As a lifetime observer of American society and history, just now I am witnessing an astonishing historical event no human being has ever seen before: a nation voluntarily abandoning its democracy to welcome autocracy (very possibly fascism). On our next Fourth of July, we may be celebrating “Our Great Leader Day,” cooking MAGA-hotdogs and drinking Proud Boys beer.

Historically, democracy has never been given up by its own citizens before, only conquered, which is restored to its rightful owner when history recovers its sanity and equilibrium. But, when democracy is willingly given up, it simply means its next stage —post-democratic — is ready to enter. Thus gone, there will be no second coming for American democracy.

Although I am devastated, I am also transfixed with fascination to witness the real-time decline and fall of a great empire, almost like witnessing the Roman Empire’s last days in person. After two centuries of being a world model for freedom and justice for all, the most daring human experiment ever conducted will write its own obituary: “RIP Failed Experiment.”

How is such a national debacle possible? It was in the very blueprint that built America, the world’s first “pure” democracy, which was already fated to crumble when time was ripe; and the time is now. The American experiment wanted to test whether a nation dedicated to an unbridled pursuit of individual freedom could still summon enough collective discipline to sustain its national enterprise. But no lasting nationhood should have been designed this way. Just now, the experiment has proved that if you are free to choose anything you desire, you are likely to choose to be free from each other, and that’s not how nations endure or their citizens behave.

Democracy, a transient system coming between always-more-stable feudalism and autocracy, consists of a delicate balance between individual and society. There, a functioning democracy demands a balance between the two forces — you and your society. It exists precariously even when these two forces are in reasonable parity. Of all existing democracies, only America’s democracy has endured in such (almost) perfect balance, thanks to its spaciousness and generous economy. Other nations, lacking America’s natural bounties, and taking democracy not as obsessively or purely as Americans, must rely on tradition and tribal solidarity to maintain their necessary and practical stability.

Indeed, democracy in America has been special, as it was created as the first-born to the Enlightenment parentage. With the vast open landmass that greeted them, Americans had the luxury of designing their new nation entirely on the basis of reasoning calculus and individual choice. Such a national creed came naturally to a frontier nation where you were on your own, with no help from the government.

This commitment to individual freedom has reached its zenith in our generation. Now, in our over-driven consumer capitalism today, “freedom of choice” is demanding a pound of flesh from us with its very logic of freely made choice: For your “best” individual choice foreordains the “worst” for all others as free choice always leads to selfish choice. In free choice, your dream is always everybody else’s nightmare. 

As voters and consumers, we are the most selfishly pampered human beings who have ever walked the earth. Our politicians and corporations, who know where our weakness lies, compete to give their voters and consumers “whatever they want!” making us all uppity, selfish and stupid. Smart campaign managers and advertisers know how to handle us delicately.

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Our famous selfishness has finally overtaken our equally famous democracy. In November, we will officially crown autocracy or fascism — whatever the new system we may choose — as our permanent successor to the abandoned democracy. We’ve been playing with fools’ freedom and now we are about to make our last fools’ decision.

America’s historical self-delusion is finally broken: As Americans, we don’t like one another, never have. An artificially created society, without tribal bond or shared souls, eventually devours itself by its own calculus. A convenient proximity of homeowners doesn’t create a real neighborhood; nor does a convergence of individual benefit-seekers make a true nationhood. A people, spoiled to the core with decades of over-consumption, would not fight and sacrifice to protect their democracy together.

Over four decades ago when I was an upstart young scholar, I made my grand entry into American historiography, predicting the fall of American democracy in my book, “The Dead End.” TIME magazine agreed, calling my prognosis America’s “national death wish.” This is how TIME’s editorial (June 9, 1980) summed up my voice-in-the-wilderness prophesy from the book: “Americans have used their immense endowment of natural wealth to buy the individual out of his social responsibilities. Now they can no longer afford the price: To go on behaving as if they could … amounts almost to a national death wish.”

It has taken us only two generations to make America’s national death wish come true.

Sharing no blood ties or subconscious origins with each other, with no history together, we are all strangers who cannot relate. Watching ballgames together or being in the consumer index aggregate is not enough to sustain the collective and moral rigors of a living democracy.

In case you wonder how we ever fought so heroically and won World War II, remember that, without Pearl Harbor in the nick of time, we would be speaking German in a “Unified Reich.” Still, it galls me to think that, as we speed toward fascism ourselves, the two fascist nations we defeated are now thriving democracies.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.