America's Worst Nightmare

I am a little late in watching the new adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale but once I started watching I couldn’t stop.  Part of my fascination is that all of my worst fears as a woman are realized in the dystopian world of Gilead (genital mutilation, rape, complete loss of legal rights), but even more timely to me is the examination of how such a society arose in the first place. 

The story is set in present day – women go jogging in shorts, they drink lattes at Starbucks, they have interesting jobs.  And when things start to change, they change gradually.  Outrageous things happen (there is overt misogyny, women lose the right to work, their bank accounts are frozen) but the outrage soon passes and life carries on as normal until suddenly it doesn’t.   The new society enslaves women so they can produce children in a world where fertility is failing, and oppresses basically every other group besides straight white men.  It is pretty awful, and could never happen to us, right?

In fact there are plenty of examples of democratic, modern societies falling into dictatorship and authoritarianism.  As Jim Powell explains in his excellent article, How Dictators Come to Power in a Democracy, Hitler rose in Germany because  “circumstances changed for the worse [for the German people], and when people become angry enough or desperate enough, sometimes they’ll support crazies who would never attract a crowd in normal circumstances.”    In Afghanistan, women’s rights were steadily improving in the 20th century (forced marriage was banned,  universal suffrage was established, women won the right to enter politics).  But when the Taliban came to power in 1996, women were suddenly forced back in time 1,000 years.  Their bodies became contraband and they lost their right to education, their freedom of movement, and their right to work or own property.   

Think it can’t happen to our democracy?  The most chilling article I have read in years talks about how the warning signs for a failing democracy are “flashing red around the world,” including in America.   Here are the questions that the authors of the report, Professors Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, use to judge the health of a democracy:

·       Do citizens think it is less important for their country to remain democratic? 

·       Is the public open to nondemocratic forms of government, such as military rule?

·       Are antisystem parties and movements gaining support? (ie: political parties whose core message is that the current system is illegitimate)

When the authors Mounk and Foa applied the test to present day America, here’s what they found:

·       The percentage of Americans who say it is essential to live in a democracy has plummeted, and the younger you are, the less important you think democracy is. (Fewer than 30% of millennials think democracy is essential vs 72% of Americans born before WW2.)

·       The number of U.S. citizens who think that it would be a “good” or “very good” thing for the “army to rule” if the government wasn’t doing a good job has risen from 1 in 16 in 1995, to 1 in 6 today.  (Again, it is the millennial generation who largely accounted for this change.)

·       The authors also see increases in the number of people who favor a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections”.

Learning that it is the younger generation leading America’s discontent with democracy is a little surprising to me because I spend my life around idealistic young women working hard to become a part of the system.  But it makes sense that the youngest generation aren’t as wedded to our systems as the older Americans are, and it is their job to question how things work and see if they might be able to think of something better.   The something better isn’t easily found, however.  As Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. “   

Watching the suffocating America of the Handmaid’s Tale, where an elite group have taken over the country in an effort to “make the world a better place”, I worry about the millennial generation, many of whom are discontent with our government, feel that no one is looking out for their interests, and who probably think there has got to be a better way.   Our free society encourages such questioning.  But I leave you with this quote from an Atlantic article on How Democracies Become Dictatorships, paraphrasing Plato:

“freedom's excesses, and the refusal of many in a democracy to accept any limits on what they can get or buy or conquer eventually hit reality. And when the reality hits, the frustration and insolence at finding that money does not grow on trees or that the world cannot be hammered into the shape our ideology demands easily gives way to a new form of government. That new government promises to remove all the perils and difficulties of self-government in favor of the certainty and security of raw executive power. “ 

And you don’t need to watch the Handmaid’s Tale to know that this, my friends, is our country’s worst nightmare. 


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