The Trump Regime: making America a banana republic. Raise your hand if you didn't know this is where we would go if we put power in the hands of Donald Trump. Yeah, millions of hands I'm sure. Time to wake up, though. Right? Are we waking up yet? Not likely I reckon.
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People may think of authoritarian nations in Cold War terms, as states with bombastic leaders who grant themselves extravagant titles and weigh their chests down with meaningless medals. These are nations without legislatures, without courts, with populations cowed by armies of secret police.
This is not how many authoritarian nations work today. Most have elections, legislatures, courts; they possess all the trappings of democracy. In fact, most deny that they are authoritarian at all. “Few contemporary dictatorships admit that they are just that,” writes the scholar Milan Svolik in
The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. “If we were to trust dictators’ declarations about their regimes, most of them would be democracies.”
But the democratic institutions that authoritarian nations retain are largely vestigial or have little power to check the executive, either because they are under regime control, or because they are cowed or co-opted into submission.....
On thursday, february 6, millions of Americans went about their lives as they would have any other day. They came home from overnight shifts, took the bus to work, made lunch for their children, cursed the traffic on their commute, or went out for a drink with friends. Yet the nation they live in may have been fundamentally changed the day before.
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the American imagination of catastrophe has been limited to sudden, shocking events, the kind that shatter a sunny day in a storm of blood. That has left Americans unprepared for a different kind of catastrophe, the kind that spreads slowly and does not abruptly announce itself. For that reason, for most Americans, that Thursday morning felt like any other. But it was not—the Senate acquittal marked the beginning of a fundamental transition of the United States from a democracy, however flawed, toward authoritarianization. It was, in short, the end of the Trump administration, and the first day of the would-be Trump Regime.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/trump-regime/606682/