“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die
Levitsky’s quote is a reminder that the elected autocrat we have in the White House has spent the first two years of his term not in defending democracy but in dismantling it.
We still have courts that rule against Trump’s most egregious acts, reporters who accurately report his moves and hold him accountable, and an opposition political party poised to hand him defeat in the midterm elections now underway.
But collectively, it may not be enough to stop him from stealing the election through one corrupt mechanism or another.
Growing up, I was taught in school to respect the heroes who defeated the enemies overseas who sought to destroy our democracy, but I was taught very little about how to defeat an enemy within.
HEADLINES:
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