In 2021, Academy Award–winning director Alex Gibney and I published a desperate plea. In a Rolling Stone essay, we implored Democrats then in power to heed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) long-forgotten warning about the link between economic hardship and authoritarianism. Five years later, it appears that at least one prospective Democratic presidential candidate understands the warning — and is using her platform to amplify it.
Back in 2021, many liberals had gone back to brunch, assuming that the “democracy crisis” was over and that Donald Trump would never reemerge. In our Rolling Stone piece, entitled “Democrats’ Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy,” Gibney and I were sounding a discordant alarm after completing Meltdown. That audio series traced how Democrats turning hope and change into more of the same created conditions for Trump’s 2016 ascent and posited that the same thing could happen again.
The key passage in our essay was here:
Americans keep voting to change this crushing dystopia, and yet they continue being force-fed more of the same. . . . Such betrayals from both parties have been telling more and more of the country that democracy is a farce. . . .
The way for Democrats to combat that disillusionment is to learn from their party’s history during the Great Depression. . . .
The year before a fulminating Nazi rally in a packed Madison Square Garden in New York, FDR warned that the global rise of fascism was the result of democratic governments doing the opposite of the New Deal and protecting an economic status quo enriching a tiny handful at the expense of everyone else.
“Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership,” he said in…
Auteur: David Sirota
