I like to speak as if we can fix our democracy, but I am really not sure we can. The only way to prevent a Chinese style authoritarianism is to invent a more accountable (and a bit less permissive) Republic. This “anything goes” style of society is clearly not working.
And if we don’t, the future belongs to China, where stability and order are valued over individual freedoms. It’s hard to tell the Chinese that our way is better than theirs now. If the goal of any society is to maximize happiness, they’re doing better than we are.
But the shame of it all is we had a great thing going. No, we weren’t perfect, and had many things that needed fixing, but until we let conservatives wreck it all for the greed of a few, we had a damn good experiment in democracy going. Then we took it for granted.
I want to live to see a day when your average Libertarian conservative fears for his or her life spewing the bullshit that came out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth in the 1980s.
