By TEE NGUGI

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On January 3, the new United States Congress convened. The US prides itself in being a paragon of democracy. This boast is not without substance. The presidency, the Supreme Court and Congress are co-equal institutions, each with substantial powers to check the other. There is the Bill of Rights that guarantees individual rights and freedoms.

These institutional, constitutional and statuary safeguards make the country relatively safe for democracy. And yet a growing ideological extremism at both political and society levels is threatening American democracy. In the past two decades, American society has become cripplingly polarised.

On one side, you have the Right Wing vision of America. This side thinks that liberal ideas and increasing multiculturalism threaten core values and ideas upon which America was founded. These foundational values and ideas, they say, are informed by an Anglo-Saxon heritage, Christianity and Hellenic intellectual traditions. They claim that other cultures, races and religions, which are increasingly a part of mainstream American society and politics, are diluting a “pure core American ethic.”

When society changes, those who feel threatened begin to propagate myths of a wonderful past, now sadly being lost. We have so much of that myth creation even here in Africa. For instance, at the onset of colonialism, when a new worldview began to challenge a traditional world, fears about what would befall the society were propagated.

This epic struggle between the new and the traditional is famously captured in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Okonkwo, the tragic hero of the novel, was unable to accept the changing times. He went on to mount a futile and ridiculous struggle against the emerging society and its values.

America has never had a pure religious, racial or cultural core ethic. It was conceived as a country of many religions, races and cultures, living together under the banner of democracy and the “pursuit of happiness.”

American civilisation has been fashioned by immigrants from all over the world. But the Christian Right, now joined by the Republican Party, is fearful of an increasingly more culturally diverse America. So they create myths about a puritan moral past and warn of an apocalyptic end to American civilisation. Like Okonkwo, they are trying to mount futile and ridiculous struggles against the changing times. Their latest absurdity was the attempt to take control of Congress on January 6, 2021.

There is also extremist thunder from the Left. This side does not tolerate ideas that are not wholly in agreement with theirs. Anyone who even slightly disagrees with their view is “cancelled,” ridiculed, called a racist or sellout, and other choice insults. This polarisation undermines national harmony and democracy. Citizens of a country do not have to always agree. But they should be able to debate and agree on reasonable proposals. When a society loses “reasonableness” and is instead driven by inflamed passions, it invites doom upon itself.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.