How to Safeguard Democracy. "You must out-create. There is no other way."
This Broken Arrow needs heeding. The Brookings Institute and Tori Amos give sage guidance.
Rash and reckless won’t get us to where we want to be. Are we emancipators or oppressors of Lady Liberty? She may seem weak. We may be battle weary. Still, the songlines sing. From our great lakes to our sacred Badlands over sweet prairies—no, I’m not letting go. I won’t be silenced or frozen out by those who must account in our senate and in the House.
—Tori Amos, Broken Arrow (2017)
So many of us are afraid today. We are reactive. In what feels like a single blink—but which has actually been at least a decade—our realities have been scattering all around us like patches of sand spun up by a dust devil.
At least we know the ground will always be under our feet. We know the sky will always be above it. We know gravity will always hug us against the surface of Mother Earth. But…should we be questioning those realities today? Should we?
For 35 years of life on Earth, it never occurred to me that the United States of America could become anything at all like Nazi Germany, or that about half of all American people would suddenly choose to become and honor Nazis rather than to reject them as the most evil human beings who ever lived.
It never occurred to me that so-called newspapers of record, including my hometown newspaper The Washington Post, would be censored by a tacky Russian-style billionaire oligarch and make itself into an illegitimate propaganda outlets for a fascist billionaire.
My imagination never would have served up, “Most people will come to think higher education is a force of evil” or “within a six-month timeframe, half the country will be seriously reconsidering if they disapprove of race-based slavery” or “a South African billionaire will become shadow president and personally fire critical federal employees while laughing and wielding a chainsaw only weeks after he gave the Nazi salute at the presidential inauguration.”
You get it. You’ve been asking yourself in all seriousness, “Have I gone insane? Am I actually psychotic and trapped inside paranoid fantasies while people in the outside world of reality try to shake me out of it?” I know you’ve been asking yourself that because we all have.
Those of us who do not support fascism, we see those who do for what they are: They’re brainwashed.
What we don’t recognized is that we all have been brainwashed—they have and we have. We may have our morality, thank God, but we cling onto illusions.
The illusions I am talking about are not the maddening realities listed above, sadly.
The illusions I am talking about are the beliefs we’ve been implanted with that we are all on our own. That we are all divided. That everyone hates everyone. That last one is true during certain inflammatory events, but it is only true because we have been so effectively divided.
I hold these truths to be self-evident:
The United States of America has always been geographically vast and diverse and it has always been home to a diversity of people. Diverse features, diverse languages, diverse cultures, diverse values, diverse foods, diverse worldviews. This was true even before our land was home to the United States of America. To this day, there are 574 federally recognized indigenous tribes within the United States. These far outnumber the number of states, the nations of our ancestors, the languages they spoke, the faiths they observed. We’ve always been diverse. We always will be. This was true before Trump and it is true in the era of Trump, whether or not he and Stephen Miller and Elon Musk want it to be.
But we’ve been carved up. First, the land has been carved up on maps. Voting districts have been carved up into convoluted shapes for the sake of advantaging Republicans in elections. Reservations have been carved out to keep indigenous people in; gated communities have been set up in rich white neighborhoods to keep nonrich, nonwhite people out. Everything we hear from everyone is about our differences. That’s done to make us see one another as ‘one’ (your community) and ‘other’ (people who are different in the ways authorities to see them). Republicans point the finger at Democrats and say “Your failure is because of identity politics!” Democrats point fingers at one another and say, “Our failure is because of identity politics,” pushing aside the actual reality that all those identity issues were created by Republicans. Same-sex marriages were never a threat, and they were not an issue elevated to political currency by gay people. Transgender women in women’s bathrooms was never a threat. It was a political pawn that worked until it didn’t, and then it was abandoned. Migrant caravans were never a threat, and they came and went. Trump began his campaign in 2015 attacking Mexican immigrants and Muslim people—why? Only to divide American people into factions of “us” and “the enemy.” Now you’re white and fighting for your job, I’m gay and fighting to stay human by law, she’s Jewish and fighting Harvard for made-up reasons, they’re transgender and fighting for their existence, and that kid with cancer is an immigrant from a Venezuela and destined to be destroyed by popular will because the public has accepted looking at brown babies as nothing but political chum. Donald Trump’s first inauguration speech was about American carnage, and it was a promise he has delivered upon by making us see one another as enemies of one another.
The United States of America is now the Divided States of America. And it did not become this by accident. This is classic divide-and-conquer strategy. The smallest minority group, transgender people, has been identified as ideal for scapegoating by everyone else as a start. The most politically disempowered minority group, nonwhite immigrants, has been identified as ideal for scapegoating by everyone else as a start. These are how it starts. We’re well beyond the beginning.
How do you see your fellow American people? If I am still inside your head, I bet you look at them with suspicion these days—if they are people you don’t know. You probably speak kindly and respectfully to them. You probably hope as you do so that they will signal they are not the enemy. But you are suspicious. You can’t trust your instincts anymore. That’s because you’ve been terrorized by psychological warfare. We all have.
One year ago to the day, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts announced that our nation “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” He got a lot of press about the “bloodless if the left allows it to be” part. But I never heard anyone point out that at the heart of his message was not just a threat of violent revolution by Christian nationalists, but the claim, or admission, that he was part of a movement waging a cold civil war within the United States. He said the revolution was actively happening; he only suggested the bloodshed was something that could be avoided, not the coup.
I think our cognitive dissonance has been founded in the reality that we have been on the receiving end of a cold war for a decade without registering that that war ever began because we were too worried that a coup or a hot war might come in the future.
Since Hillary Clinton told us Trump was “Putin’s puppet,” since the Mueller report told us that Russia indeed interfered with our 2016 election and would interfere with future ones to get Trump elected, and since Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard and others have been alleged to be Russian assets, I’ve had this thought: Hmm. When we in the U.S. were told the Cold War ended, that was our opportunity to move on and Russia’s opportunity to double down on the Cold War without anyone noticing. Methinks the same has happened here. We’re the frogs in the pot, yes, but the water has been simmering for a full decade.
Back in 2017, the musician Tori Amos (Full disclosure: She’s my favorite artist.) released her album Native Invader, which is in part a response to the election of Trump and all the red flags that election raised. You can read selections of lyrics above and below; the tone of the album is weary but resigned to resisting and persisting and overcoming, not resigned to resignation. I spoke with Amos about her prior project, the musical The Light Princess, before she made Native Invader and it was clear then that she, too, was wondering how so many realities were becoming surreal, but she also seemed to understand better than most that when someone tells you that they are presently waging a revolution, and you can either move aside and let them rewrite your reality or you can shed blood fighting to keep what you value. Amos chose option three: “You must out-create. It’s the only way.” She wrote a book called RESISTANCE: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage, and she encouraged people to take heart and to invoke imagination and creativity to out-create the forces of evil. Can we do that? Have we tried it?
Today, I listened to a podcast from The Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program that explores the question of how to safeguard democracy.
I recommend that anyone listen to the discussion, which is part history lesson, part government lesson, that explores “how to create and safeguard a positive vision for U.S. governance by examining the core pillars of democracy.”
Host Katie Dunn Tenpas and Brookings Fellow Jonathan Katz talk first about Poland, but the clear subtext is that what happened in Poland is happening right here right now. They get to that.
I recommend that people listen to this conversation because it is so sober, so measured, so not alarmist. It’s nothing like what you hear on cable news or from news influencers or from the likes of Michael Barbaro and Ezra Klein. It’s not dramatic, is what I am saying; it’s explanatory and scholarly and not activist and that makes it kind of alarming to listen to in a way because, hello, where is the urgency in this crisis?!
But also, it reminded me of Tori Amos’s lesson that “rash and reckless won’t get us to where we want to be.”
I won’t recap the Brookings conversation. You can listen to it or not. But I will direct you to a resource it publishes, called Democracy Playbook, which articulates “seven pillars of democracy.” They are:
Protect elections
Defend rule of law
Fight corruption
Reinforce civic and media space
Protect pluralistic governance
Counter disinformation
Make democracy deliver.
I am still inside your head. I heard you thinking, “Oh, no. We’re screwed.”
Well. Yes. Yes—but. We all need to understand something.
Democracy is plural. It’s not for me. It’s not for you. It’s for us. And it’s not up to me to save it. I can’t save it. And it’s not up to you to save it. You can’t save it. It’s up to us to save it. All of us.
Three hundred forty million human beings live in the United States of America. We absolutely, one hundred percent, unquestionably, without any doubt have the power to resuscitate and revive a government administered by the people for the people, which the government most certainly is not right now.
But if you think it’s just about you, then we can’t do it. If I think it’s just about me, then I can’t do it. We have to do it together. It’s really a plural in all ways.
The Republican party understands the importance of organizing and moving in lockstep. The implementation of Project 2025 is the height of organized government because the government is operating page by page, section by section, according to a thorough, carefully crafted plan that builds on itself sequentially from beginning to tragic ending.
And it is working because the Republican party is relentlessly following the plan—and the plan, by the way, is to knock down every one of the pillars of democracy named above.
It’s time to wake up and realize that we have been brainwashed to believe that we are not united. Why? Because united, we stand and divided, we fall. We’ve been carved up by expert butchers. We’ve been fragmented into shards of worry and fear and anxiety and panic and rage. We need to reassemble, reorganize, and push back hard. But we must out-create, and we must do it together. It’s the only way.
Underneath the stars above, I said, ‘No, stop; I am not going anywhere soon.’ You shout, ‘Run for cover!’ I shout, ‘Rev the Triumph’s engine.’
‘Darling, what’s the blanket for?’
‘Riding out this storm. We’ll be riding out this storm.’
—Tori Amos, Cloud Riders (2017)