Taking Stock of Election Shock

Usually around this time I begin thinking about writing my cheery Christmas letter to share the highlights of another year in the life of our family. This year is different. I’m still trying to grasp what just happened and what it will mean for all of us.

My initial reaction was blurted out in staccato texts to friends who were in the same state as I was: “Stunning!” “Horrific!” “Devastating!” “Dangerous!” Then I entered an emotionally strange place that felt like a Venn diagram in which anxiety and numbness meet in the center of a space that felt more like despair. Now I’m asking myself how and why the shock of the election happened.

It started with questions.  How could a 34-time convicted felon and a man who was found guilty of sexual assault be able to run for president? Why was the Justice Department so slow in moving forward on his trials? How could the Supreme Court grant him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to if he were president again? How could people vote for someone who lies incessantly, whose language is vile, whose racism and misogyny are so blatant, who dreams of being a dictator, not be enough to stop him?

Then I moved to what I fear most.  People like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Steven Miller, the authors of Project 2025, and other-like minded tyrants taking control of every government agency and firing thousands of career civil servants.

I worried about what it would mean to close or limit agencies like the EPA, the Department of Education, NOAA, and FEMA and to ignore the ever-worsening climate crisis.

I thought about a country with such a broken, for-profit healthcare system that would result in skyrocketing illnesses and deaths (with no data to prove it), and millions of people suffering as a result. I wondered how bad it would get without vaccinations, fluoride, Medicaid, reduced Medicare, and no insurance.

I thought of the women who will have no agency over their own lives, and I imagined the women who would die because they couldn’t get reproductive healthcare when they were in crisis or who would be jailed for having a miscarriage. I worried about a reprise of the Comstock Act that would ban abortion nationally and deny women any form of birth control (except sterilization, which some young women have already resorted to).

I worried about people of all ages who would be rounded up, separated, and held in the equivalent of prisons indefinitely. I really worried about revenge politics, roundups of opposition leaders and activists, the disappearance of news outlets, and random violence. As Robert Reich said in a piece in The Guardian the day after the election, “Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity unheard of in modern America.”

I also worried mightily about our lost standing in the global community and the threat of an expanded war in the Middle East while Ukraine is handed to Putin who can then march into the NATO countries to start a Third World War with nukes.

Then I began to question what kind of a country we have been historically, culturally and now presently. How did we allow this to happen? I came to this conclusion:  We are a country conceived and birthed by smart, visionary, educated men who were elite white supremacists wedded to racism, misogyny, religious singularity, patriarchy, and conformity.

What we are seeing now, it seems to me, is the underbelly of an America that has always flourished, and has grown in modern times, driven by color, caste, economic advantage or disadvantage, religious beliefs, ethnicity, power, and corrupted politics, all of which have divided us into Us and Them. That makes for a dangerous, disquieted and increasingly binary way to live. It stokes fear, limits compassion and clear thinking, and people like Donald Trump rely on it for their own gains.

As an Instagram post said the day after the election, “America has showed its true character and it’s heartbreaking,”

So where do I go from here?  My answer begins with my belief that resistance doesn’t die, it re-emerges when it is vital to survival. Early Americans knew that when they threw tea into Boston harbor. Slaves resisted in various ways including dancing and drumming. People stood up to McCarthyism and to an American fascist movement in the 1930s and 40s. We started labor movements and unions to protect workers, and we made sure women could vote by refusing food and enduring forced feeding. We resisted a war in Vietnam and successfully ended it. It’s in our DNA in huge numbers when things get bad because ultimately,  most of us refuse oppression, discrimination, exploitation, and evil and choose instead to embrace freedom and democracy. 

There are some among us who don’t get that yet, but they will soon see how powerful and effective it is.  Paraphrasing Billy Wimsatt, Executive Director of the Movement Voter PAC the day after the election, we have what it takes to meet and overcome this moment as our elders and ancestors did under unthinkably difficult circumstances. We can draw on their strength and wisdom as we chart our way forward and join what is likely to be one of the largest resistance movements in history.

For now, we must take a breath and remember all we did together to avert this outcome. In that spirit let’s comfort each other as we regroup before continuing the fight for a compassionate country grounded in equality, justice, and sustainable freedom and democracy.

Were We the Lucky Ones?

A docudrama, We Were the Lucky Ones, streaming on Hulu recently inspired me to consider this question: Were Americans in my generation the lucky ones, post WWII? In the story a real family scattered across Europe during the pogroms against Jews in the war. Miraculously they managed to survive and to reunite with their loved ones.

Now I wonder if those of us who have lived in America since the 1940s may be the lucky ones. We have lived in a post-war period of democracy, freedom from fear, and peace for the most part, without the obscenity of war and dictatorship on our doorsteps. We have never had to experience the terror of autocratic regimes. Most of us can’t even imagine what that is like. We have been able to trust our families, friends, and neighbors, and to receive uncensored information free of propaganda, to travel freely across state lines and to other countries without being impeded or interrogated. We have never had a government that destroyed the basis of our republic in the document called the Constitution. Most of us were able to live decent lives and to sleep soundly at night.

Admittedly the “good old days” weren’t all good. They were rife with racism, antisemitism, sexism, discrimination, and fear of the Other. We lived in a time when America flirted seriously with fascism, schools were segregated, domestic violence and sexual abuse were hidden. We lived to see the development of nuclear weapons and suffered the threat of the Bay of Pigs, when Russian threatened us with missiles from Cuba. There were race riots and a war we never should have been in, political assassinations of some of our beloved leaders, terrorist attacks and later an insurrection, and so much more that never should have happened in “the land of the free and the brave.” 

But still we were mostly the lucky ones. We never headed to bomb shelters, most of us could feel safe in our homes, and we proceeded with our lives under the protection of the Constitution. It was safe to send our kids to school, to go to a café, a concert, a grocery store, and to worship in a variety of religious environments.

We could choose our politicians in free and fair elections and vote them out of office when we needed to.  When necessary, we protested what we believed was wrong in our local communities and nationally, peacefully and without fear of being silenced or arrested. We chose whether or when to start families, we read the books we wanted to. We trusted our friends and neighbors to look out for each other, and most of all we felt free.

Those freedoms could now become fading memories.  What looms large in November is a clarion call for civility, compassion, humanity, intelligent leadership, sound judgement, and continuing democracy.  Our country cannot afford to lose its standing in a global world or risk the hideous thought of a nuclear war because we have felons and fascists in charge who admire the likes of Mr. Putin and other autocrats and dictators.

Unless we act appropriately, the idea of American exceptionalism will be nothing more than a memory embedded in the jargon of despair. In the past, Americans have managed to come together in critical times in ways that revealed our character and upheld the principles of this country. We have demonstrated to the world our capacity for cohesion, compassion, sound judgement and right action. Now is the time to reclaim that spirit by making a commitment to disavow a dystopian future.

We stand now on the precipice of a giant sink hole that would take years to dig out of, if not generations. We owe it to our progeny to leave them a world in which we proved again our resilience and our love of freedom. 

We need to make sure that they too are the lucky ones who remain free of oppression and disaster,  the lucky ones who reunite with the spirit of this country in hard times, and the lucky ones who build a new and secure future together. That means doing the right thing in November for the loved ones in your life.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Democracy vs. Fascism: America's Choice in the 2024 Election

Let’s get real about the most vital issue Americans face as we slowly march toward our dubious future as a nation.

It’s not about President Biden’s age which is annoyingly centerstage. After all, Donald Trump is only three years younger than the president, morbidly obese, and an obvious psychopath.  It’s about one issue and one issue only and that is whether we survive as a democracy and what will happen if not.

So far in this threatening time President Biden is the only viable candidate if we value our freedom in this contentious time. Given his commitment to the principles of democracy and the protection of the Constitution and his years of experience and achievement domestically and internationally, there is no other choice. That story needs to be told often and powerfully. The fact is you don’t have to like him or always agree with him, but you do need to realize that our future depends on his re-election, because once democracy disappears you never get it back, at least not for decades if you’re lucky. Every other issue from the economy, taxes, gun control, reproductive healthcare, First Amendment rights, education, a free press, and our stature in the world depends on saving our democracy. It’s that simple – and that urgent.

Americans are lucky. We haven’t lived under an autocracy or a dictatorship. We have no idea what that’s like in real terms, but it’s never pretty. There are many examples of how bad it is. To be clear, autocratic governments and dictatorships are similar but there is a distinction between them as the Carnegie Foundation has noted. As they point out, there are two important differences: An autocracy focuses power on a single person, while single-party dictatorships can share power through a small group of people who are appointed by the dictator. Dictatorships always include inherent abuse of power, while some autocrats relying on centralized power can sometimes effect positive change for their citizens. Both autocrats and dictators, however, exercise total control.

It’s important to realize that dictators have absolute power (think Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler).   Human rights are suppressed, and any sign of opposition is quickly shut down with intimidation, imprisonment, physical violence, or assassination. Citizens have “shallow levels of freedom,” and “no personal autonomy or quality of life. Social organizations and democratic institutions cease to exist, and democratic countries see the end of their rights as enshrined in constitutions.” People can lose their religion, see sexual orientation and same-sex marriage outlawed while security police are ubiquitous, and surveillance is prevalent. Over time no one dares to trust anyone.

According to the Carnegie Foundation democracies flourished in the 20th century but by 2019 dictatorships outnumbered democracies, sharing features including repressed opposition, control of communications, punishment of critics, imposed ideology and frequent attacks on democratic ideals.  Cross-border travel is stopped, and fear prevails as information becomes propaganda.

In the course of my international work, I became aware of the reality of autocratic and dictatorial countries. Even knowing I could leave, if I behaved myself, I sensed the oppression.  A Kenyan woman advised me to be cautious about the kind of questions I asked. In 1960s Greece when the political future there was bleak, I naively remarked to a man sitting next to me on an airplane that I didn’t think much of his government.  He interrogated me for the rest of the journey about who I’d been speaking with. In Romania, where the deceased dictator Ceausescu had mandated monthly pelvic exams for female students and workers to ensure pregnancies were carried to term I saw scores of children in an orphanage as a result. The visit shook me to the core. In Burma someone whispered her oppression, and in China, at the 1995 UN women’s conference, as a journalist I was barred from opening ceremonies, and I suspected I was surveilled and tapped in my hotel room. My relief as the plane departed was palpable.

We need to think about what life was like in the Franco, Marcos or Pinochet regimes in Spain, the Philippines or Chile. Today we must think about what life is like in Hungary under the control of Viktor Orban. In power for years he has “chipped away at the foundations of democracy,” as Vox.com put it. There journalism requires permits, propaganda prevails, and refugees and Muslims are seen as an existential threat. Dissent is silenced or disappears if it occurs in public or on blogs. Books vanish from libraries and shops. It didn’t happen overnight. It was achieved gradually in subtle ways.

Nationalism, right wing religion, militarism, anti-liberalism, and the silencing of citizens are deeply destructive forces that result in devastation and despair.  We cannot, we must not, ignore the signs of autocracy and fascism that already exist, or the dangerous pledges of Donald Trump. Nor can we think it can’t happen here. Our challenge is to ensure that autocracy or dictatorship doesn’t surprise us because we ignored its signals or couldn’t envision such systems. To protect ourselves and our country we must exercise the strongest sign of resistance to oppression, and that is our vote. It is incumbent upon each of us to keep that focus as we head to local, state, and national polling stations.

We must be prepared to save our democracy.

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Balfour's Big Blunder and Today's Israel

“What goes around, comes around” and “You reap what you sow” are truisms that come to mind when I learn what is happening in Israel. I wouldn’t know much about it if I relied on mainstream media or cable news because no editorial decisionmakers dare risk raising the issue of ethnic cleansing in a country that the U.S. supports in policy, rhetoric, and military support, despite the consequences. Nor do policymakers want to utter a word that might result in the alienation of Jewish organizations, funders, or voters. 

As a Jewish American, like many others, I am heartbroken by what is happening to Palestinians because of the excessively rightwing government now in power in Israel, a country that was founded because of atrocities committed against them. 

Understanding how Israel got here is helpful. A brief history is instructive. In 1917 a document, the Balfour Declaration, was issues by the British government calling for the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. It was the first time the term “Zionism” was used by Britain, a major political power.   No boundaries for what would constitute Palestine were specified in the document, but it was made clear, rhetorically, that the national home of Jews would not cover all of Palestine. The declaration also called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights for Palestinian Arabs, who made up a vast majority of the local population.  In 2017 the British recognized publicly that the Balfour Declaration should have assured political rights for Palestinians in the declaration.

So how did we get here? That question is largely answered in Ilan Pappe’s 2006 well documented book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. He explains that in 1948 over 700,000 Arabs, three fourths of the Palestinians living in territories that became Israel, fled or were expelled from their homes. Pappe identifies that exodus as the planned beginning of ethnic cleansing by Israel, designed by David Ben Gurion, a leader in the Zionist movement, and his advisors who had declared before 1948 that they were developing plans for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in order to establish Israel. The exodus and expulsion of 500 Arab village residents along with terrorist attacks against civilians came from that plan known as Dalet.

The Palestinians called the ethnic cleansing occurring during Israel’s establishment Nakba (catastrophe) as they became “stateless refugees.” For Palestinians, Nakba continues, and no wonder. Many Israelis, including political and religious leaders think Plan Dalet didn’t go far enough. In March, for example, a Palestinian man was killed by an Israeli soldier or settler. Israeli settlers then set hundreds of Palestinian homes and cars on fire in the occupied West Bank and Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a senior member of the Knesset, said in an interview that he thought “the village needed to be wiped out.” Two years ago he told Palestinian members of the Knesset that “it’s a mistake that Ben Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.” Smotrich was recently appointed governor over the occupied West Bank.

Another favorite ethnic cleanser advocate, National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has been given an Israeli national guard, actually a militia. He’s the guy who went to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in May and stood there in mock prayer as a Jew in an affront to Palestinians, thus mixing politics with religion. (The site of the mosque is called Temple Mount by Jews.)

Clearly tensions are mounting. No wonder. In February the Israeli military killed ten Palestinians, include two elderly men and a child, and injured numerous others in a raid on Nablus, then blocked Palestinian medical teams from treating them. More recently Israeli forces raided a refugee camp along with several Palestinian cities and villages where they fired live ammunition into crowds of people, injuring over 70 and killing two young Palestinians, one of whom had a disability. Again, they blocked Palestinian ambulances from providing medical care and used tear gas in a hospital.

Attacks are increasing and getting worse. In June a brutal assault was carried out, authorized by Smotrich, to hasten settlement expansion. F-16s and Apache helicopters fired on Palestinian ambulances, killing a teenager. Also in June, Israeli forces fired at a car, killing a two-year-old and critically injuring his father outside their home. Mohammad, the child, was the 27th Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military in the first half of this year. His death will not be the last of the child victims.

Palestinian journalists are also being targeted. In June six of them covering Israeli raids, were targeted. A cameraman was shot covering the Jenin killings, a journalist was killed in raids along with two youngsters, and another journalist was shot in the head. Let’s not forget that it’s been a year since the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces – an anniversary that American media failed to mention.

I have written frequently about Israel’s increasing violence against Palestinians, so I know to expect blowback, some of it chilling. But I cannot remain silent, and neither should our government in light of what has just occurred in Jenin, and is likely to continue elsewhere. As Israel becomes a fascist dictatorship, it’s imperative that we call out the “intentional escalation of violence by an occupying military power” as Jewish Voice for Peace says.

We must not reap what we sow in silence.

Are We Ready for Another Pandemic?

Almost four decades ago, when I was deputy director of the first major global health communications program supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), my work involved child survival and family planning.  But our project, and its lessons learned about health promotion, went further than that, modeling a proven methodology related to behavior change for better health outcomes. 

It was during those years that the HIV/AIDS crisis erupted, which I learned about before most people took it seriously, through a journalist I knew who had written about what was coming at us around the world and here at home. When I alerted my boss to what would become a deadly epidemic, advising him that as a health communication organization we needed to be paying attention to the problem and thinking of ways to mount a strategic health communication response, was typical.  “If you’re not gay it’s not going to amount to much,” he said, which in itself was shocking in its prejudice. It was also irresponsible coming from someone working in public health. When HIV hit hard and several gay men in our organization began to die, the head of the organization publicly apologized to me in a staff meeting for not taking the crisis seriously.

 Later, when I worked in public health advocacy, promotion, and communication internationally, I followed news, challenges, and concerns shared with the public health community from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC). That’s how I knew that they were worried because, they said, we were long overdue for another huge epidemic, bigger than the early 20th century “Spanish flu,” and we weren’t prepared for it.

So when Covid-19 showed up, I wasn’t surprised that we still weren’t prepared, nor was I particularly shocked when the Trump administration was totally unprepared for an event that would take millions of lives here and globally. What was shocking was the disinformation, misinformation, and dangerous false information Republicans glibly spread in soundbites and press briefings as more and more people succumbed to the virus.

Those memories come back to me now because history seems to be repeating itself when it comes to public health preparedness related to epidemics and pandemics in light of myriad lessons learned by now.

It’s not for lack of scholarship on this issue. In researching this topic, I found no shortage of analysis about a rising concern about what’s going on as we recognize that we’re going to have to struggle all over again when another health crisis occurs.

The pressing issues include the need for more research as new and mutant viruses rise, scaling up production of newly developed and FDA approved vaccines, planning for broad and  rapid vaccine distribution, cost containment, and equal access to vaccines from various health facilities. It’s no longer only about Covid. Other infectious diseases are on the rise. According to WHO, “zoonosis”, infectious diseases that jump from animals to humans, now number over 200 identified bacterial, viral or parasitic agents. “They can be transmitted through direct contact, food, water, or the environment, constituting a major public health problem,” WHO says. “Many of these emerging infections have the potential to cause global  pandemics.”

The Covid pandemic revealed the challenges related to supply chains and their disruptions when it comes to vaccine distribution, in addition to vaccine shortages, which can occur when companies no long choose to make vaccines, often because of manufacturing and production problems. That leads to insufficient stock piles, and reduced competition so that prices for vaccines rise.

Another major failure in pandemic preparedness revealed itself during the Covid crisis. As health communication specialists like Kizzmekia Corbett, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) point out, “Public health practitioners need to recognize that our research is only as strong as our communication. Even our strongest peer reviewed, evidence-driven findings won’t have full impact if we cannot clearly and effectively communicate them to the public.”

Practitioners also need to understand and respect the field of health communications as a multidisciplinary methodology aimed at behavior change for health promotion and disease prevention. Vicki Freimuth, former director of communications at the CDC, says that “the agency struggles to assure that experienced communication professionals are included in decision-making and developing scientifically sound public messages free of political influence.” (personal communication).  The exclusion of experts whose work has proven that behaviors can be changed (e.g., mask wearing) with research-based messaging is a troubling omission.

According to a poll taken in March and reported by  Politico, two-thirds of respondents believed the threat of future deadly pandemics is growing, while almost 90 percent wanted the federal government to be more prepared for another pandemic in its budget and planning. Still, the focus in Washington, DC seems to be on assessing what went wrong during Covd-19.

Mauricio Santillana, a professor at Northeastern University paints a daunting picture regarding future efforts. He says the influence of politics on government funding causes a “collective amnesia,” that leads to reactive responses to crises vs. proactive  prevention.

If the government prioritizes the prevention of deadly viruses, perhaps they will remember to include health communication strategies along with financing and other challenges that accompany pandemics that need to be stopped quickly. I’m not holding my breath.

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Elayne Clift has a master’s degree in health communications and has worked internationally with a focus on maternal and child health. 

Choosing Freedom: A Political Imperative

 When Franklin Delano Roosevelt uttered his famous phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” at his first inaugural address in 1933, he recognized that fear of the Great Depression could paralyze people and interfere with ways to address an unprecedented economic crisis. He realized that catastrophic thinking and overwhelming anxiety had the power to harm his plan for economic (and political) recovery.

 He recognized, as Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl did, that “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

FDR and Frankl were both right, and in many ways, we find ourselves in that space where fear and insecurity reside, inhibiting our ability to respond appropriately and effectively to the political, economic, and emotional situation we find ourselves in as a nation as we approach the most crucial election of our time.

In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR also said that there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.” He noted that he looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms, as the New York Times pointed out in an op-ed. by Jamelle Bouie last month .Those were the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of every person to worship God in his [sic] way, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. They were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and “they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II,” as Bouie reminds us.

In his essay, Bouie also enumerated four freedoms that today’s Republican party embraces. They are, he says, the freedom to control, the freedom to exploit, the freedom to censor, and the freedom to menace. “Roosevelt’s four freedoms,” he claims, “were the building blocks of a humane society – a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.” 

It’s a parallel vision of a future in which we do not have the basic freedoms and human rights that FDR espoused. Should the Republicans win the White House and the Congress next year, we will find ourselves living in a theocratic, oppressive country driven by oligarchs and dictators who embrace fear, violence, and autocracy with absolutely no regard for fundamental freedom, privacy or self-determination.

So let’s think about some of the freedoms that should drive us to the polls in droves next November. First and foremost are the freedom from fear and the menace of gun violence as we walk the streets, attend houses of worship, schools, entertainment or simply go to the market, the movies, and the mall.

Let us also think about the urgency of freedom to control our bodies and our futures as we remember the women and girls who have been denied bodily autonomy and privacy and who have suffered and died as a result of forced pregnancy because the State owns their wombs. Let us remember the women jailed for miscarriage, the health providers who live in fear of losing their licenses, or worse, and the mothers, sisters, friends, advocates who could well be imprisoned for driving someone to the airport or across a state line.

Let us remember the freedom to speak openly and honestly, and to gather, as guaranteed by the First Amendment, and the freedom from censorship so that we can read books we choose, and the freedom to worship in our own ways, and the freedom to keep our children free from want, whether it’s food or healthcare or the right to be who they are. Let our friends and families be free to live in the houses and neighborhoods they wish, be they Chinese, Syrian, Cuban, Muslim, Jewish, gay or straight, or otherwise. Let there be an end to Otherness, persecution, blinding stereotyping, and ungrounded assumptions that strike fear in the hearts of so many of us in this time.    

Let us be free from financial and physical exploitation in the workplace, especially when that exploitation involves children. And let us be free from willful prejudice, evil intentions, unenlightened faux leaders, and restrictive political actions that inhibit democracy, human rights, and social justice once and for all.  

And let us remember the wisdom of Nelson Mandela, who said “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others,” along with the wise words of Dag Hammarskjold, former General Secretary of the United Nations, who so wisely noted that “’Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.”

It’s a philosophy we need to value, remember, and embrace. We are called upon it in this moment and in the days to come to do the right thing for future generations.

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 Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social justice from Brattleboro, Vt. www,elayn-eclift.com

Choosing Political Promise Over Continuing Chaos

As we begin a new year with the relief of midterm elections behind us, many Americans are enjoying a sense of comfort about our political future. We saw a blue wave when a red one was predicted and a long overdue increase in diversity among those elected to office at all levels of governance. We moved closer to holding accountable those who wished to do us harm, including a past president and his collaborators and insurrectionists. So it may seem too early to be thinking about 2024, or what 2023 will bring.

While the sense of relief was warranted, we’re still not out of the woods, and we mustn’t allow comfort to yield to complacency and chaos.  Given the way autocracy has already crept into our lives, vigilance is still necessary.

Americans have never experienced a true, full-blown autocracy although we’ve come close. We have never had one single person hold absolute power over society, the military, the economy, and civil rights. We have not had to fear threats, punishment for lack of loyalty or disobedience and we have not lived with hideous rules and regulations, demands, or orders. We have no real idea of what it’s like to live in a country that has these rules and orders, where death or imprisonment loom large for ordinary people.

But we have seen alarming elements of autocracy creep into our lives over the past few years and we can’t ignore them in the belief that “it can’t happen here.”  We may not have a Viktor Orban or a Putin at the helm yet but we have experienced much of what occurs in autocracies.  We’ve seen voting rights eroded in 47 states, a politicized Supreme Court, an increase in domestic terrorism, political violence and police brutality, an end to privacy and horrific repression for women, hateful acts against immigrants, Jews, and the LGBTQ community – all scapegoats that foster fear mongering aimed at controlled political agendas and a planned landscape by rightwing zealots operating from a fascist playbook. Let’s not forget that we also came perilously close to an overthrow of our government in a violent coup attempt.  

Autocracy often begins incrementally so those not affected by early moves don’t notice the first steps. It becomes easy to take democracy for granted, unless you find that you are hassled by police, or graffiti appears on your synagogue or business, you need an abortion or birth control, or you find yourself watching what you say to whom, and where you congregate with friends. Soon science is suppressed, books are banned, school curricula are controlled, and texts are revised while religious schools are funded.  Environmental concerns are dismissed, and climate change is ignored. All of these things have already occurred in our country. What’s next? The military ending protests or dissent?

As President Biden says, “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.” 

Further, a troubling view held by a large segment of our electorate is also something we must keep in mind as we march toward one of the most crucial elections of our lifetimes.  Many Americans find false comfort in the notion that a centrist government is a safe government, but that assumption requires a deep understanding of what constitutes centrist positions and political priorities. For the most part, centrist Democrats and their Republican colleagues fail to enact legislation that focuses on the human rights and basic needs of constituents whose lives are an anomaly for those who have the wealth and status to achieve political power. Issues like livable wages, parental leave, child welfare, support for single mothers and working women, affordable housing, help for the mentally ill, community policing that includes opinion leaders and social workers from within the community, and other necessities promulgated by progressive leadership (like gun laws) never make it to the Congressional floor or are voted against.

Those who like to call themselves progressive centrists often talk about moderation and reasonable social equality in balance with moderate authority and sensible order. But who decides what is moderate or reasonable or what constitutes a fair balance between just law when all values are laden with interpretive views rather than fact based, objective analysis?

As George Lakoff has noted in an essay about “The New Centrism and its  Discontents,” When a Democrat ‘moves to the center,’ he is adopting a conservative position – or the language of a conservative position. Even if the language is adopted and not the policy, there is an important effect. Using conservative language activates the conservative view…which strengthens the conservative world view in the brains of those listening.”

In addition, MoveOn.org has pointed out that, “Governments actually working for people shouldn’t be seen as a radical idea. Everything that gets labeled ‘far-left’ in the U.S. is common sense policy in the rest of the industrialized world. Guaranteed healthcare. Paid family leave. Government drug price regulation. Gun control. It isn’t radical. We’re talking about the basics of a functioning society.”

Democrats (small and large D), whose pluralism often interferes with their solidarity, must keep autocracy and centrist governance high on their list of priorities when the next time to vote arrives.  As Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) has said, “Winning elections is not about looking good. It’s about being good.The path forward is to actually enact policies that address the pain people are feeling across the country, not pretend that pain doesn’t exist.”

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