Culture Wars/Current Controversies

We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying.

By Umair Haque

Eand.Co

Right about now, something terrible is happening in America. Society is one tiny step away from the final collapse of democracy, at the hands of a true authoritarian, and his fanatics. Meanwhile, America’s silent majority is still slumbering at the depth and gravity of the threat.

I know that strikes many of you as somehow wrong. So let me challenge you for a moment. How much experience do you really have with authoritarianism? Any? If you’re a “real” American, you have precisely none.

Take it from us survivors and scholars of authoritarianism. This is exactly how it happens. The situation could not — could not — be any worse. The odds are now very much against American democracy surviving.

If you don’t believe me, ask a friend. I invite everyone who’s lived under authoritarianism to comment. Those of us how have?

We survivors of authoritarianism have a terrible, terrible foreboding, because we are experiencing something we should never do: deja vu. Our parents fled from collapsing societies to America. And here, now, in a grim and eerie repeat of history, we see the scenes of our childhoods played out all over again. Only now, in the land that we came to. We see the stories our parents recounted to us happening before our eyes, only this time, in the place they brought us to, to escape from all those horrors, abuses, and depredations.

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2 replies »

  1. I agree that America has been becoming increasingly fascist and will die very soon. I object to two things in this article and the linked ones:

    1. Claiming that those of us who aren’t survivors of worse countries “have precisely no experience with authoritarianism”. Even if you use a stricter, more historical definition of fascism, you cannot redefine *authoritarianism* that way – America, like all states, has always been authoritarian, and we all have plenty of experience with it.

    2. Your use of “democracy” as a positive ideograph. Democracy is an authoritarian system of the subjugation of minorities to a majority, and that is not a deep insight, it is in the very definition of democracy.

    • I too am expecting the worst at this point, probably worse than this dude, but find it very hard to take him seriously when his warnings sound exactly like the pundits on TV, yet his primary claim is that they should not be able to see what he sees.

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