Patrick Comerford
It was a full month yesterday since Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States on 20 January 2025. Throughout the day yesterday, I found it bewildering, a living nightmare, to think back on what has happened not just in the US but throughout the world in the short space of that single month.
Dictators have been appeased, invaders have been rewarded, whole nations have been threatened, democratic leaders have been berated, besmirched and belittled, dictators have been brought in from the cold, public servants are demeaned and dismissed, allies are betrayed, books are banned, geographic truth has been hijacked, a free press has been shackled or banned from the White House, racism is rising, laws are promulgated by diktat while the elected members of Senate and Congress are bypassed and ignored or sit on their hands, the greedy and the super-wealthy have found their rewards on earth and needy and the poor have been seen empty away.
And it simply gets worse with each passing day, worse and worse and worse … Good has been decreed bad, the evil is being hailed as good, the very moral fibre of ethical public behaviour has been smothered to death.
It is more than eight years since the night of 8 November 2016, when I sat up all night in an hotel in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter in Kraków, watching in disbelief when Donald Trump was elected the US president the first time round. I had spent that day visiting many of the synagogues and the remaining Jewish cemeteries in Kazimierz and had spent the previous day in Auschwitz.
I cannot believe now, and I could not believe then, what was happening in the USA. I fall back once again on the dark humour that journalists understand: in another country pretending to be a democracy, where the winning candidate becomes the dictator, they would be waiting for an American invasion to restore democracy.
Leonard Cohen died on 7 November 2016, the day I was visiting Auschwitz and the day before Trump was first elected President. We can never really guess how the great Canadian poet and songwriter might have responded to the election of Trump, first or second time round, but I still find wisdom in the lyrics of his song ‘Democracy’:
It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the USA.
Over the past month, since Trump’s second inauguration, I can identify with Cohen’s expression that
… … the feel
that this ain’t exactly real
or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
and after years of a rising tide of
… the wars against disorder
… the sirens night and day
… the fires of the homeless
… the ashes of the gay …
I wonder this Friday night whether I can share an longer in Leonard Cohen’s hope that ‘Democracy is coming to the USA’?
Leonard Cohen was Canadian, yet lived most of his working life in the US. He cared about America, but was horrified and revolted by what was happening to it. At a time when the USA is in more danger of foundering than ever before, Cohen’s words are the perfect anthem for these times:
Sail on, sail on
oh mighty ship of State,
to the shores of need
past the reefs of greed
through the squalls of hate.
As the world watches helplessly at the capricious pronouncements and vulgar rantings of a bigoted bully with fascist tendencies and the ‘best buddy’ who gives fascist salutes, speaks to far-right rallies in Germany andoccupies pride of place in the Oval Office, I think too of the many lines Leonard Cohen cut out of this song, and how relevant they are at this time – lines such as ‘Concentration camp behind a smile’, or,
Who really gets to profit
and who really gets to pay?
Who really rides the slavery ship
right into Charleston Bay?
Over three decades after he completed this song in 1992, Leonard Cohen continues to speak to these times as though he were writing today.
‘Democracy’ is the sixth of nine tracks on The Future, the ninth studio album by Leonard Cohen, released on 24 November 1992. Almost an hour in length, it was his longest album at the time.
Both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1992 Los Angeles riots took place while Cohen was writing and recording the album, expressing his sense of the world’s turbulence. The album was recorded with a large cast of musicians and engineers in several studios. It built on the success of his previous album, I’m Your Man, and sold a quarter of a million copies in the US, which until then had not been enthusiastic about Cohen’s albums.
In an interview with Paul Zollo in Songwriters on Songwriting, Leonard Cohen spoke at length about ‘Democracy.’ He admitted that he wrote 60 verses for the song. As he watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, he recalled, ‘everyone was saying democracy is coming to the east.’ But he thought to himself, ‘I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.’
‘But then I asked myself, “Where is democracy really coming?” And it was the USA … So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn’t going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon. So it was these world events that occasioned the song. And also the love of America. Because I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song.
‘It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy.’
According to Ira Nadel’s book Various Positions (1996), the title track, ‘The Future,’ was originally called ‘If You Could See What’s Coming Next.’ I cannot predict the future, I cannot see what is coming next. But for the past month I have been wondering whether the USA is ‘the real laboratory of democracy’ or whether we are watching the end of democracy in the US, perhaps even the beginning of the end of the USA.
In ‘Democracy’, Leonard Cohen sings:
It’s coming through a hole in the air
From those nights in Tiananmen Square
It’s coming from the feel
That this ain’t exactly real
Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
From the wars against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gay
Democracy is coming to the USA
It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It's coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay,
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming to the USA
It’s coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the USA
Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on
It’s coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst
It’s here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst
It’s here the family’s broken
And it’s here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the USA
It’s coming from the women and the men
O baby, we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
The river’s going to weep,
And the mountain’s going to shout Amen
It’s coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the USA
Sail on, sail on
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That Time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Democracy lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
