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Things fall apart in the United States — and Canada takes a hard look in the mirror
We assume we're immune to the forces now threatening the American experiment. We shouldn't.
John Turner, who passed away in September, was particularly fond of a phrase that could stand now as an abiding lesson for everyone who has watched the chaotic last four years of the American experiment.
"Democracy," the former prime minister used to say, "does not happen by accident."
He seemed to have meant that as a call for democratic and political participation. It works equally as well as a broader statement on democracy itself and the steady progress it's supposed to facilitate — neither of which can be taken as automatic or inevitable.
"America is no fragile thing," former president Barack Obama said nearly four years ago as he prepared to leave the White House. "But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured."
The United States has offered the world a demonstration of how things can fall apart — not in one cataclysmic moment, but slowly and steadily over a long period of time as institutions and ideas erode and crumble.
Every other country on earth has to deal with the ramifications of what's happening now in the U.S. But beyond those consequences, there's another question for every other democracy: how do you make sure your own country doesn't end up like that?
An age of optimism ends
Everything was not all right for the United States before 2016 — but it was easier to take a great many things for granted. "Until recently, we Americans had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same," the American historian Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny. "We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy."
Four years later, the United States is a global symbol of political and state dysfunction, "constitutional hardball," corruption, misinformation, tribalism, racism, nationalism, conspiracy theories, falsehood, distrust and civil unrest.
In the past six months, more than 225,000 Americans have died of a contagious disease — at least in part because their government could not be roused to properly confront it — and the governing party's members and supporters were not willing to abandon it in response.
Now, at the conclusion of another presidential election campaign, the ability of the United States to fulfil even the basic requirements of democracy — free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power — is in doubt. "Democracy is on the ballot in this election," Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris recently said.
How did it come to this? There's no shortage of possible explanations. Legislative gridlock. A poorly designed electoral system. A lack of regulation over the use of money in political campaigns. The treatment of politics as entertainment or sport. The weakening of mainstream media and the rise of partisan outlets and social media. A failure of major media outlets to properly grasp or respond to the challenges of the moment. Maybe even a national history of conflict.
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did you notice Richard Branson finally got a new set? OMG he looks so good now..teeth are everything.
