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Leonard Cohen, poet laureate of Canada’s 1960s, offered a closing anthem to the twentieth century in his 1992 lament “Democracy.” In an earlier year of revolt, 1968, Cohen had refused his country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General’s Award. “The world is a callous place,” he reportedly said, “and he would take no gift from it.” He would later be the accepting recipient of many honours, including the Order of Canada.
Two decades later, confronted with the changing global landscape, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the crumbling Soviet Union, Cohen reflected on how and where democracy might be realized. Now a celebrated songwriter, Cohen looked to the United States, where his music was produced and marketed for world-wide audiences. He saw the “sorrow in the street” of working-class grievance; “the holy places where the races meet” that were never far removed from white supremacy; the gender difference scratched into human relationships expressed in “the homicidal bitchin’/that goes down in every kitchen/to determine who will serve and who will eat”; and the deserts created domestically and internationally by an America confident in its imperial dominance. Yet for all of this, 1992 seemed a bridge to a better future. “Democracy,” yet to be realized, “is coming to the U.S.A.” Cohen insisted. Amidst turmoil, tension, and recognition of revolt’s righteousness, Cohen was nonetheless hopeful.
So, too, were others, albeit of a different bent. Proclamations of “the end of history” came from ideologues of the right and postmodernists of the ostensible left. Capitalism, finally victorious over its century-and-a-half nemesis – actually existing, and undeniably deficient, socialism – promised boundless prosperity and expansive profits for those pulling the now unrivalled levers of possessive individualism. Windows of political and economic opportunity opened widely, offering a luxuriating vision of a new world order.