The erosion of democracy follows a predictable rhythm—one that echoes through literature and reverberates in our current moment. Today’s headlines blur into yesterday’s warnings, and the distance between fiction and reality shrinks with each news cycle.
Free-ish Today: The Illusion of Intact Liberty
We live in the “free-ish” moment—where rights exist on paper while practice tells a different story. Constitutional protections remain formally intact, yet their application becomes increasingly selective. Court decisions that once seemed foundational are suddenly “wrongly decided.” Independent institutions find their authority questioned not through legislative process, but through the steady drum of delegitimization.
In Traci Chees We Are Not Free, fourteen American teenagers discover that citizenship offers no protection when fear overrides law. Their internment wasn’t presented as tyranny—it was sold as necessity, wrapped in the language of national security. The camps weren’t called prisons; they were “relocation centers.” The language mattered because it obscured the reality: American citizens imprisoned without trial, without charges, without recourse.
Today’s parallel isn’t in camps, but in the systematic redefinition of democratic norms. When election results are preemptively declared fraudulent, when courts are dismissed as “rigged” before cases are heard, when the peaceful transfer of power becomes conditional—we’re living in Chee’s world of euphemism and erosion.
Fee’d Tomorrow: Democracy as Transaction
The commodification phase arrives when civic participation requires payment—not in dollars, necessarily, but in loyalty tests and ideological conformity. Protest becomes “domestic terrorism.” Journalism becomes “fake news” or “enemy of the people.” Justice depends not on law but on political allegiance.
Orwell understood this transactional corruption. In 1984, Winston Smith’s job is literally rewriting history, making the past conform to present needs. The Party doesn’t just control information—it retroactively creates truth. “We have always been at war with Eastasia” becomes fact not through evidence, but through repetition and enforcement.
Contemporary America hasn’t reached Orwell’s totalitarian extreme, but the mechanisms are visible across administrations and institutions. When loyalty to party supersedes loyalty to constitution, when institutional independence becomes a liability rather than a virtue, when competing versions of truth emerge from the same set of facts—we’re watching the transaction unfold.
The most insidious aspect of this commodification is how it makes resistance expensive. Speaking truth costs careers. Maintaining professional standards risks retaliation. Upholding democratic norms becomes an act of personal sacrifice rather than civic duty.
Forgotten Forever: When History Becomes Marketing
The final stage transforms democratic struggle into nostalgic commodity. The real work of democracy—messy compromise, institutional respect, shared commitment to truth—gets replaced by performative patriotism and selective historical memory.
Chee’s teenagers understand something their elders forgot: democracy requires active defense, not passive assumption. Their resistance isn’t dramatic—it’s in refusing to internalize shame, maintaining dignity under dehumanizing conditions, and preserving community bonds despite systematic attempts to break them. Their quiet defiance preserves something essential that official channels have abandoned.
Similarly, Orwell’s Winston finds rebellion not in grand gestures but in private thoughts, in the simple insistence that two plus two equals four regardless of what the Party declares. Truth becomes revolutionary when lies become institutional.
The Contemporary Echo
These literary warnings resonate because they illuminate recurring patterns in democratic societies under stress. When electoral legitimacy becomes conditional—accepted when favorable, questioned when not—we’re seeing Orwell’s doublethink in practice. When citizens are simultaneously told that institutions are both supremely trustworthy and deeply corrupt, depending on the outcome, we’re living in the space between “free-ish” and “fee’d.”
When agencies are restructured based on ideology rather than expertise, when career professionals face political litmus tests, when inconvenient data disappears from public view—these aren’t unique to any single administration. They represent systemic vulnerabilities that different political forces exploit in different ways.
The danger isn’t a dramatic coup from any particular direction—it’s the gradual normalization of institutional breakdown across the political spectrum. Each boundary crossed becomes the new baseline. Each norm violated creates precedent for future violations, regardless of which party holds power.
Resistance in the Margins
Both Chee and Orwell offer models for resistance that don’t require heroic gestures. Chee’s characters survive by maintaining human connections and refusing to accept their captors’ definition of their worth. Orwell’s Winston fails ultimately, but his failure illuminates the machinery of oppression and the cost of compliance.
Today’s resistance might look like: election officials who count votes accurately despite pressure; journalists who report facts despite intimidation; judges who apply law despite political consequences; citizens who vote despite suppression efforts; career professionals who maintain standards despite retaliation.
These aren’t dramatic acts—they’re the mundane work of preserving democratic space in an era when such preservation has become politically fraught.
The Choice Before Us
Democracy’s survival doesn’t depend on grand declarations or perfect leaders. It depends on millions of small decisions to choose institutional integrity over personal advantage, shared truth over comfortable lies, inclusive democracy over exclusive nationalism.
The books warn us, but they also guide us. We are not yet imprisoned like Chee’s teenagers or brainwashed like Orwell’s citizens. We still have choices—but the window for exercising them without significant cost may be closing.
The refrain continues: Free-ish today, fee’d tomorrow, forgotten forever. The question is whether we’ll recognize the melody before the song ends.