Let's have the decency not to pretend we weren't warned about this, shall we? Since virtually the day Donald Trump was elected, if not before that, people like journalist Masha Gessen and historian Timothy Snyder have told us that his presidency would be a sustained assault on democracy, and that America stood at a historical fork in the road, with at least one of the paths leading into darkness. We began to talk about "fascism" and "authoritarianism," and maybe those terms seemed metaphorical or melodramatic, for a while. Do they seem that way now?
It didn't feel like the end of democracy, did it? To use Gessen's language, did it feel like the dangerous moment between the "autocratic attempt" and the "autocratic breakthrough"? Not the way that alarming news reports from Hungary and Russia and Turkey and the Philippines do. The problem is, as history informs us, that we're not likely to notice such dangerous moments while they're happening. So the insults and outrages piled up and the news cycle grew ever more discordant and surreal, but there was still takeout and Netflix and Amazon. Life was about the same, for most people most of the time. Maybe it was all an "aberrant moment in time," in Joe Biden's immortal phrase. There was no Reichstag fire. There were no troops in the street. Not until now.
We can argue about whether Trump is simply the vector through which the authoritarian current flows — the Forrest Gump of fascism — or is, after his stupid-brilliant fashion, a very small Great Man of History. Both things can be true, which is effectively what Gessen argues in her new book "Surviving Autocracy." We can argue that this is all part of a larger global pattern of democratic crisis, which is clearly true, and that the United States had already become a degraded and dysfunctional pseudo-democracy in 2016, because only such a society could have allowed Trump to rise to power. Bernie Sanders literally went red in the face telling us that, over and over again, during his 2016 campaign. He sounded more like an Old Testament prophet than a presidential candidate, and made way too many normal people uncomfortable.
So, yes, a lot of us — probably all of us — should be called to account for how we got here. Because whatever we believe we did or didn't do, it wasn't enough, and here we are: Fourteen weeks before a presidential election, there are troops in the streets.
OK, we're not supposed to call them "troops." They're not members of the military. I don't think that improves matters. For the last week, armed men in camouflage uniforms marked as "POLICE," who do not seem to have recognizable insignias or badges, and do not have names on their uniforms, have been battling Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon. But even the language we use to describe these events grows slippery — another consequence of encroaching authoritarianism, which drains the meaning out of ordinary words. These police are not real police, and the protesters in Portland (and many other places) have moved past the Black Lives Matter agenda to something much larger and more difficult to define. They are standing up against autocracy, I think we can say, while these so-called police are trying to enforce it.
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