E.J. Dionne writes that the United States is slouching toward autocracy. We like to think that autocracy arrives will a military coup. However,
in their book, “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: “How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often, the assault on democracy begins slowly. … The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”
The baby steps began quite awhile ago:
Long before Trump ran for office, Republicans were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their purposes, as Michael Tomasky argued last week in the Daily Beast. Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia.
The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with former FBI director James Comey; Trump’s willingness, even eagerness, to lie; his effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family.
This not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career ending.
On the eve of the Second World War, William Butler Yeats warned of the "rough beast" which was "[slouching] toward Bethlehem to be born." And he lamented the fact that while "the best [lacked] all conviction, the worst [were] filled with passionate intensity."
We've been here before.
Image: The Irish Times
4 comments:
The normalization of mendacity and corruption that both the Republicans and Trump have raised to a high art is the greatest threat we face today, in that, like any other contagion, it is rapidly spreading, Owen.
That's precisely the problem, Lorne. Corruption has gone viral.
America ceased functioning as a liberal democracy many years ago. Democracy was effectively killed off with the ascendancy of America's "bought and paid for" Congress. Legislative capture was followed by regulatory capture, a process that was brought to fruition under Bush/Cheney. Even the US Supreme Court has been politically captured.
I invariably point to the 2014 paper published by Princeton that documents how the US federal government now serves powerful private interests over the public interest whenever the two conflict. Gerrymandering, voter suppression and dark money are American democracy's concrete overshoes. As democracy sank to the bottom the American people didn't even blink.
They watched a the ship slowly sank, Mound. Some of them cheered.
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