How Democracies Fail

Chris Hedges is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, professor at Princeton University, author of several New York Times best-sellers, and Presbyterian minister, who’s written extensively on democracy and fascism, and the delicate balance that exists between the two.

Here’s an article in which he (quotes) “Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” noting that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”

Despotism happens slowly, gradually consolidating power, shutting down or at least discrediting the media, eliminating democratic institutions, and isolating the country from its erstwhile allies.  Democracy gradually gives way to totalitarianism, like a slow-growing cancer, where the victim may remain asymptomatic, or even undiagnosed,  for many years–until treatment is no longer possible.

That sounds vaguely familiar given our current political milieu, doesn’t it?