The Atlantic Monthly October 2018 devoted most of the edition to the cover question: Is Democracy Dying?
David Frum’s piece titled Building an Autocracy is very troubling. Following is an abridged version is the first article in the magazine. For definition purposes an autocracy is a system of government by one person with absolute power.
Twenty-one months into the Trump presidency, how far has the country rolled down the road to autocracy? Yet measuring the distance traveled is vital.
Let’s start with the good news: Against the Trump presidency, federal law enforcement has held firm. As of this writing, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry is proceeding despite the president’s fulminations. The Department of Justice is ignoring the president’s Twitter demands to prosecute his opponents. As far as we know, the IRS and other federal agencies are not harassing Trump critics.
Around the world, democracy looks more fragile than it has since the Cold War. But if it survives for now in America, future historians may well conclude that it was saved by the president’s Twitter compulsion.
Yet even as Trump ties his own shoelaces together and lurches nose-first into the Rose Garden dirt, he has scored a dismaying sequence of successes in his war on U.S. institutions.
President Trump continues to defy long-standing ethical expectations of the American president. He has never released his tax returns, and he no longer even bothers to offer specious reasons, like a supposed audit.
…the president continues to collect payments from people with a vested interest in decisions made by his administration, from foreign governments looking to influence U.S. policy, and even from his own party.
Perhaps the most defining characteristic of modern autocrats such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin is the way they seek to subsume the normal operations of government into their cult of personality.
Apparently to punish the Washington Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for his paper’s reporting, Trump has pressed the Postal Service to raise Amazon’s rates—thus warning other business leaders to be careful what they say.
Trump’s tariffs personalize power too. They enable him to privilege some industries and hurt others. Some losers—farmers, say—may be compensated; others, such as aerospace manufacturers, will be disregarded.
When Trump refers to “my” generals or “my” intelligence agencies, he is teaching his supporters to rethink how the presidency should function.
To protect the president—and themselves—from the truth about Russia’s intervention in his election, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee have concocted (and the conservative media have disseminated) an elaborate fantasy about an FBI plot against Trump.
Many Americans want to believe that Democratic victories in November will reverse the country’s course. They should be wary of investing too much hope in that prospect. Should Democrats recover some measure of power in Congress, their gains could perversely accelerate current trends. As Republicans lose power in Washington, Trump will gain power within his party.
We cannot blame democracy’s troubles in the United States or overseas on any one charismatic demagogue. Free societies depend on a broad agreement to respect the rules of the game.
The distrust of free speech on campus is being carried by recent graduates into their jobs and communities. We see in other countries, especially the United Kingdom, the rise of an activist left nearly as paranoid and anti-Semitic, as disdainful of liberal freedoms and democratic institutions, as the so-called alt-right in the U.S.
Restoring democracy will require more from each of us than the casting of a single election ballot. It will demand a sustained commitment to renew American institutions.
The road to autocracy is long—which means that we still have time to halt and turn back. It also means that the longer we wait, the farther we must travel to return home.
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