Democracy needs …?

Democracy needs our rage and our courage.

The impending midterm elections are a chance for Americans to take their country back. To quote our hideous president, “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore.”

Only the oblivious and indifferent fail to see this historic challenge. What does it take to alert and awaken those who barely pay attention, who think this is just another round of typical politics? It isn’t.

We’re in the midst of a coup worthy of a Shakespearean drama told by the Marx Brothers. Murders abound. From JFK and his brother to the Oklahoma City bombing to 9-11 to Gaza to Charlie Kirk – we are all vulnerable to fanatics out to take over. Largely, they have.

Not only have those involved in attacking our Capitol been pardoned, but some have also been hired by our Department of Justice. That department and our FBI no longer monitor right-wing domestic terrorists; they instead fire their own investigators and hound judges. True to the tactic of “attacking with defensiveness,” they accuse decent judges, lawyers, congresspeople, television networks, and comedians of treason even as they engage in it.

Halloween is supposed to be fun and scary, not civilizational scary. Could the Epstein Files contain facts so despicable that wars could be started rather than stories be revealed? Epstein regularly gathered damning photos of the world’s elite – a treasure trove of blackmailable scandals. Could Israel and Russia have documents and videos on Trump far more offensive than mere pee tapes? Could Israel and Russia have ambitions for world domination? Could Gaza and a war on Iran be twisted into a God-on-our-side new Bible story?

We’re told affordability is a made-up word. We’re told the economy is doing well. Well, it is for these guys.

Trump more than quadrupled his wealth in 2024, by $ 2.2 billion. (That mere .2 in those figures equals two hundred million dollars; that’s on top of the two thousand million dollars in 2026 alone that Trump has “earned.”) His appointed boss of DOGE, Elon Musk, had his income increase by over $400 billion in 2026. He is now a trillionaire.

(I’d bet most Americans don’t know how many millions are in a billion and how many billions are in a trillion. The answers are: a thousand millions make a billion, and a thousand billions make a trillion. So his donation of $446 million to his America PAC to exercise his free “speech” in influencing our elections was less than half of one of the thousand billions of dollars in his bank.)

How many annoying political ads this season did he finance? How loud would your free-speech voice have to be to match his? What does our Supreme Court care about this imbalance? The answer is that they like it. They’ve preemptively allowed our president to bend and break laws. Trump would be glad to cheer on an evil robot who warns, “I’ll be back.”)

It isn’t just the Gilded Age economy that worries me. It is the amorality that generates and excuses it. Musk likes Ayn Rand’s (Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) Objectivism. The hero makes his own happiness the moral purpose of his life. Empathy is a weakness. Machiavelli and Orwell have become guidebooks. This turns the iconic satire of the 1987 movie Wall Street on its head: “Greed is good.”

If Trump is embarrassed by losing so publicly in these impending midterm elections, he could take revenge on us and the world. He and Netanyahu could “defend Western values” (or some similarly shallow excuse) to wage more war on Iran. We could no more stop him than the trees on the D.C. golf course and at the border with Mexico could prevent their fall. It would stimulate the arms industry, reinforcing their assertion that the economy is doing well.

Okay, enough of my familiar ranting. I’ve often had objections to the Republican and Democratic agendas and tactics. Our predicament is far more serious and ominous than mere politics. The levers of media and economics are being pulled to trick and defeat us. Our inherent concern for e pluribus unum and our vulnerable planet is at stake.

Courage is made up of heart and anger. Americans have sometimes surprised me by voting sensibly despite well-funded campaigns to confuse them. Vote? Yes, but our country, our civilization, and our planet will need vision, ingenuity, and persistence as never before.