Cool guy Anand Giridharadas is back with a new playbook for saving democracy. The midterms are offering Americans a stark choice between Liberal Democracy and “fascism.” As of this morning, “fascism” is surging ahead in the latest round of national polls due to economic concerns.
“Polls swing this way and that way, but the larger story they tell is unmistakable. With the midterm elections, Americans are being offered a clear choice between continued and expanded liberal democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other. And it’s more or less a dead heat.
It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds.
The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age.
I believe pro-democracy forces can do this because I spent the past few years reporting on people full of hope who show a way forward, organizers who refuse to give in to fatalism about their country or its citizens. These organizers are doing yeoman’s work changing minds and expanding support for true multiracial democracy, and they recognize what more of their allies on the left must: The fascists are doing as well as they are because they understand people as they are and cater to deep unmet needs, and any pro-democracy movement worth its salt needs to match them at that — but for good. …
In their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. …”
The current playbook isn’t working.
Jon Meacham speeches aren’t inspiring and marshalling the forces of Democracy behind the political establishment. Democracy Defenders appear poised to lose the midterms.
Anand is best known for his ecstatic reaction to Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan which set off the current wave of inflation which is bringing our new progressive era to an early end.
That op-ed reads like something written by a high school sophmore in social studies class. But maybe I’m not cool enough to appreciate a genuine urban hipster like Anaconda Mohandas, or whatever his name is. If the rampant crime, inflation and social disorder plaguing the country are examples of his liberal, multiracial democracy then I’m definitely ready to give “fascism” a try.
Why is this wog even in this country? BTW, someone should tell this wog his fake tough guy look isn’t working, it takes more than a leather jacket and bad attitude.
Demography is destiny.