Piggy’s American Adventure

A few weeks ago, apropos of Republican efforts to subvert fair elections in this country, I wrote in these pages about the rising danger of autocracy in the United States.

File that under “dog bites man.” That has been a running theme in this blog for the entire four years of its existence.

And it is not merely the danger itself but its source on which I am fond of harping, which is to say: the extent to which tens of millions of Americans wholly support the authoritarian movement that is Trumpism, and how that strain in the national DNA — far more than one gaseous, orange-hued game show host-cum-tyrant manqué — represents the greatest threat to what we like to think of as “America.”

By now it should be painfully clear that Trump and Trumpism would not have risen without the support of this swath of our countrymen: a minority, to be sure, but large enough to do serious damage. And it is that same dangerous minority that is now enabling the Republican Party to carry out its wantonly anti-democratic attempt to disenfranchise millions of Americans and install itself in permanent power in defiance of the will of the majority and of basic principles of representative government.

But in a recent piece in The New Yorker called “What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy” (re-printed from its original publication…