No wonder they’ve not been able to contain their glee. After their win of another Senate seat in the improbable state of Mississippi, the Democrats will now hold at least 55 Senate seats in the next U.S. Congress.
But now it’s the morning after the night before. Now it’s time to sober up. For what we’ve seen in the last couple of years is not a pretty picture. Turns out that the United States is saddled with serious vulnerabilities and fragilities – as well as one potentially deadly vagary.
The vulnerabilities are political and economic and they are systemic. They include but are not limited to a supreme court frozen in aspic; an antiquated electoral college; a dangerous deficit; lopsided congressional representation (for example, two senators per state, no matter Montana or California); the abiding influence of money in politics; checks and balances to the point of paralysis; and income inequity as extreme as entrenched.
The fragilities can be traced to the times in which we live. They include but are not limited to populations that are fragmented and polarized; leaders who are distrusted and disrespected; followers who are angry and frustrated and loyal to no particular person or party; free-floating fears about money and jobs and the unfathomable impact of artificial intelligence; and the death of the American Dream.
Finally, the vagary. Which is that The Time of Trump has demonstrated that Americans are no more resistant to the seductions of a strongman than any other people at any time anywhere in the world. In the last two years especially, we flew close to the sun. We almost slid from democracy to autocracy. We discovered that a chief executive who is ruthless and ambitious, in tandem with a congress that is stupefyingly supine, is risky business. One that with a president who is younger and steadier than the declining and erratic incumbent might have succeeded where he failed. Might have brought down democracy in America.
So however strong the recent rebuke of Trump, we now know, or we should, that we are not exempt. That we are not exempt from Freud who, in his book Moses and Monotheism, wrote “We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them.”