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Today’s anniversary may seem auspicious, on the eve of the president-elect returning to the White House in just two weeks. But democracy in America was crumbling long before the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The last week has exposed its collapse in no uncertain terms.

History taking shape before our eyes

35 years ago, as the Berlin wall fell between the countries of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, political scientist Francis Fukuyama envisioned what he described as “the end of history.” How painfully wrong he proved to be.

Fukuyama envisioned an indefinite future dominated by an emerging global neoliberal consensus favoring the free flow of capital encouraging an era of peace between nations.

What ultimately ensued was a predatory seizure of resources by billionaires supported by each of the major corporate political parties, which in turn created such a crisis for middle and working-class Americans that, last month—with eyes wide open—they electorally overthrew the neoliberal consensus envisioned by Fukayama as permanent, in favor of an overt fascism whose contours are already taking shape even before the incoming administration takes office.

What the failure of democracy looks like

Political violence indicates the failure of democracy. The very point of respecting the consent of the governed, beyond whatever theoretical moral value that carries, is to channel political concerns into nonviolent discourse. Democracies (at least claim to) wield greater legitimacy, which helps support political stability.

Put another way, President John F. Kennedy observed that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

The contemporary history of the United States more or less proves his point.

Violence in the U.S. has grown thoroughly pervasive, exposing the failure of democracy in America long preceding last November’s elections.

What violence looks like

Gun violence is pervasive. Mass shootings are seemingly random, but disturbingly consistent. Meanwhile, police violence remains murderous, predictable, and effectively unrestrained. And domestic violence flourishes in communities across the country, despite intergenerational efforts to curtail it.

But only recently has the specter of political violence raised its head in a manner visible to most Americans. From a series of assassination attempts targeting the president-elect to the widely celebrated assassination of a healthcare CEO by an outraged son of the establishment, to a pair of seemingly politically motivated acts of domestic terrorism in the first week of January, Americans are discovering the price of letting democracy—and the stability it is supposed to offer due to its legitimacy—slip through our fingers.

In at least one case, this political violence responded to economic violence that none of our formal institutions have seen fit to address—or even recognize. It has been not only permitted by them, but overtly encouraged and enabled by them.

Economic violence takes many forms, all of which are widely overlooked and ignored even as they impact growing swaths of America.

Systematic denials of insurance coverage represent not only a death sentence for patients facing severe illnesses, but also lifetimes of discomfort, inconvenience, and pain for others. They are the product not only of a predatory economic system and business model, but also artificial intelligence—representing a microcosm of the dystopian future imagined by the Terminator movie franchise.

The vision of machines dictating the life and death of human beings has terrified humanity since the industrial revolution and the advent of automation. The use of artificial intelligence to drive grandmothers into early graves by the millions is the very culmination of that nightmare. I’m grateful to live in a state which has formally recognized that and taken action to guard human rights, but most Americans enjoy no such protections.

Yet, somehow, journalists in the United States have managed not to observe this horror, even though it plays out in painfully slow motion in families from coast-to-coast. The one thing that could bring America together, it seems, could be outrage at the predatory nature of our “healthcare” system.

Other examples of economic violence abound. Like denials of health insurance coverage, evictions sacrifice basic human needs on the altar of profit. Both forms of economic violence impose cascading effects.

And when corporate landlords evict (especially low-income) tenants, they come to play a role similar to that of AI denying insurance claims: faceless, nameless, perpetual non-beings placing precious human lives at risk.

How did we get here?

Many voices would claim that the source of these nightmares coming to fruition is the right wing, and a president-elect willing to demonize his critics. That might seem like a satisfying analysis, but it is unfortunately inaccurate.

At the moment, the first wave of conciliation with the autocracy promised by the president-elect has come from newspaper editors, and owners willing to sacrifice the independence of the press for their own political and financial opportunities.

The press is supposed to serve a crucial function enabling democracy. That’s why it’s among the institutions protected by the First Amendment. Historically, commitments to a free press are part of what allowed democracy to flourish.

Today, those commitments have been abandoned.

On the eve of November’s election, editors at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times bent their publications to serve their political (and ultimately financial) interests, silencing editorial voices and reports critical of the president-elect due to the inclinations and allegiances of their owners.

The pattern continued this week, with an award-winning cartoonist resigning from the Washington Post due to the newspaper’s institutional inability to allow criticism of its owner, the second richest man in the world.

The single richest man in the world has already run a major social media platform into the ground, turning it into a megaphone amplifying his bizarre rants and self-serving hostility to democracy. Elon Musk’s influence extends well beyond the United States. In Germany, his election interference has prompted outrage from a political culture more committed to democracy than the one that introduced it to the modern world.

As our political culture continues to undergo a profound transformation, it’s important to understand the roots of those changes. The collapse of democracy in America began not with the result of a presidential election, but rather an abdication by professional journalists lacking the independence to observe reality.

Luigi Mangione envisioned himself as being the only one to face reality. In his manifesto, he wrote:

“these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it….[M]any have illuminated the corruption and greed decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Mangione’s alleged actions channeled a collective outrage that journalists have done everything possible to ignore and suppress. One might say his alleged crime revealed the blood on the hands of not only our predatory corporate healthcare system, but also the press—and our society writ large—as much as himself.

The most tragic part of all

The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson sent shockwaves across corporate America. But there’s one thing it has decidedly not done...