Dancing with Democracy, Flirting with Fascism

(Graphic: Brian Covert / Photo: AFP/Getty)

These many long months of campaigning for president of the United States of America have now come to an end this day as voting begins tomorrow, 5 November. The world has been shown two very different sides of this thing called “America” over the tedious, tiring campaign season — an often jarring and jolting contradiction in terms that will be decided by millions of voters in what is undoubtedly the most important national election of their lifetimes.

On one side stands Kamala Harris, candidate for the Democratic Party, and a former U.S. senator and attorney general in her home state of California. The Democrats seemed all but sunk as recently as this summer, as U.S. president Joe Biden, Harris’s boss, effectively lost the path to re-election due to a lack of public confidence in him. Harris stepped into the race, redefined the campaign playbook in an unusually short time and gave the Democrats some much-needed hope.

To Harris’s credit, her campaign has been about empowering voters, celebrating diversity, partaking in joyous celebrity-filled concerts and rallies and outlining a positive future — a dance with democracy that engaged everyday working people and motivated wealthy fundraisers to get on board and support her. Harris has been breaking her own records on crowd attendance at rallies and in the amount of monetary donations, intent on becoming the first woman and person of color to occupy the vaunted Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC. And she may well get there.

It was only in the last couple of weeks before the vote, however, that Harris as a candidate, the Democrats as a party and talking heads in the U.S. news media finally got around in earnest to uttering the F-word in public. No, not that F-word — the other one: fascism.

While about half of America was busy dancing with the high ideals of a truly democratic society this campaign season, the other half of America was being titillated by the candidate for the opposing Republican Party, Donald Trump — a far-right, neo-fascist political candidate if there ever was one. Trump’s dark, hate-filled public speeches and his surviving of two assassination attempts gave his faithful flocks renewed hope for the future of their country. Trump is intent on becoming the first authoritarian-xenophobe-demagogue of color (orange, in his case) to re-occupy the vaunted Oval Office after a one-term absence from the scene. And he may well get there.

Why has this presidential election campaign been so damn close? That is a question that many have asked but few have been able to adequately answer. In a normal reality, Trump’s toxic talks on everything under the Nazi sun would have disqualified him early on and relegated him to the junkyard of history. But not this time. The more extreme his rhetoric grew, the more crimes he was convicted of, the more his former allies denounced him, the more his “Make America Great Again” flock adored him and the more his public image seemed to rise in the polls.

Maybe it all comes down to something as simple as this: Many American citizens, having flirted with fascism over the long campaign season and during Trump’s four years in office as U.S. president, are now ready to take that plunge and take their chances on a future where democracy becomes but a distant memory. They would seem to prefer a USA in 2024 that will party hearty the way Nazi Germany did back in World War II, violence and all. Violence is the only language the political far-right has ever known throughout human history and that certainly wouldn’t change under a new Trump government.

Many Americans seem more than ready for Trump to rip the U.S. constitution to pieces and start anew, and never look back. They would gladly throw away everything the USA has ever represented, warts and all, and drag the rest of the country down with them into the graveyard of nations. Don’t be surprised if they would even try to rename their country Trumplandia or some other absurd moniker honoring their Dear Leader daddy-figure in the event of his victory in this election.

It would be a short honeymoon, of course, once a new fascist USA came into being. If there’s one thing we know about dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, it is that conservatives lose all their rights just as much as liberals do. There would be no freedom of speech or thought, no room for public criticism of a fascist government, regardless of where you stood on the political spectrum. Everybody becomes a slave to The System under fascism, and anybody can be executed, imprisoned or disappeared at any time. Extreme-rightist governments respect no one and nothing but their total control and unrelenting grip on power. The main lesson to be learned here is that once you throw democracy away, you rarely get it back. It’s usually gone for good.

Maybe, just maybe, it will take the U.S. populace actually going over to the Dark Side and embracing a fascist future for them to finally realize what they have lost, to understand at last what concepts like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” and yes, the “American dream,” really mean. Maybe it will take them just chucking the whole system of democracy out the window to eventually come to their senses. But given that Americans have a very weak spot in their national psyche when it comes to history (geography too), I wouldn’t bet on them being so enlightened so soon. The most they could do under fascism in the future would be to settle down on their living room couches and binge-watch reruns of democracy on their trusty TV, with pangs of nostalgia creeping up inside them every now and then. Then, change the channel.

One thing is clear: The Republican Party as a political institution is going all out this time to steal the election in broad daylight. Under Trump, the Republicans have transformed into the party of anti-democracy; the machinery for Trump to challenge the outcome of this election is much more organized now than it was back in 2020. A number of lawsuits by the Republican Party are already in place that could buy them enough time to overturn the voting results and overthrow the election. The once-vaunted U.S. Supreme Court has now injected itself into the election-stealing scenario by blessing the purging of voter rolls in the Republican Party’s favor. And right on cue, with just a few days to go before election day, Trump was already falsely claiming massive election fraud that did not exist.

It would seem at this late hour, on this day before the votes are officially cast nationwide, that the fix is in and the plans are in place for when, not if, the hour of the grand theft of the election arrives. See exactly how that is playing out in a new documentary film, Vigilantes Inc., released by investigative journalist Greg Palast. Palast had investigated the stealing of the presidential election of 2000 two decades ago for George W. Bush, and Palast is back on the case in 2024 with his new film. Watch it if you dare.

On the other hand, maybe we are all just getting worked up and paranoid over nothing and the system of democracy will hold this time, like it (barely) did the last time Trump and his party faithful tried to rob the election a few years ago. Maybe, once this election is smoothly carried out and Kamala Harris is elected the 47th president of the United States, we will finally get to see Trump sentenced to hard time in prison for his many crimes and spend the rest of his retirement days there lounging in a custom-made orange jumpsuit.

Whichever way the dice roll tomorrow, one thing is beyond doubt — that while the USA is indeed a democracy, it is a very flawed democracy. This is something that Europeans especially have been openly discussing these past many months. And they are right. If there is any region of the world that knows about flawed democratic systems, it would definitely be Europe. The Europeans have seen their share of despots and tyrants come and go over the centuries, and they too, as we speak, are battling a resurgence of neo-fascism and pro-Nazi social movements in several European Union countries.

Trump, like no one else in modern times, has exposed the flaws in American democracy, the scratches in the shining diamond, for all the world to see. If Harris is lucky enough to become the president this time, the first order of business for her and the Democratic Party must be to take steps to repair the broken U.S. election system from top to bottom, starting with the abolition of the Electoral College and ending with the total banning of so-called “dark money” from political campaigns. Not a partial reforming of the voting and election systems — no, a complete makeover of the whole systems so that they are Trump-proof and fascism-resistant forever. Carrying out such urgent actions will require a lot of guts and determination, something that Democratic leaders often seem to have in short supply. But it must be done. If not, we will keep on having these cliff-hanger American presidential elections where the fate of humanity on Planet Earth rests on the outcome over and over and over again. Nobody wants that.

One thing we can’t do is give up hope, either way. More than any clever campaign quip by Harris or Trump, the last public words of Salvador Allende, the president of the South American nation of Chile, come to mind on this final day before the U.S. election is decided. The United States government, back in 1973 under then-president Richard Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger, secretly set in motion a military coup in Chile that overturned democracy and installed a fascist military dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled with an iron fist for decades. The Chilean people are still scarred and traumatized by that today. This is what fascism really looks like, the true face of the monster of militarism and extreme nationalism.

And know this: If America can successfully impose fascism on the citizens of other sovereign, democratic nations, like it had in Chile and elsewhere over these past decades of the Cold War, then the U.S. government under Trump could easily move to impose fascism on its own people at home as well in 2025.

“Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny,” Allende announced over the radio on the morning of September 11 of 1973 just before he died. “Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society.”

Which avenue will prevail tomorrow, America’s delicate dance with democracy or America’s fetid flirtation with fascism?

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