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.

# # #

When my siblings and I were growing up and we did something untoward that got us into trouble my mother would say, “Let that be a lesson to you!” I’ve remembered that line whenever someone thinks I’m over-reacting when I say the Trump administration has opened the way to a functioning autocracy rapidly morphing into full-blown fascism.

I think about the truism that “history is prologue. We should be taking that truth more seriously.

A chilling December article in The Guardian by Jason Stanley revealed why. “America is now in fascism’s legal phase,” Stanley posits.

His article begins with a 1995 quote by the late Toni Morrison. “Let us be reminded,” the writer said, “that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

Morrison recognized the connection between racism, anti-Semitism and fascist movements propagated by and aligned with oligarchs, as Stanley does. His compelling article lays out the various ways in which Donald Trump led us to the tipping point “where rhetoric becomes policy.”

Among the issues Stanley discusses are the takeover of our courts by Trump appointees, right wing attempts at voter suppression, increasing corporate influence, the crackdown on reproductive rights and enforced gender roles, Jim Crow laws and controlled school curricula, increased political and police violence, mass incarceration particularly among blacks, threatening vigilante groups, and punitive actions towards journalists and non-loyalists. It’s a gobsmacking portrait of where we are now as a country on the brink.

This isn’t the first time America has had to confront insurrection and political violence, but it is a time to consider history, and to remember that this isn’t America’s first fascist threat.

The lessons of history include a close look at all dictatorships. In this moment, it is urgent that we consider Hitler’s rise to power. As Stanley and others make clear, Hitler and his minions were adept at using propaganda and lies to create a narrative that led to his election, and his subsequent hideous policies. Citing “the big lie” that the last election was stolen, Stanley notes that “we have begun to restructure institutions, notable electoral infrastructure and law” and that “the media’s normalization of these processes encourages silence at all costs.’

German fascism didn’t arise overnight. Germany’s National Socialist Party began small, but extremely right wing and anti-democratic, according to historians. Masked in nationalist rhetoric, its agenda resonated with people who felt worried and humiliated. They welcomed scapegoats. Stanley put it this way: “The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews.” Nazi leaders “recognized that the language of family, faith, morality, and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things.”

Sound familiar? We’ve already heard talk of book burning, spying on each other, and Jews altering their behavior as precautionary measures. We’ve witnessed racist violence, attacks on peaceful protesters, and acts of white supremacy grounded in the claim that we are a Christian nation. Congress has its share of pro-autocracy politicians, and our local and state governments have all been infiltrated. Vigilante groups prowl the streets, guns and hate placards waving.

What more do we need to wake up?

This is not the first fascist threat to American democracy but the pro-Nazi movement of the 1930s and early 1940s was the most frightening to date. Characterized by a 1939 event at Madison Square Garden, a rally of 22,000 members of the German party known as the Bund, saluted large banners in Nazi fashion. The banners showed George Washington surrounded by swastikas.

The movement included summer camps for children, billed as family friendly venues, where Nazi indoctrination took place. At one of them in New York state an annual German Day festival attracted 40,000 people. Germany’s brown-shirted camp kids later became SS thugs.

The American Nazi movement, with which Charles Lindbergh sympathized, came to an end only after the 1939 invasion of Poland by Hitler, followed by the Bund being outlawed in 1941. All of this is captured in Philip Roth’s semi-autobiographical novel The Plot Against America.

Nevertheless, America has continued to witness Nazi inspired acts. In 1978 a rally in Skokie, Illinois repeated the language of the Third Reich. Donald Trump coopted a German slogan in “America First” as support for anti-immigration sentiments. And now white supremacist rhetoric is being spewed as it was in Charlottesville in 2017. A year ago, a massive crowd of insurrectionists stormed the Capital wearing T-shirts embossed “Camp Auschwitz.”

In her speech at Howard University, Toni Morrison asserted that fascism relies upon media to convey an illusion of power to its followers. Now, finally, the media is listening to booming alarm bells and the military is preparing for an all-out coup which could happen in 2024 if not before.

It’s time now to ask for whom the alarm bells toll. As Ernest Hemingway knew, it tolls for all of us.