Democracy Grief Is Real

Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
• Dec. 13, 2019
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Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as
something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate
grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is
inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all
of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg,
Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep
depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of
people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it
threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born
after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal
democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or
the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that
would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss
feels so vast that I can barely process it.

After Trump’s election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with
books explaining, as one title put it, “How Democracies Die.” In the years since, it’s
breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be
impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be
acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His
attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged,
replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues.
One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of
ethnonationalism.

In “How Democracies Die,” Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard
describe how, in failing democracies, “the referees of the democratic game were brought
over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against
constitutional challenges and a powerful — and ‘legal’ — weapon with which to assault
its opponents.” This is happening before our eyes.
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The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the
plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and not just in
myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression. You can see it online, in the self-
protective cynicism of liberals announcing on Twitter that Trump is going to win re-
election. In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W.
Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings
of political desperation: “Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods,
I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.”
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I reached out to a number of therapists, who said they’re seeing this politically induced
misery in their patients. Three years ago, said Karen Starr, a psychologist who practices
in Manhattan and on Long Island, some of her patients were “in a state of alarm,” but
that’s changed into “more of a chronic feeling that’s bordering on despair.” Among those
most affected, she said, are the Holocaust survivors she sees. “It’s about this general
feeling that the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual
might fail,” she said.

Kimberly Grocher, a psychotherapist who works in both New York and South Florida,
and whose clients are primarily women of color, told me that during her sessions, the
political situation “is always in the room. It’s always in the room.” Trump, she said, has
made bigotry more open and acceptable, something her patients feel in their daily lives.
“When you’re dealing with people of color’s mental health, systemic racism is a big part
of that,” she said.
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In April 2017, I traveled to suburban Atlanta to cover the special election in the Sixth
Congressional District. Meeting women there who had been shocked by Trump’s
election into ceaseless political action made me optimistic for the first time that year.
These women were ultimately the reason that the district, once represented by Newt
Gingrich, is now represented by a Democrat, Lucy McBath. Recently, I got back in touch
with a woman I’d met there, an army veteran and mother of three named Katie
Landsman. She was in a dark place.
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“It’s like watching someone you love die of a wasting disease,” she said, speaking of our
country. “Each day, you still have that little hope no matter what happens, you’re always
going to have that little hope that everything’s going to turn out O.K., but every day it
seems like we get hit by something else.” Some mornings, she said, it’s hard to get out of
bed. “It doesn’t feel like depression,” she said. “It really does feel more like grief.”

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But
the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement,
and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be
shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no
longer true.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are often incredulous seeing the party of
Ronald Reagan allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but the truth is, there’s no reason
they should be in conflict. The enmity between America and Russia was ideological.
First it was liberal democracy versus communism. Then it was liberal democracy versus
authoritarian kleptocracy.

But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest

in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that
applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of
America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation. Russia, which has long
wanted to prove that liberal democracy is a hypocritical sham, is the natural friend of
the Trumpist Republican Party, just as it’s an ally and benefactor of the far
right Rassemblement National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and
American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is
something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Barack
Obama, we’ve never before had a president who treats half the country like enemies,
subjecting them to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda.
Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They
have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their
meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment

committee hearings, Republicans insist with straight faces that Trump was deeply
concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican senators like Ted Cruz of Texas,
who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of
interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s inspector general’s report
refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert
Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those
theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.
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To those who recognize the Trump administration’s official lies as such, the scale of
dishonesty can be destabilizing. It’s a psychic tax on the population, who must parse an
avalanche of untruths to understand current events. “What’s going on in the
government is so extreme, that people who have no history of overwhelming
psychological trauma still feel crazed by this,” said Stephanie Engel, a psychiatrist in
Cambridge, Mass., who said Trump comes up “very frequently” in her sessions.

Like several therapists I spoke to, Engel said she’s had to rethink how she practices,
because she has no clinical distance from the things that are terrifying her patients. “If
we continue to present a facade — that we know how to manage this ourselves, and
we’re not worried about our grandchildren, or we’re not worried about how we’re going
to live our lives if he wins the next election — we’re not doing our patients a service,” she
said.
This kind of political suffering is uncomfortable to write about, because liberal misery is
the raison d’être of the MAGA movement. When Trumpists mock their enemies for
being “triggered,” it’s just a quasi-adult version of the playground bully’s jeer: “What are
you going to do, cry?” Anyone who has ever been bullied knows how important it is, at
that moment, to choke back tears. In truth, there are few bigger snowflakes than the
stars of MAGA world. The Trumpist pundit Dan Bongino is currently suing The Daily
Beast for $15 million, saying it inflicted “emotional distress and trauma, insult,
anguish,” for writing that NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now defunct online
media arm, had “dropped” him when the show he hosted ended. Still, a movement
fueled by sadism will delight in admissions that it has caused pain.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic
candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and
withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that
despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t
let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and
expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit and
accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular
grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.