his Atlantic article, “We may not be doomed. But we should be honest: The optimistic assessment from experts who study authoritarianism globally is that the United States will most likely settle into a dysfunctional equilibrium that mirrors a deep democratic breakdown. It’s not yet too late to avoid that. But the longer we wait, the more the cancer of authoritarianism will spread. We don’t have long before it’s inoperable.”
Hopeful Perspective: Choices and Cycles
The prognosis may seem dire and gloomy, but we would do well to remember that trend is not destiny, that loss is not inevitable. And that not even the worst lasts forever. Think of the fall of the Nazis. The pendulum swings and there are cycles of darkness and light. And so, we do still have choices and a little time. And I hope we can find ways to use both wisely and well.