America has a lot to lose. As I’ve learned, you don’t always have as much time as you think.

I didn’t need cancer to appreciate the grave threat to democracy America now faces. But the diagnosis did change my perspective.

The Republican Party’s slide into extremism — gradually and then suddenly, in the words of an Ernest Hemingway character — has been threaded throughout my four decades of political reporting for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNBC, and CNN. The party’s increasing reliance on plutocrats for money and blue-collar whites for votes produced an incoherent coalition that, by the era of Donald Trump, left a single imperative: power at any cost.

That was a fact of life when Joe Biden’s administration began in the shadow of the Jan. 6 insurrection. But it largely remained in the background as the new president grappled with the COVID pandemic, economic recovery, and foreign policy challenges.

From the start, Biden declared that America was engaged in a global struggle pitting democratic systems against autocratic ones. In his second year, Biden delivered a major speech warning of the threat to democracy at home. In his third, I interviewed him on that subject. The political world mostly yawned.

A few weeks after the interview, however, something dramatic happened — to me.

https://zeteo.com/p/how-cancer-changed-my-perspective