Crisis in American Democracy?

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

4 people died after pro-Trump rioters breached the US Capitol yesterday, watched with horror around the world. Since November Trump and his allies have been attacking the presidential election results in the courts and the media relentlessly. After the Capitol was secured against the insurrection, Congress reconvened late last night to certify the electoral college vote count. Joining the rioters in their treasonous act, 6 GOP senators and 121 GOP House members voted to reject Arizona's result.

The sound and the fury can easily create a sense of panic that American democracy is in a crisis. However, the sense of crisis is uncalled for, as professor of journalism and political science Peter Beinart explains. Beinart points out that the Republicans are not doing something new. They're merely giving a new form to an old idea that animated the framing of the Constitution: the idea that "only some Americans deserve to vote." If the present trouble is considered a crisis, then American democracy has been in crisis since its birth.

A better understanding of the American past undergirds a personal decison in this week's essay "Saying Goodbye to America," published on SP Blog. Essayist Jonathan Chan was born in Manhattan of a Chinese Malaysian father and a South Korean mother. The couple were married in St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue. Growing up in Singapore, Chan would visit his paternal grandparents in Houston, Texas, regularly. Such links to the US gave Chan a special pride in being American until his study of the country's history and literature persuades him to give up his American citizenship in favor of retaining his Singaporean one. The story of Singapore-US immigration is usually one-directional, from east to west. More rarely told is the story of the reverse direction.

We hope you will join us for the first Second Saturdays gathering of the year, taking place this Saturday. Gregory Pardlo and Grace Talusan are reading from their new memoirs. See details below. RSVP Jee at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org for the Zoom link.

This year Singapore Unbound will not hearken to the dramatic rhetoric of crisis, and the longed-for afterwards of relief. Instead, we will continue to deepen our understanding of the past and present, and endeavor to meet the understanding with deeper presentations of literature and the arts. We hope you will join us in our endeavors.

Jee Leong Koh
January 7, 2020

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