How democracy dies

By Deauwand Myers

Many Americans think democracy is durable; that the United States, bloody and genocidal in its past, has been expanding the franchise to women and people of color and sexual minorities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

But that's just ahistorical, if we look at the long arc of human history. Most civilizations have been rigid monarchies of a kind, and pluralistic democratic nations have only emerged in the last few hundred years. Some philosophers and historians believe that though the most beneficial to the most people, democracies may not be able to endure the millennia that other forms of governing have.

It may very well be that there's something genetic in humanity's appetite for authoritarian, repressive regimes. Though a plurality of conservatives in America seem to have embraced the cult of personality embodied in disgraced ex-president Trump, the rise of right-wing, racist, anti-democratic, populist movements have gripped a lot of advanced democracies in recent years. Germany, France, Britain, Poland, Japan, and even Israel have seen an explosive rise in hate crimes and right-wing rhetoric. From anti-Semitic attacks in Europe and North America, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian mobs in Israel, neo-Nazi fascists in Germany and elsewhere, to anti-Asian murders, sexual assault, and random, casual brutality in major cities throughout the United States: we have a problem.
It doesn't stop there. Years ago, small gay pride parades never attracted homophobic, hyper-Christian protests in major Korean cities. Now, every year these protests get larger and more violent, particularly in Seoul. Japan's ultra-right wing, xenophobic political groups flood Tokyo, espousing toxic nonsense like Japan didn't commit war crimes and all foreigners should leave the country.

These are all happening in wealthy, well-educated societies, not some developing nation supplanted by military coups, e.g. Myanmar, a country which, not unlike China, has been pursuing a genocide of its Muslim ethnic minorities before and after the democratic government was summarily overthrown.

There are many reasons democracy is under siege in far too many places around the world. One is the failure of neo-liberal policies. Neo-liberalism, put far too simply here, favors policies promoting free-market capitalism, deregulation, and a reduction in government spending. Which, oddly, is the same definition you could give conservatism. Unfortunately, political parties on all sides of the ideological spectrum have subscribed to this by varying degrees in most advanced democracies.

Over time, these policies concentrate wealth and power to fewer and fewer people, and so instead of having a more hexagonal-shaped distribution of wealth (where you have a broad and thriving working and middle-class), you have a pyramid. Research countries whose economies stayed in that latter shape for too long: the governments collapse.

This steady concentration of wealth is interconnected to, at least in countries like the United States, white supremacy, itself merely a psychological tool to extract wealth from people of color and poor whites. It's really an effective tool, one, to the best of my knowledge, that arose organically. Unfortunately, this psychological crutch fashioned for wealth extraction may destroy the richest, most powerful nation in human history, or change it into a kind of autocratic, quasi-presidency like that of the late Korean President Park, or the exceedingly intelligent, ruthless President Xi of China.

I stand by my previous assertion that former President Trump, disgraced and increasingly delusional as he may be, is just a symptom of the broader social rot at the core of American society. But one can't deny the unique danger he and his ilk represent to the United States. If a plurality of one major political party believes that President Biden is illegitimate and that Trump is the rightful president, and more broadly, that elections in the United States are shod through with fraud, the work of geopolitical adversaries like Russia and China is being done for them from within.

January 6th, though horrific, was not nearly as costly in lives or property as white mobs mass murdering whole wealthy, black communities in the early 1900s. But the symbolic act of seeing grown white men and women storm the seat of democracy for all the world is a shock to the senses in ways no other racist American president achieved.

To be clear, these white Americans sought to overturn an election they lost because they believe two big lies. One, that Trump won and the election was fraudulent, but two, more insidiously, that black and brown people's votes should not count because they are inherently un-American. That a white person is the exemplar of what an American should look like is nothing new. Just ask black and Korean-Americans and Korean-Canadians, for example, trying to get English education employment in Korea and throughout Asia.

Neo-liberalism is an easier ideology to modulate than the sickness of white supremacy. White folks need to fix this problem for themselves, and quick, lest America will look like China come morning.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.