We will soon learn what kind of country America is, and what kind of people we are

The 2020 election, more than any other, feels like a life-or-death struggle for the future of the nation – and if it fails, there’s no going back.

I certainly don’t know more than anybody else.

In America, as you may know, we will soon be voting to determine who will be our next president.

And we will also be voting to find out what kind of country America is now and will be, and what kind of people we are.

Today in America, I’m sensing a disarming quiet on our land.

Even in the midst of a perfect storm of perilous national tumult – a contumacious president stoking public violence and governmental distrust, massive protests in our cities, towering storms and wildfires stealing lives and property, an economy in disarray, a pandemic flourishing unchecked – it is as if we Americans are all just waiting.

But also waiting anxiously to know what will happen to us next.

My country of 76 years seems to exist today at a strange and unnatural distance from me, and not at all clearly.

At this perplexing and virtual distance, America feels more like just any other country – any other that could fail.

In other words, it feels dangerous in America today.

If feels like we can’t go on this way indefinitely, that we should be doing more to help ourselves but are oddly constrained.

You could say it’s a version of “too big to fail.” But we know how that worked out.

A Newfoundlander friend of my wife’s and mine once joked to us that “You Americans are the only country that took democracy seriously.” (He wasn’t paying us a compliment.) To which I answered quite correctly, “Yes.

But America is a young country untested by time, and in most ways not very self-critical or self-aware.

(A great many Americans still think we won the Vietnam war!) Our delicately counterpoised, foundational materials make for a grand country when they work well and everybody buys in, knows and follows the rules (less government plus more freedom equals happiness – the great American experiment).

Citizens didn’t even know how the government worked or why, and their leaders selfishly sabotaged many of the normal mechanisms of governance.

For a ridiculously rich country, many people were actually starving and sick.

It’s really not that strange that America should fail – when you look at things as they really are.”.

Sometimes I think Uzbeks and Canadians and citizens of Uganda may see what’s going on in America better than most Americans, who see things close-up.

Because sometimes the strange quiet I detect around me and all of us in America seems like the silence preceding a battle; and the odd, cottony haziness surrounding even the simplest facts of human existence seems similar to the fog of war.

I don’t know much about proto-fascist authoritarianism – only what I read in books – though the words themselves frankly frighten me.

But unlike the suspicions I hold about American exceptionalism, I know authoritarianism is not a myth, and that one of its first sinister and subversive characteristics is that it doesn’t announce itself as what it is?

Instead, it announces itself as a direct and quick and rational and inevitable solution to everything that ails a people and a country?

There are just too many signs, and they are in plain sight – if we’ll only take our eyes off our spreadsheets, or off our mirror wherein things may not be going just precisely right for us today.

Donald Trump (you’ll notice, this is my first mention of him), whether he’s a proto-fascist or any of the other things he might be – an evil child, a Frankenstein stumbling around in a dark, unfamiliar room (that would be America), or just a COVID-19-addled, oxygen-deprived, old roid-rager – Donald Trump is really, of course, just an unhinged and befuddling symptom of a deeper American malaise fuelled by anger, frustration, disappointment, fear, a violent history, serial powerlessness and even dislike of the America we have all of us made.

It’s just that most of us can manage these feelings without wanting to tear the whole country apart.

When I wrote at the beginning that we are now waiting apprehensively to learn what kind of people and country we are, I meant that we are waiting to learn how we are to manage what we and our country cannot any longer ignore.

The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who knew the young America, wrote in 1838 that the “health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.” I write here as one of the specimen private citizens.

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