A dangerous disconnect by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

We have received one body blow after another since November 5, the strength and the frequency increasing exponentially since January 20, and continuing — I almost said culminating, but more comes every day — with the passage of the cruelest and most destructive bill ever passed by Congress and signed by a president of these United States. 

My silence here is a reflection of my daily struggle with despair. I have been nearly knocked off my feet by what is happening in this country. There are days when I can barely function. I’ve spent as much time on the couch as upright. I know being flattened by grief does no one any good. “Don’t pay so much attention,” some friends counsel me. “It’s not like you can do anything about it, and it’s making you ill.”

I got a Substack post the other day from Mike Brock’s Notes from the Circus that reminded me why it is so important to stay engaged. The title, The Reactionary Coup of America Continues Apace, caught my attention, but the subheader is what focused it: Why Americans can’t feel the democracy dying around them.

“The gap between the magnitude of what is happening and our capacity to feel its significance represents one of the most dangerous disconnects in American history. But gravity is real. We are falling fast. And history will not wake Americans gently. The psychological trauma approaches whether we prepare for it or not.

“We treat an existential threat to self-governance as if it were merely another election cycle. We discuss the systematic capture of democratic institutions in the same register we might debate tax policy or infrastructure spending… We are witnessing the establishment of martial law by another name, processed as routine immigration enforcement…

“While Americans focus on their daily lives, the ideological architecture of a post-democratic America is being constructed in plain sight… this capture proceeds without generating the emotional response that such systematic lawbreaking should provoke… we’re witnessing what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Ordinary people processing papers, following procedures, participating in a system whose horror they refuse to fully acknow ledge.”

One of the reasons I have been on the couch is that I was born into the residue of the banality that murdered much of my family. I know in my bones what Arendt described. I can’t help but see the horror beneath the ordinariness.

“Temporal coherence—the connection between past, present, and future—has dissolved into a perpetual, chaotic now where each revelation of systematic corruption erases the last, preventing sustained attention to the ongoing coup. We cannot learn from history because we cannot hold patterns in mind long enough to recognize them.

“Without these forms of coherence, we cannot process the coup in progress. We lack the cognitive and moral frameworks needed to recognize democratic collapse as it unfolds, to distinguish between normal political conflict and systematic institutional capture, to sustain the attention and emotional engagement that resistance requires…”

I share and understand the overwhelming need to live as normally as possible. Struggling as I have for a lifetime with the Holocaust history that I carry in my body, I also know that attention must be paid. Heaven knows I welcome even the brief relief that an hour tracking down a murderer in a British mystery can bring. But, even then, it is impossible to put the cruelty and the corruption and the lawlessness completely out of my mind. No, that’s not the right word because it’s not just my conscious mind that is involved. There’s a deep disturbance in our national psyche that we are all experiencing on many levels. So, I take breaks when I can to give myself the strength not to give in to the evil without a fight.

“This is a slow-motion coup, but the motion is accelerating…

“The speed of this transformation has exceeded what anyone believed possible about American institutional resilience. The guardrails are being systematically dismantled by people who understand exactly what they are doing and why…

“The coup proceeds because it maintains the appearance of democratic process while systematically eliminating democratic substance. Americans continue to believe they live in a democracy even as democracy is being dismantled around them.

“We are not in the early stages of democratic backsliding. We are in the advanced stages of systematic institutional capture… This moment requires mass political mobilization on a unified front… We must overcome the denial, deflection, cynicism, and false equivalencies that allow us to process accelerating fascist consolidation as normal democratic politics…

“The question is whether Americans will recognize they are in free fall and choose to deploy the tools of democratic resistance before they hit the ground, or whether they will continue to believe they are still dancing while authoritarianism completes its hold over every aspect of their lives.

“The choice is still ours. But it will not remain so for long.”

I know I am only one voice, one that I self-silenced over the past weeks. But I also remind myself of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”  So I have pulled myself off the couch and gotten back in touch with you. And I will be there on July 17 to join millions of Americans on the streets to make some Good Trouble as we “deploy the tools of democratic resistance” before it is too late.