n his article “We’re All Soviets Now,” Niall Ferguson marshals economic and social facts to claim that modern America resembles the latter days of the Soviet Union. This kicked off several weeks of contention, on and off social media, about whether Ferguson and company are mere doomsayers misreading the times. In 2017, The Washington Post unveiled its slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to signal what its editors believe to be a time of political darkness, mostly due—in their view—to the election of Donald Trump.
Eventually, there arose the oft-repeated line that President Trump is a threat to democracy. This line—a threat to democracy—whether in reference to Trump or some other point at issue, is repeated with such vitriol that often it sends the claimant into what can only be described as an unhinged state. As immigrants, my family and I are dumbstruck at times to see how undemocratic, in fact, is this response, and how far America has succumbed to libertinism as dogma—we are told that this is the only way to “save” America. The America we are experiencing today is not the America to which we immigrated.
There is a certain arrogance in Western democratic countries, especially in America, regarding our form of government. Whenever things go wrong in other systems of government—say Communist China or Russia, the dictatorships of a variety of nations in South America or the Middle East—we are quick to point out that it is intrinsic to that form. But when things go wrong for us, we tend to think of it as an anomaly, an aberration we can overcome, as if there is nothing intrinsic to democracy that can degrade and destroy it.
Read the full essay at Public Discourse.