My thinking on what must happen to save democracy has evolved.
Fact: The United States has been a backsliding democracy for some time.
Fact: We are in an information disruption.
Because democracy requires facts and an educated population, the question is whether enough people will develop the media literacy needed in this new age of information quickly enough.
1/
How much time we have depends on what happens in the next election.
If the Democrats win again with small margins, the backsliding can be stalled.
If the Democrats win big, the we will buy more time. There were not big enough majorities in the Senate in 2020 to do much, and then the Democrats lost the house.
I am putting together a long reading list for my blog.
Even countries that slide into authoritarianism can (and have) gotten out without war.
2/
FDR demonstrated what can happen with a landslide election.
Looking back, he brought about rapid changes that entirely changed the face of the nation.
At the time, the progress felt painfully slow. For the first few years, the Supreme Court was nixing his legislation.
Even a big win will create lots of rage in people who don't understand how slowly a large and complex system moves and this is by design: It also slows down autocratic power grabs.
3/
Those who are content with the slowness of change in our system are privileged not to understand what it is to be unable to survive that long. On both the right and the left, the number of people who won't survive that slowness is growing. None of them can afford to wait for the Democrats to stop fucking around and get an actual sense of purpose along with a candidate we don't have to hold our noses to vote for.
Increasing media literacy will not stop homelessness fueled by corporate greed and the complacency of the privileged, nor will it stop the growing despair, at least not before all who are currently suffering have been sacrificed on the altar of continuing democracy. Perhaps we should consider this before bemoaning their willingness to let the society that has abandoned them burn.
Teri Kanefield
Madame Ximon