Prospects for Democracy

There's been much discussion in traditional and social media for the potential that democracy may fail in the 2022-24 time frame. Minority rule may be locked in at the federal level for decades after that. (Fifty-nine million Americans in six states already live under minority rule at the state government level due to partisan gerrymandering.)

Because of these concerns, I've been reading books and articles and listening to podcasts on the topic. I put this website together to organize my thoughts, and hopefully to alert other people to the dangers we're facing. On this website, I have summarized:

• background on democracy.
• evidence that democracy in the U.S. is at very high risk of failing.
• The threat is from the whole Republican party, not just Trump.

My plan is to continue this work and also summarize:

• how we got to this point.
• what to expect if democracy fail.
• what we can do to save democracy.
• what we can do if democracy does fail.
• what a better federal government could look like.

I don't know exactly when I'll add the remaining material. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon, because if authoritarianism takes root in the U.S., it will be in place for the rest of our lives.

In case you don't have time to read everything, I will start each section with key takeaways.

If you have any feedback, please reach out to me on Twitter @snarton.

Before we start talking about the possible demise of American democracy, let's start with what it is.

If I had been asked for a definition of democracy before I started looking into this topic, I probably would have said something about voting for people to represent me in government, but I found out that there's more to it than that. I also found out that it's a recent and fragile form of government that's currently under threat around the world.

It's also an extraordinary form of government because it's the only way that we have discovered to manage the affairs of large groups of people while also allowing those people to maintain control of their own management.

If we lose our democracy, we'd then be under the control of whoever seizes power. You like your civil rights? Sorry. You think that the government should do something about inequality and climate change? Not likely. You want laws to be passed or operational decisions to be made in the best interest of the population? You'd better hope that these happen to align with the interests of the people in power.

As we'll talk about later, there are some groups of people who feel that they'd be better off with an authoritarian government: primarily white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and American oligarchs. Everyone else will be much worse off. If authoritarians were to take control of the government, it would probably take decades to reestablish democracy, so many people would spend the rest of their lives (and much of the lives of their children and grandchildren) under authoritarian control. Reclaiming democracy is typically violent.

Because of what's at stake, it's mystifying to me that more people aren't taking the risk of losing our democracy seriously.

Even though our species has existed for about 200,000 years, groups of humans larger than a tribe have lived together only since the Neolithic Revolution, about 12,000 years ago. Since then, almost everyone has lived under authoritarian rule, in which power is held by one or very few people. The first partial democracy, in which power was held by some citizens, didn't develop until 508 BCE in Athens. Other partial democracies existed sporadically until the short-lived Corsican Republic was established in 1755, implementing Enlightenment principles to form the first true democracy with universal suffrage. The first long-lived democracy was New Zealand in 1893.

Although the U.S. has considered itself a shining city on a hill for other countries to emulate, it wasn't a true democracy until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 allowed universal suffrage. We could even argue that the U.S. still has not achieved the status of a true democracy because the constitution allows for minority rule, such as via the electoral college and the senate.

The number of countries with democracies grew throughout the 20^th century. Currently, Freedom House says that 84 countries have free citizens. However, one of the weaknesses of democracy is that they can be taken advantage of by rulers who want to seize power. Democracy failed in over 30 countries in the last century, and in some of those it failed multiple times. We are currently in a period of global democratic backsliding. In the past two decades, the number and quality of democracies have declined and an increasing fraction of the world population lives in countries undergoing autocratization.

Democracy is an attempt to balance two conflicting goals. On one hand, we want citizens to be free to live their lives, pursue happiness, etc. On the other hand, we want to give a group of people the authority to make and enforce rules in order to maintain order within society, build infrastructure, organize our defenses, etc.

So how do we achieve this balance? Through three strategies:

1. Free and fair elections. Collectively choosing who governs us. All adults are able to vote. Elections that don't restrict or pre-determine who can be elected. All votes count equally.
2. Good governance. Both written laws and unwritten democratic norms ensure that elected officials are responsive to citizens' best interests. It doesn't do us any good to vote for representatives if they then turn around and are responsive to others for political, monetary, or safety reasons. We expect accountable elected officials. We expect that they hire qualified government employees and run the government in service to citizens. We impose terms (requiring that they stand for re-election periodically). Anti-corruption laws aim to support these goals. We deserve to be represented by respectable, trustworthy, ethical people.
3. Respect for citizens' rights. Making sure that the government treats citizens fairly and respects their rights and liberties, no matter how much power or wealth they have. We put limits on the powers of elected officials by separating powers into multiple branches of government, making officials adhere to laws and regulations, and defining our rights and liberties in the constitution.

The crux of the threat to our democracy is a difference in what people consider The United States to be at its core. People in favor of democracy view us as a "nation of laws." Laws are passed to support the three strategies of democracy described above, are intended to make us all equals from the government's standpoint, and apply the same to every citizen. In contrast, people in favor of authoritarianism define the country based on groupings of people. They feel that this is a nation of white, Christian, and/or wealthy people. Sure, everyone can have a vote as long as those groups retain their power, but if their power is slipping it's more important to maintain control than to maintain democracy. They would argue that this is simply maintaining the true essence of the country, and the fact that it's self-serving is of no importance.

Democracy describes a process, not a single type of government. Democracy can take many forms. In direct democracies, citizens participate in decision making directly. The first partial democracy, in Athenia, used a lottery system to randomly select representatives of citizens for purposes of decision making. Today, most democracies are a representative form, in which citizens vote for representatives to make policy decisions. (There are many sub-types of representative democracies. The U.S. is a "federal presidential republic.")

Given a choice between living in a democracy and authoritarian state, I'd pick democracy every time.

There's the obvious reasons: you have a say in how your government is run, your rights are protected, free and just society, etc. Authoritarian governments preserve power through repression. No thank you!

There are some follow-on benefits too:

• People who live in democracies are happier.
• People who live in democracies are healthier. A country transitioning to democracy increases life expectancy by 3% and decreases infant mortality by 94%. In contrast, autocratization leads to a decline in life expectancy.
• Democracies have better technology innovation.
• Democracies have better economic growth, resulting in 20% faster growth of GDP and protect against economic contraction.
• Democracies are less violent.
• Democracies provide more and better education. Studies have shown that democracies have 70% higher enrollment in secondary schools and spend 30% more on education.
• Democracies are more committed to climate change mitigation.

Our democracy may end within the next few years, with the U.S. under the control of an authoritarian regime.

What signs of this are we seeing? I'll discuss several overlapping areas of evidence:

• The 2021 Republican putsch to subvert the 2020 presidential vote.
• Republican plans to lock in minority rule starting with the 2024 election.
• Ongoing removal of the guardrails of democracy by Republicans.
• Republican affinity for authoritarian leaders of other countries.
• Republican use of fascist political tools.
• Academic and political experts say that Republicans are seeking authoritarianism.

A strong signal that Republicans want to overthrow democracy is that they already attempted it in 2021. Rather than being remorseful, the party has doubled down on claiming that their actions were justified.

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election against Trump, both in the electoral college (306 to 232) and popular vote (81.3 million to 74.2 million). Trump and his Republican followers said that the election was stolen, but these claims were debunked by other Republicans immediately after the election by Trump's own Homeland Security officials and through dozens of court cases, several months after the election by Trump's Attorney General, William Barr, and in a rigorous later analysis by eight prominent Republicans.

Because Trump was not willing to accept an election loss no matter the results, he led three successive (but not successful) attempts to remain in power.

Trump's first plan to steal the election was by asking the courts to give him the presidency by overturning the election. He thinks purely in terms of transactions: he installed many federal judges and the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, so he expected them to look on his challenges favorably despite having no evidence of wrongdoing. He filed and lost over 60 lawsuits after the 2020 election challenging election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in swing states. Malcom Nance [p. 21] writes

After Trump wasn't successful using the Supreme Court to steal the election, the second plan was to pressure Republican-led state legislatures in swing states to certify alternative slates of electors to the electoral college.

J. Michael Luttig explains:

The memo that John Eastman wrote for Trump says that the plan was for Pence to announce that "because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States [with alternate slates of electors], there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States." In that case, neither Biden nor Trump would have the requisite 270 votes to win the presidency. In this situation, the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution calls for each state delegation in the House of Representatives to cast one vote for president. Because there are more red states than blue states in the House (even though there are more Democratic representatives), Trump would have been declared the president.

Luttig continues:

We don't yet have the full story of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Information from the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack has provided us with a partial picture of what happened. What we do know indicates that:

Trump and his allies planned the attack ahead of Jan. 6.

• Significant planning and fundraising was conducted ahead of Jan. 6.
• Trump's Dec. 19, 2020 tweet saying that the protest "will be wild" was a signal to his base that violence was planned.
• Trump's associates such as Roger Stone and Michael Flynn were in close communication with right-wing militias in attendance including the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Proud Boys. The militias used the larger mob of Trump supporters as a screen, entering the Capitol only after the larger mob had broken in.
• It appears that Chuck Grassley (R-IA) knew what to expect. On Jan. 5, he said "if the Vice President isn't there and we don't expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate." Grassley was president pro tempore of the Senate at the time and would preside in the case of Pence's absence.

The insurrection was intended to be violent.

• The night before, pipe bombs were placed near the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters.
• Trump knew that the crowd that had assembled to watch him speak at the Ellipse was armed and encouraged them to march to the Capitol.

The likely goal of the insurrection was to disrupt the transfer of power.

• The insurrectionists were looking for the Electoral College ballots. If the ballots had been destroyed, the vote to certify the election would have been delayed.
• Despite pleading from Republican leadership, Trump refused to call off the attack, letting it continue for hours.
• During the attack, the Capitol Police requested backup from the National Guard, but the requests were denied. Trump's acting Defense Secretary had sent a memo two days prior requiring his personal authorization for deployment.
• Trump finally called off the insurrection after learning that Mike Pence had authorized the deployment of the National Guard, meaning that the insurrection had failed.
• The Oath Keepers militia had prepared a cache of weapons and supplies to last 30 days at a location near the Capitol, indicating that they expected a long-lasting seige of the building.
• Trump wanted to personally lead the mob from the Ellipse to the Capitol, in the manner of Mussolini leading his blackshirts to Rome.

It's also possible Trump had no post-insurrection plan. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes [p.252]:

The Capitol Police managed to keep congress members safe that day, and they reconvened later that night, certifying Biden as the president at 3:24 AM. But what if the violent attack had been successful? Trump's goal isn't (yet) known. Some personal speculation of what Trump may have had in mind:

• Congress can pass legislation to give themselves more time to certify the election after Jan. 6, but if neither the vote certification nor delaying legislation was passed in time, then Trump may have wanted to use this uncertainty to claim the presidency.
• If there was sufficient violence/death in the Capitol, he may have wanted to declare martial law, suspend the constitution, and declare himself president. Trump had discussed having the military "rerun" the presidential election in swing states, which would fit with this plan.
• The insurrectionists seemed to be hunting for both Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. If both had been killed, the next in the line of presidential succession would have been Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who no doubt would have been open to encouragement to let Trump remain president.

There was and remains widespread support among Republicans for the insurrection.

• Despite the violent attack only hours earlier, 147 Republican congress members still objected to the certification of the election results on Jan. 6, though they had no legitimate reason to do so.
• When Trump was impeached for leading the insurrection, 197 of 211 Republican representatives and 43 of 50 Republican senators voted against impeachment.
• As of June 2022, 61% of Republicans say that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a "legitimate protest."

The Republican's attempt to subvert the previous election through both legal and violent means is evidence of their willingness to impose authoritarianism in the future. As Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said,

Although their 2021 attempt to illegitimately hold presidential power failed, Republicans are actively working on how to hold onto power in 2024 and beyond, no matter the will of the American people.

Who decides the electors to the electoral college? The U.S. Constitution says that

Unlike the procedures for choosing Senators and Representatives, the constitution gives the federal government no role in setting procedures for choosing presidential electors. Early in American history, state legislatures chose the electors themselves in most states, and it wasn't until 1864 that all states chose electors by popular vote.

Could a state legislature choose to not hold a popular election directly appoint a slate of electors? Currently, presidential elections are written into state laws, but state government could change this law at any time. This is not a likely course of action, though, because citizens in every state expect to be able to vote for president.

Could a state government hold a popular election for president, but then appoint a slate of electors themselves? Probably yes in all states, and definitely yes in some states. This might be needed if, say, a natural disaster prevents the completion of an election or the counting of the ballots. A North Carolina statue, for example, says that if the counting of ballots isn't completed by a certain time, then its state General Assembly will appoint electors. This hasn't been tested yet in any with or without a relevant state law, but, it almost happened in Florida in 2000 due to hanging chads in Palm Beach County:

The potential for a state legislature to act due to a delay provides a mechanism by which a partisan secretary of state could throw an election, such as by artificially creating delays in ballot counting through excessive audits.

Could a state government hold a popular election for president, but then appoint a slate of electors themselves, even when there's no cause of a delay like a natural disaster? Because of, because of... fraud. Yeah, fraud. Just like in the 2020 election. Yeah, that's the ticket.

A radical legal theory called the Independent State Legislature Doctrine advanced by Republicans in the last two decades says "sure you can- it says right there in the constitution in black-and-sepia that the state legislature can appoint electors in whatever manner they want." As the Brennan Center for Justice notes:

In June 2022, the Supreme Court said that they will review the Independent State Legislature Doctrine in their next term in the case Moore v. Harper. Conservative lawyer J. Michael Luttig predicts that Repbulicans

The Moore v. Harper case focuses on another aspect of the independent state legislature doctrine, regarding if state legislatures have absolute power to gerrymander congressional districts. Their ruling may be wide enough to speak to legislatures appointing presidential electors directly.

The independent state legislature doctrine could come to a head in the 2024 election because out of 13 presidential election swing/battleground states, Republicans hold control over both houses of the state legislature in 11 of them, often due to extreme gerrymandering:

• Arizona
• Florida
• Georgia
• Iowa
• Michigan
• New Hampshire
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Pennsylvania
• Texas
• Wisconsin

The plans to overturn the 2020 election involved "alternative" slates of presidential electors (the people who vote in the electoral college), but these efforts were stymied by state election officials who put their country before their party. Republicans are using several techniques to reduce the likelihood that election officials will stand in their way in future elections.

One technique is the passage of laws that make it easier for political parties to interfere in elections. According to the Brennan Center:

In addition to new election interference laws, Republicans are also putting in place people who are more willing to interfere with elections. They are "seeking to replace officials across the nation, including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general..." who are integral to the process of appointing presidential electors.

To put partisan election workers in place, they are first getting long-time election administrators to quit through threats of violence, fines, and jail time.

Second, they are campaigning for new secretaries of state and other election administrators who support Trump's Big Lie. There are several ways that secretaries of state can interfere with election results including:

• conducting endless audits
• refusing to accommodate voters due to unforeseen circumstances
• acquiescing to political pressure to produce favorable results

As conservative judge J. Michael Luttig puts it:

Third, Republican leader and far-right nationalist Steve Bannon is pushing for a takeover of the election process from the bottom-up, called his "precinct strategy".

We've already gotten a taste of what to expect from partisan control over election results in one New Mexico primary in January 2022.

Johnny Harris provides a summary of election subversion in a New York Times opinion video.

University of Michigan professor of political science Nicholas Valentino told New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall that voter subversion would be a marker of the end of democracy in the US.

Voter subversion efforts, which announce to the world that they are an authoritarian regime, won't be needed if Republicans win elections through voter suppression, which tends to fly under the radar.

As Prof. Thomas Zimmer wrote:

According to the Brennan Center:

Republicans are advancing these bills despite no widespread voter fraud.

Voter suppression proved successful since the Jim Crow era in preventing minorities from voting. Following the Supreme Court's 2013 gutting of 1965 Voting Rights Act, there is no legal impediment to Republican voter suppression.

Voter suppression methods include:

• Closing polling places to make it more difficult to access a polling place and ensuring long lines.
• Making it difficult to wait in voting lines, such as prohibiting the handing out of food and water.
• Voter roll purges.
• Requiring voter ID for mail ballots
• Restrictions on voting by mail
• Restrictions return of mail ballots
• Efforts to make voter registration harder
• Creating an "army" of poll watchers to intimidate minority voters.
• Threatening election administrators who help people vote with jail time.

I used to think democracy was like a sport. Each election is like a match between a blue team (yea!) and a red team (booo!).

To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, I still do, but I used to too. What was wrong about my earlier thinking, though, was that I thought about us citizens as just the players on the teams. The novel thing about democracy is that not only do we play the game, but we set our own rules and enforce them too.

So we're more like a self-organized sports league than just players. We have specific rules that govern game play (laws and regulations), rules about changing the rules (legislative process), and even rules about how to change the rules about how to change the rules (constitutional amendments). We set up the league and keep playing because we decided that it would be to our collective benefit.

Authoritarianism is when the red team feels that they deserve to win every game. As mentioned earlier, many democracies have failed before, so there are a number of strategies the red team (the Republicans- were you able to guess?) can choose from.

To torture the sports analogy a little more, the red players would be in a more stable position if the blue players thought the league was still intact, so they used all their time to practice their skills and play the games under the old rules, even if they never won any. If too many people on the blue team were to catch wind of what's going on, they might put up a fight or take their ball and go home.

According to Profs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard in their book How Democracies Die:

According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat [p. 49]

Levitsky and Ziblatt say [pp. 101-3] it's not just a democratic country's constitution or laws that keeps it a democracy, it's also the unwritten rules of the game.

In other words, the erosion of democracy isn't just the result of an authoritarian takeover, it's part of the typical process in modern history. Therefore, the weakening of a democracy can be evidence of its impending failure. In addition to an authoritarian leader or party deliberately weakening democracy for their own gains, an unintentional weakening makes the population more receptive to authoritarian rule because they feel the current government is no longer working in their best interests.

Because the erosion of democracy is a potent warning sign, we'll look at four areas of evidence that it's happening in the U.S. recently. First, we'll look at examples in the three aspects of democracy we discussed above:

• free and fair elections
• accountable government officials
• respect for citizens' rights

Then, we'll look at worldwide ratings of democracies.

Other aspects of the erosion of democracy relate directly to fascism, and are discussed in that section, below.

Free and fair elections are one of the bedrock principles of democracy. A few of the reasons that Americans are losing faith in elections are discussed below. Another important reason, false claims of election fraud, is discussed in the section on fascism, below.

I am very concerned about SCOTUS interference in the 2024 and subsequent presidential elections, especially through the Independent State Legislature Doctrine, but SCOTUS has already interfered in a recent election.

The 2000 presidential election between George Bush and Al Gore was so close that it came down to Florida's electoral college votes. Poor ballot design resulted in many confused voters. The state began a hand recount of the ballots. In the supreme court case Bush v. Gore, SCOTUS ordered the state to stop counting the ballots. Seven of the nine justices had been nominated by Republican presidents.

According to Alan Dershowitz, a respected Harvard law professor at the time,

Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said that

There were also multiple instances of conflicts of interest. For example, Ginni Thomas, wife of justice Clarence Thomas "was so intimately involved in the Bush campaign that she was helping to draw up a list of Bush appointees more or less at the same time as her husband was adjudicating on whether the same man would become the next President." She went on to play a significant role in the Jan. 6 insurrection as well, pushing the legislatures of Arizona and Wisconsin (that we know of so far) to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Neither she nor Justice Thomas have faced any investigations or consequences for these actions.

James Comey, a registered Republican for most of his life, was Director of the FBI (part of the Department of Justice) during the 2016 election. On October 28, two weeks before the 2016 election, Comey told members of Congress that the FBI had reopened an investigation into Hilary Clinton's emails. Clinton later said that she believes Comey's announcement played a major role in her election loss.

What Comey didn't mention at the time was that the FBI was simultaneously investigating Trump's ties to Russia. That could have been useful information to the electorate weighing the two candidates' trustworthiness. Maybe it slipped his mind?

It's one thing for Russia to try to exert influence over American elections; it's quite another for Republicans to welcome and cooperate with it.

Robert Mueller identified numerous instances of Russian interference in the 2016 election in his special counsel investigation

Due to extensive obstruction of the investigation, Republicans have plausible deniability of knowledge of a number of Russia's actions. Russian interference that Republicans did know about include:

• Republican operative Paul Manafort was Trump's campaign manager. He was in contact with senior Russian intelligence officials during 2016 as well. He worked for Trump unpaid, even though he was deeply in debt. He previously served as campaign consultant for a number of autocratic governments, including Putin.
• Republican and retired Army general Michael Flynn was appointed as Trump's National Security Advisor. He had recently met with Putin directly and during the 2016 campaign set up secret communications channels with Russia through which he made deals about US sanctions.
• Trump's campaign met with Russians, including a trusted Putin insider, at Trump Tower in New York because the Russian's said they wanted to help Trump by providing "dirt" on Hilary Clinton that they had obtained through spying.
• Russia funneled tens of millions of dollars to Trump's campaign through the National Rifle Association.

The Brennan Center for Justice explains:

Over $1 billion in dark money was spent on the 2020 elections.

Both Democrats and Republicans make use of donations by corporations and the wealthy, but the avalanche of donations was set off by the Citizens United decision by the Republican-led SCOTUS.

Ok, the electoral college isn't erosion of democracy because it was baked into the U.S. from the start, but it's certainly anti-democratic, so I'm squeezing it in here. It was included in the constitution as a concession to slaveholders and small states, and to protect against "mob rule," e.g. electing a demagogue (which it clearly failed to do). It's anti-democratic for two reasons.

First, electoral votes are allocated by the total number of congressional seats. Because senate seats are included in the talley, residents of small states get more of a say in the electoral college than residents of large states. For example, in the 2020 election, my vote in New York counted only 41% as much as the vote of someone in neighboring Vermont.

Second, because most states award the whole electoral college slate to that state's winner, and because people are so committed to voting for their party's candidate, most of the electoral college vote is already known before the election starts. As FairVote puts it:

A fundamental principle of democracy is that a citizen's vote counts as much as anyone else's. Gerrymandering undermines this principle by drawing electoral districts to favor one party over another. The two basic techniques of gerrymandering are:

• Cracking. Splitting a group of like-minded people into multiple districts to dilute their voting power.
• Packing. Cramming like-minded people into as few districts of power, so they're more likely to win a smaller number of seats, but less likely to win the number of seats they deserve.

At the federal level, gerrymandering means that representation is not proportional to the votes of the electorate. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, gerrymandering provides Republicans with a "durable advant­age of 16–17 seats" in Congress. While this may not sound like a lot of the 435 seats in the house, only about 30 of those seats are considered "swing seats."

At the state level, gerrymandering locks in minority-rule. According to one study, 59 million people in six states live under minority rule of their state legislatures. For example, the Brennan Center found that

Because democracy is a system of self-governance, it requires that citizens have a minimum amount of trust in each other and governmental institutions and processes for it to work. Jeffrey Abramson of the Aspen Institute wrote

In July 2022, a CNN poll found that

If enough people lose faith in our shared system of democracy, the it will cease to function.

Citizens of a democracy deserve and expect government officials to be upstanding citizens, represent their best interests, and put in their best effort to run the government effectively.

Nepotism is a signature of autocratic governments around the world. Hiring relatives provides the autocratic leader both increased power and a feeling of security. As Sarah Kendzior writes, "The longer autocrats stay in power, the smaller the inner circle becomes, and the more kinship ties tend to dominate. Parties bound by blood or marriage are easier to control.... They tend to be trustworthy confidants in regimes rife with paranoia [and are] excellent vessels for laundering money, creating enough disstance that assets stolen from the state are harder to track."

The most egregious examples of recent nepotism are Trump's hiring of his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner. Kushner was initially not granted a security clearance because, according to Kendzior:

• "lied on his security clearance forms more than any person in US history"
• was "carrying $1.4 billion in debt" on family property
• "lobbied for a Qatari blockade after Qatar refused to provide his family a loan to pay off its massive debt"
• "met with the president of a sanctioned Russian bank as part of yet another debt payoff scheme"
• "met illicitly with other Russians connected with plots to subvert the 2016 election" including devising a secret back-channel with the Kremlin and "attending the notorious 2016 Trump Tower meeting"
• "obstructed justice by helping to fire James Comey"
• "oversaw the Cambridge Analytica data mining operation that became a key subject of the Mueller probe"
• "helped Saudi prince Mohammad bin Salman cover up the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi"
• "Illicitly proposed giving the Saudis nuclear secrets"
• "Used personal email and private apps to communicate with foreign leaders," the reason why Republicans wanted to "lock her up."

When red flags such as these prevented Kushner from getting a top-secret security clearance, Trump ordered his chief of staff to give Kushner one anyway.

Other examples of nepotism in the Trump administration given by Kendzior include:

• "Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who opposes public education, is the sister of military mercenary Erik Prince, a key operator in Trump's network of back-channel trades with other kleptocracies"
• "Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell."
• "The appointment of Attorney General William Barr was followed by the appointment of Barr's son-in-law, Tyler McGaughey, as Trump's White House legal counsel and his daughter, Mary Daly, as an employee of the Treasury."

As discussed above, an important guardrail of democracy is forbearance, which is self-restraint in exercising power. An example of this is that presidents are not supposed to meddle in the operations of the Department of Justice. During the 2016 campaign, former president Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and it caused widespread concern because Lynch was investigating Hillary Clinton's email practices at the time.

In contrast, Trump requested a pledge of loyalty from FBI director James Comey, who was investigating Trump's ties with Russia, and then fired him when he refused (and admitted on TV that was the reason).

It now appears that Trump may have reached into the Treasury Department to use the IRS to punish Comey and Andrew McCabe, who was acting FBI director after Comey was fired.

Trump also reached into the Department of Commerce to improperly interfere with the 2020 census for political gain.

To reduce the chances of federal government officials being influenced by foreign governments or states, or falling prey to corruption in general, the framers of the constitution included both a Foreign Emoluments Clause and a Domestic Emoluments Clause. When a government official accepts payments or gifts from anyone besides the government, we can't be sure if they are acting/did act/will act in the best interest of citizens or themselves.

Presidents prior to Trump divested themselves of their financial interests before taking office. In contrast, Trump kept his real estate/golf businesses operating.

This provided ample opportunity for violations of the emoluments clause. One of his businesses, the Trump International Hotel Washington DC, was only two blocks from the White House. Every business group and foreign government that wanted to curry favor with Trump stayed there, and the hotel got over $3.7 million from foreign governments from 2017 to 2020. It wasn't even legal for Trump to own it at the time because the lease with the US Government Services Agency (GSA), which owned the building, contained a conflict of interest clause saying that "no elected official of the government ... shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom."

Another way that Trump profited from the presidency was making the Secret Service rent space from his businesses. According to Citizens for Ethics, "The Secret Service has spent nearly $2 million of taxpayer money at Trump properties, literally paying Donald Trump for the right to protect him and his family"

Another way that Trump profited was visiting his businesses over 500 times while in office. "[W]hen he brings some of the country's highest ranking government officials, he sends a message around the world that Trump businesses are centers of power and fluence. These VIP visits also bring a ton of publicity to the businesses, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money."

The presidency also allowed Trump's family to make huge amounts of money. According to Citizens for Ethics, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while working in the White House. This income includes Ivanka's ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in DC and income from her namesake business. Russia renewed two trademarks and China awarded her three trademarks for her business while she worked for her father.

Saudi Arabia recently invested $2 billion in Jared Kusnher's business. Because the deal made little business sense,

According to NBC News,

• Attacking Joe Biden from the Rose Garden during the 2020 campaign.
• Playing campaign-style videos in the White House briefing room.
• Delivering a speech to the Republican National Convention from South Lawn.

Justic Antonin Scalia died in Feb. 2016. President Obama nominated Merrick Garland on March 16 to replace him. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, refused to hold hearings.

This wasn't the first time that the Senate had refused to act on a president's SCOTUS nomination. But the last time was in the 1840s when the Whigs refused to consider John Tyler's nominee. Therefore, this is a clear example of breaking of democratic norms established over the previous 170 years.

Following this indecent behavior, Republicans then forced through Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, even though he had been credibly accused of attempted rape and numerous other instances of sexual misconduct. "The FBI gathered more than 4500 tips relating to Kavanaugh without any apparent further action by investigators"

The normal process for receiving a presidential pardon is to apply to the Department of Justice's Office of the Pardon Attorney. If the applicant has demonstrated good conduct for at least five years since conviction, and meets other requirements, the office will forward the request to the president for review.

There have been some exceptions to this process over the years, which raised eyebrows at the time, such as Ford pardoning Nixon, George H.W. Bush pardoning some Iran-Contra participants, and Bill Clinton pardoning billionaire fugitive Marc Rich and his own brother, Roger Clinton.

Trump's use of the pardon completely obliterated previous norms.

To start, Trump essentially eliminated the Office of the Pardon Attorney from the process. According to the Washington Post, "pardon seekers ended up on the president’s radar after conservative activists, television commentators, or other friends of Trump made personal appeals on their behalf."

• had a personal or political connnection to at least 89% of people receiving pardons.
• granted clemency to five of his former campaign staff members and political advisers Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Stephen K. Bannon, and George Papadopoulos
• pardoned five people convicted as a result of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.
• pardoned his daughter Ivanka's father-in-law, Charles Kushner.
• granted executive clemency to three court-martialed U.S. military officers who were accused or convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, which "undermined military discipline, constituted an inappropriate interference in the U.S. military justice system, and called into question the U.S. commitment to the law of armed conflict."
• pardoned seven Republican congressmen
• pardoned four Blackwater guards convicted of killing Iraqi civilians. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, Trump's long-time political ally and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

According to the Washington Post

Citizens have a right to expect to be told the truth by government officials (wtih limited exceptions when security may be put at risk). Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims over 4 years.

The U.S. is a "nation of laws," and government officials need to obey the law too. Citizens deserve to be represented by respectable, trustworthy, ethical people. Government officials are leaders, and part of leadership is exhibiting behavior that should be emulated.

Democracy is eroded when criminals or people credibly accused of criminal behavior are elected to office, and when people remain in office after crimes are discovered.

When Trump was elected, he had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and/or rape by 25 women since the 1970s and had been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits spanning three decades. Topics of these suits involved branding/trademarks, casinos, contract disputes (e.g. Trump University), employment, golf clubs, taxes, personal injury, and real estate.

Using the presidency to escape consequences for crimes is a trail blazed by other authoritarian-style leaders. Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in her book Strongmen [p.159]:

In addition to criminality in the executive branch, misconduct among congressmembers has skyrocketed since 2010, among both Democrats and Republicans.

In days of yore, when Republican malfeasance was discovered, such as Watergate, other party members participated in the investigation and meting out of punishment.

One illustration of this is the Republicans' shifting reaction to the Jan. 6 insurrection. During the attack, politicians like then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Fox News personalities like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity begged Trump to call off his supporters. Soon after the attack, Republicans including Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz condemned the attack.

Soon, though, they circled the wagons and now have nothing negative to say about it. When Trump was impeached for inciting the insurreciton, 197 of 211 Republican representatives and 43 of 50 Republican senators voted against impeachment, and the Republican National Committee censured Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House January 6 Committee.

Another example of Republicans putting party over country is their vote against certifying the 2020 presidential election results. Only hours after the Jan. 6 insurrection, 147 Republican congress members objected to the certification of the election results, despite having no legitimate reason to do so.

According to Prof. Steve Vladeck

Another way Republicans put their party over the country is by attempting to block as much legislation as possible. Legislation is needed for the country to make progress and address the problems it's facing. Republicans, however, see legislation as a zero-sum-game: if legislation passes while a Democratic president is in power, it strengthens the Democrats' hand in the next election, while failure to pass legislation can be painted as a failure of the Democrats, strengthening the hand of Republicans in the next election. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he is "100 percent" focused "on stopping" President Joe Biden's administration.

We don't live in a direct democracy. If we did, then the chance of a particular bill being passed into law would directly correlate with the fraction of citizens who support that legislation (with some exceptions for how many people turn out to vote, veto power by the president, etc.). We live in a representative democracy, though. We elect government officials to become well versed in policy issues and then write/evaluate bills on our behalf. Even though there's this layer in between citizens and legislation, you would still expect a pretty strong correlation between legislation and what the general populations wants.

However, a landmark 2014 study by Prof. Gilens of Princeton and Prof. Page of Northwestern University found that

In other words, wealthy people and corporations get the legislation they want, but regular people do not.

The policy/legislation cases examined in this study were from the period 1981 to 2002. Although there has been a flood of money from the wealthy and corporations into elections since the SCOTUS Citizens United ruling in 2010, that was not the cause of these results.

Democratic governments treat citizens fairly and respect their rights and liberties, no matter how much power or wealth they have. Unfortunately, this respect has been waning.

A classic tactic of authoritarians is to use a crisis to gain control. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to take control of Germany. Putin used bombings of apartment buildings in Russia by "Chechens" (who used large amounts of explosive that's exclusively controlled by the Russian FSB).

After the 9/11 terrorist attack, Republicans led the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act a mere 6 weeks later. As the ACLU puts it:

The PATRIOT Act and follow-on programs at the National Security Administration and other agencies, such as the PRISM program are used to spy on Americans' electronic communications. (As a safeguard against , domestic spy activity has to be approved by the FISA court. Fortunately for the spies, 100% of their requests are approved.)

Today, most Americans assume that the government is monitoring their phone calls and emails. Personally, I feel that the regular collection/monitoring of communications violates the Fourth Amendment, which enumerates our right to privacy, a fundamental aspect of democracy.

America has two systems of justice: one for the wealthy and one for the rest of us. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren notes:

Besides no one being prosecuted for causing the 2008 financial crises another example of the wealthy being above the law includes the lack of prosecutions for illegally hiding wealth via offshore finances. Journalists exposed three such schemes involving "unethical tax avoidance to criminal tax evasion, fraud, corruption, and money laundering" via the

• Panama Papers
• Paradise Papers
• Cum Ex files

The nonprofit Freedom House notes that the uncovered

In addition to monitoring our communications, the 9/11 attack led to the government going outside the bounds of law enforcement and the Geneva Conventions, such as

• Kidnapping ("extraordinary rendition") of suspected terrorists and bringing them to "black sites" around the world and Guantanamo Bay. (The practice started before 9/11, but was then greatly expanded.
• Torture ("enhanced interrogation") of suspects, which violates the Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949.
• Indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without trial.

Trump used federal agents without any identifying insignias against protestors across the country. (Neither badges nor any markings indicating what group they were a member of.) Sometimes, these agents arrested people and took them away in unmarked vehicles. This was an example of a democratic norm, not a law, being violated at the time. In January 2021, Congress passed a law that required federal agents to display "visible identification of themselves and the name of the government entity employing them."

The International Center for Not-For-Profit Law says that since January 2017, 45 states have considered 245 bills that restrict the right to peaceful assembly, which is guaranteed in the First Amendment. Of these bills, 39 have been enacted into law and 12 are pending as of June 2022.

According to Prof. Barbara F. Walter [p. 20]

According to Walter, the Polity data series "is particularly interested in the durability of different types of governments and their political institutions." It was started in the 1960s and was funded via the CIA. Its funding ended in 2020.

The Polity data, compiled by the Center for Systemic Peace, gives a rating to every country from -10 to +10, and groups those scores into "autocracies," "closed anocracies," "open anocracies," "democracies," and "full democracies". They note that:

Walter says that the January 6 insurrection

Other countries with a +8 rating like the U.S. include Brazil, Ghana, Kosovo, Mexico, and the Philippines.

Walter writes that

Freedom House rates freedom on a scale from 1 to 100 and divides these ratings into "not free," "partly free," and "free."

The U.S. currently scores 83 and is therefore "free." Other countries with a score of 83 include Panama and Romania. The countries with the five highest scores are Canada, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, was started in 2014 and looks at different dimensions of democracy.

V-Dem gives 5 ratings for each country, but their flagship rating is the liberal democracy index with a scale from 0.00 to 1.00.

The U.S. gets a rating of 0.74 as of 2022. Countries with similar scores are Latvia and Lithuania.

Three researchers at the V-Dem Institute developed a methodology, called "Regimes of the World (RoW)" to classify countries into one of four regime types: liberal democracies, electoral democracies, electoral autocracies, and closed autocracies. According to V-Dem [p. 37], the US is barely holding onto its status as a liberal democracy:

New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall notes

We tend to think of the US as a "shining city on a hill," or a beacon of hope for other countries. These ratings show that this is no longer the case, and we have a lot of collective work to do to earn the admiration of other countries.

The Atlantic describes how autocracies are gaining strength around the world based on Trump's brand of transactional politics

Autocrats tend to emulate other autocrats. Hitler admired Mussolini, and kept a bust of the inventor of fascism on his desk [Ruth Ben-Ghiat, p. 30]. Trump worked hard for the approval of Putin.

Trump met with Putin several times. Each time, Trump either barred Americans from the meeting (allowing only Russians to attend), or used an American translator but then destroyed the translator's notes immediately afterwards, so we don't know what was discussed. We do know that

• In May 2017, Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador.
• In July 2017, Trump said "Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded and safe." Marco Rubio pointed out that "Partnering with Putin on a 'Cyber Security Unit' is akin to partnering with Assad on a 'Chemical Weapons Unit'."
• In Nov. 2017, Trump asked Putin about Russian meddling in the 2016 election. He said that Putin denied it. “Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
• In March 2018, the day that Putin handily won reelection after barring anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny from running (and soon after Putin had poisoned a former Russian spy in Britain with a powerful nerve agent), Trump called Putin and congratulated him, after his staff gave him a note stating in all-capital letters “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”
• In February 2022, Trump called Putin's invasion of European democracy Ukraine "genius" and "savvy."

We don't know the reasons behind Trump's affinity for Putin. Maybe it's the money. In 2014, Eric Trump said "We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." Or maybe it's a psychological need for approval from a harsh father figure.

Republicans appear to be using Hungary as a model for where they want to take the U.S.

• FOX News host, Republican thought leader, and potential presidential candiate Tucker Carlson broadcast his FOX News show from Hungary for a week in August 2021 and interviewed Viktor Orbán.
• In January 2022, Trump endorsed Orbán for Prime Minister of Hungary, and the New York Young Republican's Club threw in their endorsement for good measure.
• The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is the main political conference for conservative activists and elected officials. The first CPAC was in 1974, when Ronald Reagan was the keynote speaker. In May 2022, Orbán spoke to the attendees when CPAC held a conference in Hungary
• Orbán addressed CPAC again in August 2022 at their conference in Dallas.

As discussed above, democracies now die by elected leaders who then violate democratic norms and use legal pathways to lock in authoritarianism. Orbán is the epitome of this method. According to Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker

Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, notes

Marantz concluded

As discussed above, Freedom House monitors freedom under governments around the world. In 2019, Hungary became the first country in the European Union to be downgraded to no longer be considered "free."

We discussed above that there's a spectrum of governments based on how free the citizens are, and the countries with the least-free citizens are lumped together as having authoritarian governments. Within the authoritarian end of the scale, there's a variety of types of repressive governments. The most virulent of these is fascism.

There isn't a single accepted list of which historical regimes were fascist, beyond the WWII Axis nations (Italy, Germany, and Japan), their puppet states, and Austria before it was annexed by Germany. Some people choose to define fascism more broadly and include a number of other right-wing authoritarian governments.

Because there's little agreement on which countries were fascist, there's no accepted definition of fascism either. However, a central tennet of all of them is the deliberate use of an "us versus them" division to stoke hate and fear to gain and maintain power.

Prof. Stanley notes [p. xvi]

The Nazis primarily focused on four groups of scapegoats to send to concentration camps:

• Jews. Hitler and Goebbels believed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax was true (Stanley pp. 59-60) and that Jews were conspiring to take advantage of hard working Germans.
• Ethnic minorities, especially the Roma.
• LGBTQ people.
• People with disabilities.

In contrast, Republicans are scapegoating:

• Jews. Now referred to as "George Soros" and "globalists."
• Ethnic minorities, especially Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims.
• LGBTQ people.
• People with disabilities.

Many authoritarian governments use political violence as a tool. The fascist governments of Italy and Germany are known for a particular type of violence: using civilian militias to gain and maintain power.

Mussolini organized his blackshirt squads in 1919. Over the next three years they grew in number and attacked and killed many of Mussolini's enemies, including "socialists, communists, republicans, Catholics, trade unionists, and those in cooperatives." In 1922 they surrounded Rome, ready to attack. The prime minister of Italy prepared for Rome to defend itself, but the king of Italy made Mussolini the prime minister instead, possibly out of fear of being dethroned. As a result, Mussolini became head of Italy through the threat of his miliatias.

Hitler oversaw the organizing of brownshirts, also called stormtroopers or the SA. Initially, in the early 1920s, they were "ex-soldiers and beer-hall brawlers who were to protect gatherings of the Nazi Party from disruptions." By the time Hitler took power in 1933, the SA grew to 2,000,000, or twenty times as large as the number of troops and officers in the German Army. A second militia, the SS, started as a subset of the SA to serve as Hitler's bodyguards, and grew to 35,000 members by 1933. According to the Wiener Holocaust Library

Some examples of the alignment of Republicans with militias include:

• At the Sept. 29, 2020 presidential candidate debate, Trump told the Proud Boys militia to "stand back, and stand by."
• The Three Percenters militia provided security for Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) during a campaign event.
• Roger Stone used the Oath Keepers militia as security ahead of the January 6 riots.
• The January 6 House investigation found evidence of coordination between militias and Trump allies.

Spreading disinformation is a strategy common to authoritarian governments, but was pioneered under fascism.

Trump from the first day of his presidency lying about the size of the crowd at his inauguration to his last, saying that he won the 2020 election in his "big lie". In between, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims.

Trump had long practiced making whatever false claims helped him politically, such as supporting the death penalty for the wrongly-convicted Central Park Five in 1989 and claiming in 2011 that Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

Even the Big Lie about the 2020 election was old hat. According to Malclom Nance [p.17]

Trump started the lie up again for the 2016 election, telling people at an August campaign event, "I'm afraid the election's going to be rigged. I have to be honest."

In fact, the rallying phrase "stop the steal" was planned before Trump was even elected president.

The sheer volume of the disinformation, much of which was easily refutable, was an intentional Republican tactic.

At the time, it felt to me like I was being sprayed with a firehose of lies and outrages. It turns out that wasn't a coincidence, and Republicans were using the Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model.

Many of the lies were easily refutable, so apparently the goal was not to get the public to believe the disinformation. So what were the purposes of this strategy?

One goal was to take control of the media using underhanded techniques, or in other words to "hack the media."

The media's traditional roles include discussing what is new and noteworthy and presenting correct information to media consumers. They felt that it was their job to discuss and correct the lies and outrages spewing from the federal government.

The sheer quantity of propaganda is difficult to counteract. As the Rand Corporation says

The "flood the zone" tactic keep the media completely occupied for years, and it allowed the administration to direct its attention (or "capture the news cycle") at will.

According to journalist Sean Illing

Like a magician using his wand to divert attention from a secret move, flooding the zone with shit diverted the public's attention from inconvenient facts like a president and his family running a business enterprise out of the oval office and the dismantling of democracy.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat [p. 111] notes

Another purpose of spreading huge amounts of disinformation is to make citizens give up on trying to figure out the truth. Sean Illing said "flooding the zone" is

This isn't a new goal or technique. Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 (as quoted by Ruth Ben-Ghiat [p. 106]

Anne Applebaum, speaking with Ezra Klein, said

One of the reasons that people believe in conspiracy theories is that it bonds them with others who also believe. I suggest that while not all of Trump's lies rose to the level of conspiracies, taken collectively they can identify an in-group of people who believe the lies and an out-group that denies them.

This conspiratorial club-like attitude is protective of criminal and undemocratic behavior. In the before-times, if the president or other officials committed a crime there'd be investigations to uncover the truth. Now, any Republican who takes part in investigating Trump is automatically shunned. In other words, parroting lies is like flashing a membership card.

Leaders spreading disinformation to citizens is so undemocratic that it's completely counter to the ideas of the Enlightenment, which the US constitution is grounded in.

Stochastic terrorism is

Psychologist Valerie Terico explains that it's not a new phenomenon, and attributes the murders of abortion providers as early as 1993 to this technique. She writes

There are two potential reasons that Republicans are inciting stochastic terrorism.

The first is to instill a desire among the general population for more "law and order." One of the purposes of government is to maintain order so people can go about their lives. If people feel that their world is out of control, they will seek to put into power a group that they perceive will maintain order. Once a group is in power, citizens will let it enact and enforce increasingly restrictive (undemocratic) laws and practices to maintain order.

The second reason is to discourage people from resisting the rise of authoritarian rule. For example, during the March on Rome, Mussolini was able to enter Rome and was given control ahead of the blackshirts because of the threat of violence.

Wil Wheaton writes:

Republicans regularly demonize their standard scapegoats.

A prime example of this scapegoating is the "Great Replacement Theory." According to The Jewish Chronicle

Republicans are killing two birds with one stone by demonizing both Jews and ethnic minorities in one conspiracy.

In fact, the Republicans are correct about one part: white people are projected to become a minority of the total population in 2045, due to long-term demographic shifts. The conspiracy theory is that this is anyone's intentional plan. If you're a white supremacist and you believe the conspiracy theory, then you would see Jews and other minorities as an existential threat to your culture and power.

A sampling of Republicans promoting the replacement theory include:

• Tucker Carlson. In April 2021 he said on his FOX News show

  “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement.' If you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate — the voters now casting ballots — with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World, but they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true.

• Jeanine Pirro. The FOX News host said in 2019, "Think about it. It is a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals that will vote for the Democrats."
• J.D. Vance. The senate candidate in Ohio said that Democrats "have decided that they can't win reelection in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here."
• Blake Masters. The senate candidate in Arizona said “The Democrats want to change the demographics of this country. They think that if they can bring in millions and millions and millions of illegal aliens, someday they'll be able to grant them amnesty to grant them citizenship and make them reliable Democrat voters. I think it's an electoral plan."
• Eric Schmitt. Missouri's state Attorney General said Democrats are "fundamentally trying to change the country" through immigration.
• Mitch McConnell. When asked, the Senate Minority Leader declined to reject the concept of 'great replacement.'"

• Elise Stefanik. The number 3 ranking Republican in the House ran a Facebook ad saying

  “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” reads one of the ads, which shows a reflection of migrants in sunglasses Biden is wearing. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

• Ron Johnson. The Wisconsin senator said "This administration wants complete open borders. And you have to ask yourself, why? Is it [that] really they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever?"
• Wendy Rogers. The Arizona state senator said "We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country."

Whoever is spewing the Replacement Theory, it appears to be working. A poll conducted in April 2022 showed that 68% of Republicans and 48% of all respondents believe in the conspiracy theory.

Republicans regularly accuse Democrats and the LGBTQ community of being pedophiles or "groomers."

According to The Guardian:

As of October 2020, half of Republicans thought that top Democrats were involved in child sex-trafficking.

Prof. Emily Johnson notes that "There is no better moral panic than a moral panic centered on potential harm to children."

When various conspiracy theories get to be too much, the Republicans can always fall back on the tried and true accusations that minorities are dangerous.

As one example of many, during Trump's campaign for the 2016 election he said:

Malcolm Nance [p. 49] gives the example of Mark Nuckols who "apparently lives in an alternate universe where antifascists, Black Lives Matter, and Islamic jihadists, the three boogeymen for all extremists, join in a civil war against good, God-fearing white Americans." Nuckols wrote:

In stochastic terrorism, after a targeted group of people is labeled as being a threat, violence is suggested.

One way to stoke violence is to suggest it as being a reasonable and expected course of action. The trick is to suggest it indirectly enough to maintain "plausible deniability."

Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, notes:

Additional examples of this rhetoric includes:

• In the campaign for the 2016 election, Trump spoke ominously about Hilary Clinton nominating SCOTUS justices and other if she were to win: "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know."
• After DHS cybersecurity director Chris Krebs described the 2020 elections as the most secure in history, Trump campaign lawyer Joseph DiGenova said Krebs should be "taken out at dawn and shot."
• When electors in Arizona were preparing to certify Biden's win, Wendy Rogers, then state senator-elect, who backed Trump’s false claims about the election, said “Buy more ammo.”
• Steve Bannon called for beheading Dr. Fauci and FBI Director Wray.
• At campaign rallies, Trump spoke about immigrants heading north toward the US border and said "You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion! That is an invasion!" Fox News regularly warned viewers about the dangers of migrant caravans.

Kyle Rittenhouse, then a 17 year old from Illinois, traveled with an AR-15 to protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin that followed the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, by a white police officer. Rittenhouse killed two protestors who tried to grab his gun, claiming self defense. In a trial overseen by a judge who was so biased that the case drew laughter from observers, Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges that the judge hadn't already dismissed.

After the acquittal, Rittenhouse met with Trump at one of his golf clubs and appeared at several events run by Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit. At one event, the Turning Point organizer Charlie Kirk said to Rittenhouse "You're a hero to millions, it's an honor to be able to have you," after which the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

During the gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA in 2017, one of the white supremacists drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one. Subsequently, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Florida passed laws granting immunity to drivers who hit protesters, and eight states have similar bills pending.

Another way of encouraging violence indirectly is to flood the country with weapons. Republicans have opposed restrictions on gun ownership for decades, and as of December 2021 there were an estimated 436.4 million guns in the country, or about 1.3 guns per person. (About 1% of the guns are owned by law enforcement agencies or the military.) The average gun owner has 5 firearms.

Republicans have pushed the false interpretation of the Second Amendment that it allows the use of guns "to promote peace, prosperity, and liberty, both by protecting one's life and property from invaders and by lawfully resisting a tyrannical government." This interpretation ignores the "well regulated militia" clause of the amendment, and it wasn't even argued until 2008 that there's a private right of individuals to have arms for their own defense. Communicating to gun owners the sense that they have the right to use their guns to kill people in the name of defending their own "property" and "liberty" makes increases the chances of gun violence.

Stochastic terrorism has worked successfully for the Republicans, resulting in right-wing violence.

For example:

• In 2017, an Illinois militia group bombed a Minnesota mosque. The militia members said they "wanted to scare [Muslims] out of the country" because they push their beliefs on everyone else.
• In 2018, a Florida Man mailed inoperative pipe bombs to 13 prominent Democrats and media figures critical of President Trump. His lawyers said he was "motivated by his obsession with Trump and his anger at Democrats."
• In October 2018, a man

  entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA and yelled “All Jews must die,” then opened fire upon the congregants. He was armed with an assault rifle and several handguns and killed eleven congregants and wounded six others.... [He] told an officer that... Jews “were committing genocide against his people.”

• In August 2019, a man killed 23 people and injured dozens more in a Walmart in El Paso, TX. He left a manifesto "railing against immigration and announcing that 'this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.'"
• In April 2020, two weeks after Trump tweeted that his followers should "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" from Covid restrictions, armed militia members entered the Michigan capitol building. Six months later, the FBI arrested members of the same militia on charges that they planned to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
• In May 2022, an 18 year old from upstate New York drove for hours and then killed 10 Black people and injured three others with an AR-15 at a supermarket in Buffalo, NY. In his manifesto, he stated "that it was 4chan, a controversial online message board, where he was 'awakened' to the conspiracy theory that was the driving force behind his actions: the 'great replacement' theory."

The claim that "the U.S. is a republic not a democracy" has long been a rallying cry on the right. For example, it was a chant at the 1964 Republican convention (where Goldwater became the G.O.P. nominee). However, there's been a sharp increase in this talking point by the right wing on social media and at rallies.

The problem is that the words "democracy" and "republic" have long been understood to be short-hand for more complex concepts, which is knowingly being ignored at rallies and social media posts.

Libertarian UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh wrote

In other words, a republic is a type of democracy. The founding fathers used the term to differentiate our government from a direct democracy. Professor of political science George Thomas at Claremont McKenna College explains

Some who claim "America is not a democracy" actually do understand that America is a democracy. For example, Utah Senator Mike Lee tweeted this phrase. He later wrote

I doubt that many of the thousands of people who read his tweet bothered to read his fuller explanation on the website of First Things, "America's most influential journal of religion and public life."

It also doesn't matter to the Arizona Republicans who are telling this to crowds. Robert Draper of the New York Times quoted Selina Bliss, candidate for the Arizona State House, speaking to a recent political gathering

Draper goes on to report

The founding fathers created a republic, or representative democracy, with the goal of enforcing checks on the will of the majority. Jay Cost of the conservative National Review wrote on the website of the conservative American Enterprise Institute that the founding fathers'

It appears to me that the Republicans are laying the groundwork to justify having state legislatures choose federal representatives. This is the system that Republicans may be aiming for by arguing for the Independent State Legislature theory, allowing state legislatures to appoint presidential electors.

There is also movement in conservative circles to repeal the 17th amendment, which would return the election of US senators from popular election back to state legislatures. As of 2018, that would have given Republicans 64 senate seats, rather than the 51 seats they won through elections.

While country's founders would have found it abhorrent to hear anyone using the term "republic" to deny that the US is a representative democracy, the framers did write the constitution to allow for disproportionate voting power as a compromise to bring all of the states into the new federal government. For example, representation in the senate is extremely disproportionate to population and the electoral college is somewhat disproportionate. (I would argue that the constitution did not create a true democracy for this and other reasons.)

However, due to the demographics at the time the constitution was written, the disproportionate voting power did not result in minority rule, nor did the framers envision that happening. It wasn't until the past few decades that Americans increasingly moved into politically homogeneous regions in "The Big Sort," that this disproportionate power combined with gerrymandering of election districts gave rise to the potential for sustained minority rule.

A number of experts have stated that we should be concerned that Republicans are seeking to take control of America with an authoritarian government.

J. Michael Luttig, conservative federal judge appointed by George H.W. Bush:

Joe Walsh, former Republican congressman and a leading Tea Party conservative who rose to prominence in part by being a very vocal enemy of Barack Obama:

Paul Tonko, Democractic congressman from New York:

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton

On January 6, 2022, Joe Biden said

On August 25, 2022 Joe Biden said

Liz Cheney (R-WY) after losing the primary on August 16, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, history professor and expert on fascism at New York University.

Stanford professor Cécile Alduy, who studies French politics and the far right says of a Republican win in 2024

Malcolm Nance is a former United States Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer specializing in naval cryptology. He is an author and a pundit on national media programs. He said

Tom Hogan was a lecturer in Holocaust and genocide studies at Santa Clara University and UC Santa Cruz and then a Silicon Valley marketing executive. Now he is an author and contributes to Newsweek, The Jerusalem Post and The Bulwark. He writes

Much of the evidence of impending authoritarianism discussed in this section centered on Trump. However, even if Trump were to be, say, incarcerated at Georgia State Prison, eating nutraloaf and shuffling around the exercise yard in a white jumpsuit with "Dept. of Corrections" on the back, the threat of authoritarianism would not be diminished. The problem started decades ago, and will continue after Trump. As Barack Obama said

The long and the short of it is that a huge number of Americans support authoritarianism.

Bob Altemeyer was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba where he produced the right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale in 1981 as an improvement on the earlier fascism scale. It measures "a personality type that describes somebody who is highly submissive to their authority figures, acts aggressively in the name of said authorities, and is conformist in thought and behavior."

RWA is scored from a low of 20 to a high of 180. Those scoring between 111 and 180 points are considered "high RWA," while those scoring 20 to 63 are considered "low RWA."

Working with the Prof. Altemeyer, Monmouth University conducted polling in 2019 and 2021 to assess the RWA tendencies of Americans. Monmouth found that poll respondents who identified as Republican had an average score of 115 ("high RWA"), while those who identified as Democrats had an average score of 53 ("low RWA"). Just because this bears repeating, the average Republican has high authoritarian tendencies, based on responding positively to a number of questions like "Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us."

Monmouth also found authoritarianism to be more prevalent in the US than other advanced democracies. The poll showed that 26% of all American adults have "high RWA" tendencies, which is twice as high as the two countries tied for second place, Italy and Australia. This means that 67 million American adults have high authoritarian tendencies.

In 2021, Morning Consult sponsored additional polling that found that not only did the American adult population as a whole score higher on the RWA scale compared with other advanced democracies, but also that right-leaning Americans had a higher RWA score than right-wing citizens of those other advanced democracies.

In the end, the biggest indicator that the Republican base supports authoritarianism is that after four years of Trump in office- after all the lies, the constant chaos, the kissing up to authoritarians around the worlds and shunning of our allies, the disastrous response to COVID, the constant attacks on minorities, the uncountable abuses of power, our inability to distinguish if any action he took was for his benefit or the country's, the complete shit show from beginning to end- almost seven million more people voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. Every single one of those voters saw his dictatorial ambitions and said "that's for me."

There's almost no one left in the Republican Party at the national level in favor of democratic practices. Not in the House, Senate, or Republican National Committee.

The Republican National Committee doesn't even have a platform anymore. At their last national convention in 2020, their only stated value was that they "unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration."

The few democracy-supporting Republicans who are left are actively being pushed out. For example, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection, only 2 will even be on the ballot for reelection in November 2022. After Liz Cheney (R-WY) lost her primary in August 2022 because of her participation in the House January 6 hearings, The Lincoln Project noted

On August 25, 2022, Joe Biden told supporters

An important component of democracy is the peaceful transition of power. A tactic used by authoritarian rulers, is to deny that they lost an election. A few examples are

• Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
• Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela
• Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia
• Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast

According to the New York Times, "A 2018 study, based on elections around the world since 1950, found that only 12 percent of dictators who submit to elections and lose at the polls leave office peacefully."

In the weeks before the 2022 midterm elections, the New York Times found that

Kari Lake, Republican candidate for Arizona governor said ahead of the 2022 election that she will only accept the election results if she wins.

Political commentator Leigh McGowan noted

If Trump were unavailable to run for president in 2024 due to being, say, under house arrest at Seven Springs in Westchester, NY, or for health reasons, Ron DeSantis is next in line for the presidency. He's at least as much of a danger to democracy as Trump: he's following the authoritarian playbook in Florida, but in a more competent and strategic way than Trump is capable of.

He demonstrated is disdain for democracy in November 2020 when he "urged Pennsylvania and Michigan residents to call state lawmakers and urge them to intervene" by using the Independent State Legislature theory to overturn the results of the presidential election.

As noted earlier, authoritarian leaders includes the restriction of civil liberties including those of peaceful assembly. Thomas Edsall, writing in the New York Times, notes

Once authoritarians achieve power, they commonly remake the schools in order to indoctrinate children, and this has been a focus for DeSantis.

According to CNN

According to Ana Ceballos of The Miami Herald:

During a new civics training for Florida public school teachers, the teachers were instructed that it's a “misconception” that “the Founders desired strict separation of church and state.”

Andrew Marantz said

Another authoritarian strategy is to exert control over businesses and business leaders so they don't interfere with his political machinations. The first step in taking control has traditionally been to make an example of one or a few businesses, so others fall in line. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes

According to Theda Skocpol, a political scientist and sociologist at Harvard, DeSantis

With DeSantis at the helm and most of the Republican base and leadership behind him, the U.S. would be just as at risk of authoritarianism as under Trump.