Ordinarily, the word “unprecedented” is hyperbole, similar to “Breaking news!” or “Greatest ever!” When used to describe the current danger to American democracy, however, it is all too appropriate. Never in the nation’s history have democratic institutions been so at risk under what would first appear to be banal circumstances.
There have been previous threats to America’s system of government, but each was spurred by a single overriding issue that created deep doubt as to whether democracy was up to resolving it. For the first 75 years of the nation’s existence, the United States wrestled with whether human slavery would be perpetuated or abolished, which left the Union teetering on the edge of dissolution. In 1861, it fell into Civil War and the succeeding decades were spent trying to reinvigorate democracy, first by bringing Black Americans into the political system, then, in a sad irony, by shutting them out of it.
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, with unemployment in excess of 20 percent, many Americans looked to Europe and what seemed to be the enormous success of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini in pulling their countries out of similar quagmires and wondered if fascism might not be a better system for the United States. As Ira Katznelson described in his brilliant book, “Fear Itself,” it was only the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt that prevented fascism from gaining perhaps unstoppable momentum here.
