Yes, democracy looks nice as it dies

But we must resist the seduction to stop thinking.

Jasmine Mooney, who was kidnapped and jailed by ICE last month

The catastrophe in America is happening quietly, too quietly, a softly falling fog.

“In the real world, the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet,” wrote my friend Andrew Marantz this week in The New Yorker, alluding to Carl Sandburg’s short lyric, “Fog.”

I hope the cataclysm, like Sandburg’s feline fog, “sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.” But the cataclysm has certainly not moved on yet. It could be here on silent haunches. But we’ve barely noticed yet.

The fog is really the overcast mental states, the would-be brain fog, of those of us who keep exhaustedly taking stock. This you will recognize, even if you aren’t ready to say democracy’s done for. Has it happened? What’s “it”? How would I even know? Should I leave, fight, keep my head down?

What Andrew calls “the lag between intellectual acknowledgment and emotional acceptance” of democracy’s demise—a lag many of us seem to be in—can be long, sad, uncanny.

Hungarian economist Péter Krekó told Andrew: “The way they do it here [in Hungary], and the way they are starting to do it in [the U.S.] as well, they don’t need to use too much open violence against us. . .The new way is cheaper, easier, looks nicer on TV.”

So what do we do?