American democracy isn’t dead Every political nightmare eventually comes to an end

Intellectually, I knew these things. By then, I had already become a firm believer in the notion that democratic outcomes — especially the ones that seem most threatening to us — must be respected. But in the heat of the moment, it was hard. It was a long night. My parents, who care about politics but care less than I do, went to sleep before Donald Trump altered the course of American history. They woke up to a new world. Yet when I spoke to my father that morning, he seemed oddly relaxed, taking it in his stride. He had grown up under an authoritarian regime. Because he had seen the alternative, he had an intuitive grasp of what made democracy — and specifically American democracy — strong. If enough Americans had voted for Trump, they must have had a reason for doing so. It was their choice, and what was democracy if not the right to make the wrong choice? This wasn’t the end of the world. There would be another election.

America muddled through then. And it has muddled through yet again.

Could democracy have died, or at least begun dying? In politics like in life, anything is possible. But black swans, by their very nature, are extremely unusual occurrences. To preoccupy ourselves with them is to orient our politics around the least likely scenarios. As The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg and I discussed recently, apocalyptic rhetoric about democracy’s imminent death is the Democrats’ version of the “Flight 93” argument that America’s fate hinges on one election. That’s not to say that they are morally equivalent. But it is to say that they play on the same notes of overwrought existential dread.

Fear is a powerful emotion. It’s also a thrilling one. Might you be more willing to vote if you think America as you know it is about to end? Perhaps. I’m willing to concede that catastrophism serves a mobilising function in particular instances. However, one can easily imagine such rhetoric losing its incantatory power. Either way, if electoral mobilisation depends on perpetually framing politics as an existential battle — even if it’s not — then it’s hard to see how that level of intensity and angst can be maintained indefinitely.

As arguments go, “democracy will die if we don’t act” is also unfalsifiable. If the Democratic Party outperforms expectations, then catastrophists can say that they pre-empted the fall of democracy by spurring people to action. But if Republicans win, they can just as easily point to those victories as evidence that the threat remains. The easy resort to rhetorical alarmism also captures a certain way of thinking about politics. It treats language as a substitute for politics. For some, such an “angle” may be purely cynical, but once words are uttered with enough frequency, it becomes easier to believe them.

And they shouldn’t be believed. An argument about democracy’s imminent death is not an argument about facts. It’s an argument about something that, in a very literal sense, hasn’t actually happened yet. As it turns out, it’s challenging to engage in reasoned analysis about something that may or may not happen at some unspecified point in the future. The future, perhaps more than the past, is disagreeable. And if reasonable people can disagree on the future, then they can — and should — disagree on otherwise wild claims that we may be witnessing the end of America as we know it.

For American democracy to have died after the Midterm elections, or for it to die in 2024, an unlikely confluence of several unlikely events would need to happen in a particular order and within a fairly narrow timeframe. In a country as large and unwieldy as ours, as evenly divided as ours, with as much separation of powers as ours, with enough federalism as ours, and with a media as vigorous as ours (against Republican overreach), the notion that democracy would die or even that it could was a nightmare. The good thing about nightmares is that you wake up from them.

To say nothing of its effects on politics, panic and fear are also bad for your health. They’re certainly bad for your relationships with other human beings. If you come to believe that your opponents are “fascists”, then they are no longer mere opponents. They are transformed into enemies who must be defeated. Being in such a state of alarm — and wanting to be alarmed — is probably a thrilling way to live, but also probably exhausting.

The highly-educated — particularly writers, intellectuals, and poets — are susceptible to this sort of political romanticism, which is why having the “right” education and the right information will not save you. After all, a well-educated, bored person is a frightening thing to behold, as Charles Fain Lehman recently observed. The political theorist David Runciman said of the romantics that “they want something, anything, to happen, so they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things”.

But you and I are not at the heart of things. Politics should not be anyone’s primary focus or vocation, unless, that is, your life literally depends on it. Since America is still a democracy, for all its faults, your life almost certainly doesn’t. That is something worth appreciating, at least for a moment. You are not a revolutionary — and you probably never will be.

---

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author, most recently, of the The Problem of Democracy.

shadihamid