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POLITICS
Is Our Democracy Merely a Myth?
What we once took for granted as solid is now crumbling at an alarming rate
Those of us who grew up when boredom wasn’t cured by interacting with a screen may remember the dots game. You made a grid of dots, taking turns drawing lines to connect them. It seemed an impossible task to create enough lines to make blocks, but when this began to happen, suddenly your turn lasted forever; a slightly thrilling win of closing box after box.
I imagine this is how our democracy has begun to fold. It began slowly, as lawmakers created the structural changes to our systems to set us up for what we are now experiencing: a complete reversal of democratic norms. The trick, it seems, is to make us believe that the norms continue to exist, maintaining the myth that the people still possess the power.
Doomscrolling today is met with incessant revelations about how many ways the Constitution can be bypassed or how much more terrible we can make our economy, impair our human rights, destroy the jobs market, or sabotage our status on the world stage. You get my point.
Our reputation concerning human rights has become so terrible that we have been placed on the same watch list as the Congo and Afghanistan. The land of the free, you say? Free for…
