The Minneapolis Crucible

Will we forge democracy anew?

I won’t do a full post today. Just a note on where America is right now.

When Trump won the 2024 election, I feared — rightly — that our democracy would soon be in great peril. Between gerrymandering, a corrupt Supreme Court, a compliant Republican Party, and a tsunami of political donations from the tech broligarchy, I thought American democracy might soon perish.

But I thought the process of losing our democracy would be a slow, ineluctable descent as institutions and people resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable. I expected the process to be akin to what happened in Hungary, where ordinary people’s lives remained mostly normal amid Viktor Orban’s authoritarian takeover. There, independent media have been suppressed, business has been co-opted by crony capitalism, the judicial and electoral systems have been rigged. But Orban didn’t employ armed thugs to brutalize, maim and murder people in the streets. Rather, Hungary’s democracy fell to a quiet, creeping coup.

My early fears weren’t completely off base. Everything that transpired in the first few months of Trump 47 suggests that if our own home-grown fascists had been as patient as Orban, a de facto dictatorship would have been established here with relative ease. Our vaunted institutions, our system of checks and balances, either capitulated quickly or were overrun by Trump’s onslaught. Big business quickly bent the knee, immediately directing its focus to how to make money through Trump trades. The Supreme Court and the Republican Congress abetted and even encouraged every fascist move.

Yet the US has not replicated Hungary’s measured slide into authoritarianism. For Trump and his minions aren’t patient. They want retribution and subjugation. Threats and dominance displays are how they operate. They burn with racism, misogyny, and performative cruelty.

So now we have Minneapolis, America’s laboratory of democratic destruction, where ICE agents have gone full Sturmabteilung, terrorizing and even killing not only people with brown skin, but anyone who protests or gets in their way. And the irony is that this may be for the better.

For a gradual destruction of democracy would have been hard to resist. After all, who wants to rock the boat when there’s money to be made, jobs to keep, perks to be had, convenient bothsideism to be upheld, if you will just be silent and keep your head down?

Instead, however, the assault on freedom and civil liberties is open, lurid, and impossible to deny. While our institutions and our elites have failed us, ordinary Americans are rising to the occasion. If Minneapolis is a laboratory of democratic destruction, it has also become a laboratory of civil resistance — organized civil resistance, of a kind we haven’t seen since the civil rights movement. When ICE is on the rampage, crowds of brave Americans, summoned by texts and whistles, quickly gather to stand against the masked men with guns. As the outrage grows, people of common decency — like the federal prosecutors in Minnesota who chose to resign rather than pervert justice by going after Renee Nicole Good’s wife — are taking a stand.

So what’s happening now is both horrifying and inspiring. How will it all end? I don’t know, but maybe, just maybe, our democracy isn’t being destroyed — it’s being forged anew in the hands of the American people.

MUSICAL CODA