Mark it down in your diary that in the first month of 2019 we all saw with our own eyes that the two leading democratic governments in the world — the United States and the United Kingdom — were in the thrall of an unprecedented seizure, unable to act, sliding toward irrevocable division, chaos and ruin. A third democracy — France — was spiraling through the smoke of widespread violence and nascent rebellion toward a very hard landing indeed. And there were many others, such as Venezuela, disintegrating before our eyes.

The government of the United States has been hamstrung by a partial shutdown that has lasted longer than any other such political gambit in history. (The Donald is fond of saying he is doing something “for the first time in history,” but for him all history begins with him — for him, this is the year 72 A.D., or “after Donald.”) But really, never in the history of our republic has the government been crippled for so long, never so many people deprived of their livelihood, over a policy dispute that is supposed to be settled by voting.

At issue is whether to build, at enormous expense and disruption, a 30-foot-high wall to stop an inflow of criminals, terrorists and drugs that, all reliable sources say, to the extent they exist at all are arriving by airplane. The legislative and executive branches of government can’t agree on what to do, so they are doing nothing at all except calling each other names and watching the waves of misery ripple outward from the initial million people to roll over everyone they know.

The government of the United Kingdom has been playing tiddlywinks for two years since “the people” — goaded by populists with shrieking dog-whistles of hatred for migrants fleeing North Africa for sanctuary in Europe — stampeded into a referendum demanding their country leave the European Union. Now this Brexit is an extremely complex proposition, involving every single transaction and personal movement across any European border. Having come up with a sort of a plan to deal with it all, with two months to go, the government was just humiliated to see its plan defeated by a greater margin than any government proposal has ever been rejected in the history of England (which is a lot longer than the history of our republic, and predates The Donald by several millennia).

It is more than remarkable that two of the world’s preeminent democracies are locked up at the same time. And it is tempting to blame a new birth of racism, directed against the migrants from Africa on the one hand and Mexico on the other. But the forces at play here are far larger and more intractable than racism, which is a symptom of the illness, not the illness itself.

The democracies are sick because they have poisoned themselves, especially since the 1980s and the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, with a deranged love of money and profit for the few, combined with increasing contempt for ordinary people and the things that permit ordinary people to thrive — things such as health care, education, decent wages and a reasonable hope for a better future. We can quote all the bright government propaganda we can find, and Lord knows there’s plenty of it available, but it cannot quench the knowledge eating at our gut — the certainty that ordinary people are not thriving, they are losing ground. And among people losing ground, racism comes easy.

The democracies are dying of self-inflicted wounds, greed being the worst, but there are others. The migrations that are destabilizing Europe and threatening North America have their origins in global climate change, which is depriving ever larger swaths of the planet of its ability to grow food. This is especially true in Africa, the Middle East, western Asia and Central America. The tide of humanity with starvation behind it and desperate hope in front of it, has hardly begun. And global climate change, we now know, is another self-inflicted wound, and not just for democracies.

Ignorance, in this age of information-technology wonders, is a self inflicted wound. Sloth, the unwillingness to exert oneself, even to vote, to change things for the better, blaming one’s inertia on a facile cynicism — that’s a self-inflicted wound.

Democracies were supposed to be better than this, but here we are, at the beginning of 2019, and there they are, paralyzed, unable to speak let alone act, dying the death of a thousand cuts. America has ever been the “last, best hope of earth.” To whom can it turn now for help?