Tim Mannello

Williamsport

The question no longer is: “Can it happen here? “The question is: “Is it already too late to stop?” Is full-fledged authoritarianism inevitable in the United States?

The House of Representatives and the Senate are too broken to pass legislation which pits citizen against citizen, like illegal immigration, abortion, voting rights, climate change, gun violence and health care affordability.

The judicial branch is so entrenched and reactionary, it can and has reversed long established constitutional rights, squelched democratic initiatives coming up in the form of state court decisions, promoted a unitary arbitrary executive, supported insurrectionist initiatives and movements and even seriously considered whether a president might have immunity to commit crimes…whether an American President is above the law.

The executive branch is one election away from being led by a self-professed dictator.

John Dunne who wrote “No man is an island, also wrote the words “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” As I understand it, Dunne connected these two quotes. When he says: “No man is an island,” he not only means that none of us lives independently and that shared ideals and adversity can strengthen the bonds of human belonging. He also means that when our sense of human connection is lost, we die to each other. We are no longer united; what makes us truly human, our inter-relatedness, dies too.

That’s what is happening in our atomized country where, through social media, even facts are personalized to fit our individual biases and many dread the thought of seeing loved ones at Thanksgiving dinners and family reunions because of our deep divide over fundamentals. We don’t just differ on policies any more. We are no longer united in our defense of the democratic institutions, behavior and principles that anchor our Constitutional Republic.

In the minds of many, it’s okay to reject the results of the 2020 election in the total absence of evidence of fraud anywhere close enough to have changed the outcome. It’s okay that Americans violently attacked the nation’s Capitol to keep the certified and validated votes of the states from being certified by Congress. It’s okay to honor those who desecrated the seat of our democracy in an attempt to thwart the Constitutional transfer of Presidential power. It’s okay to grotesquely call the attacking mob “Patriots” and not accurately, the “insurrectionists” they truly were.

We have become islands to one another. So maybe we should not worry just about the extinction of democracy in countries like Ukraine and Taiwan. Or, as John Dunne would put it, “Never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Many are worried that our democracy is in hospice. Many others can’t stop talking about the price of eggs.