Authoritarianism Adjacent

As far back as the very earliest weeks of this blog, back in the summer of 2017, I wrote about what strikes me as the greatest and most insidious threat to our representative democracy: the slow, steady Republican attempt to undermine its fundamental institutions and entrench permanent right wing control in defiance of the public will.

At the time, I described this effort as a slow motion coup d’etat. (The Elephant in the Room: Trojan Trump and the Invisible Coup — July 12, 2017.) Since then, Trump has taken to using the word “coup” frequently (I don’t want to say “liberally”) to describe what he says is a sore loser effort by “angry Democrats” to undermine and even end his presidency — principally, through the “witchhunt” of the Mueller probe, oversight by Congress, scrutiny by the free press, and other mechanisms that the rest of us without delusions of imperial grandeur understand are the normal functions of a working democracy. As a result, the term “coup” has lost its currency; I certainly don’t want to lower my argument to a false equivalence by laying claim to the same terminology.

But the point remains.

Of course, the GOP scoffs at the very idea. Perish the thought! Do you expect them to do any less? But the evidence speaks for itself, and has been well-catalogued in these pages, among numerous other places. It was well summarized this week…