Extreme Danger to our Democracy

It can’t happen here.  But it has.

This is a post about two Sinclairs.  The first is Sinclair Lewis.  In 1935, this Sinclair wrote a landmark satire, It Can’t Happen Here.  Goodreads describes the book thusly, “ . . . It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, rampant promiscuity, crime, and a liberal press.”

The second Sinclair is the Sinclair Broadcast Group.  In a chilling example of authoritarian group-speak, a deadspin.com story broke big over the April 1^st weekend.  The title says it all, “How America's Largest Local TV Owner Turned Its News Anchors Into Soldiers In Trump's War On The Media”.  It has since been picked up and run just about everywhere.  We could only hope this was some kind of cruel April Fool’s day joke.  It was no joke.  And apparently, we are the fools, for letting it get this bad.

Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here was fiction.  It wasn’t supposed to be able to happen.  America with her strict legislative safeguards and passion for liberal democracy is a force the world has relied on to be the  stalwart defender against the dark forces of authoritarianism.  No more.  Looking back from where we stand today, Lewis’ work now seems like more prophesy than prose.  He more clearly envisioned a path that America might take if just the right conditions coalesced at just the right time.   And they have.

It was bad enough to watch Fox News transform itself into an outright, unapologetic mouthpiece, a Baghdad Bob, for Trump.  We could handle that.  But it is truly sickening to watch a chorus ofnews anchors from across the powerful Sinclair empire, stacked in a gridresembling Hollywood Squares on steroids,  espouse, in audio and visual lockstep, their allegedconcern for honesty in media.  Here are some of the carefully scripted highlights:

“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.”

“Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias.”

“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

The most dangerous thing to our democracy is our current president and a Republican party willing to be taken down the sinister road that Sinclair Lewis warned us about.   Sinclair Broadcasting is, for reasons obvious and perhaps not so obvious, making their on-air journalists toe the Trump FAKE NEWS line to alienate American’s from the 1^st Amendment itself, all the while wrapped up in it.  How ironic is that?  The Fuhrer was pleased and showered Sinclair Broadcasting with praise. 

With each passing week, day and hour, the Trump presidency is marching American down a road that is the antithesis of greatness and threatens the core of our values and our hard-won stature on the world stage.  That an influential media company is so easily able to curry favor with a president steeped in corruption and self-interest is, to use the words of Sinclair Broadasting itself, extremely dangerous to our democracy.