Democracy, 2024 Election, Trump
It’s Time to Worry About the Survival of Democracy
Is it time to declare democracy an endangered species? Not just in America, where Trump credits the democratically elected administration of Biden and Harris with America’s decline, but in Europe. An ill wind is blowing across the continent. Earlier this summer, the right-wing National Rally party fared well in the first round of voting in France’s national election. Now the AfD, Alternative for Germany, won in Thuringia, the first state victory for a far-right party in Deutschland since World War II.
In the 1930’s as Hitler rose to power in Germany and a neo-Nazi movement grew in America, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel, It Can’t Happen Here, that told the tale of a dictator coming to power in the U.S. The book warned Americans not to take democracy for granted.
In October 1948, presidential candidate Harry S. Truman told an audience at Chicago Stadium:
We must not imagine, just because we love freedom, that freedom is safe — that our freedom is safe. Eternal vigilance is still the price of liberty.
Other people have also loved freedom, but have lost their liberty with tragic…
