Defending Democracy in America
It’s time to take action.
This is the latest edition of “Diamond on Democracy,” a series by American Purpose at Persuasion. To receive future installments into your inbox—plus more great pieces by American Purpose and Francis Fukuyama’s blog—simply click on “Email preferences” below and make sure you toggle on the relevant buttons. And while you’re at it, why not subscribe to Persuasion, the Bookstack podcast, and Yascha Mounk’s column!
In an essay in this space last month, I argued that the crisis of democracy was already upon us, virtually from the outset of Donald Trump’s second term as president. Nothing has happened in the last few weeks to alter that diagnosis.
The assaults on democratic checks and balances have escalated. Without agreement from Congress, Trump’s DOGE shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development with stunning speed. On March 18, a federal court blocked further implementation, ruling the action “likely violated the Constitution,” but the agency had already been gutted and largely dismantled. On March 15, Trump ordered the effective closure of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and all of America’s other global information services that counter authoritarian propaganda and advance freedom and democracy. On March 20, he signed an executive order to dismantle most of the Department of Education, even though he knows it will take an act of Congress to eliminate it. In an alarming politicization of the military high command, he fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, and the judge advocates general (the highest-ranking legal authorities) for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Pressing his claim to imperial power (through the theory of the “unitary executive”), Trump has moved to assert absolute control over all federal regulatory bodies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission. This not only hobbles their capacity to act independently in the public interest but opens the door to massive corruption. As DOGE seizes control of more and more of the government’s most sensitive and highly centralized stores of data, the conflicts of interest proliferate for its chief “overseer,” Elon Musk, who has received over the years “at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits.” And Just Security has documented an “alarming” pattern of “politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice” since January 20.
The United States now faces the grave and imminent danger of democracy decaying into a hollow shell of “competitive authoritarianism.” In such a system, multiparty elections still hold, but they are no longer free and fair. The opposition wins seats in Congress and some city and state governments. But at the national level, a domineering leader and ruling party assert monolithic control over government, in a grip that cannot be broken by any normal means. Regulatory agencies are stripped of their independence. The legislative branch becomes a rubber stamp. The courts are pressured, defied, and eventually brought to heel. The civil service and the military are purged of non-loyalists and converted into instruments of the “elected” leader and his party. The media are pressured and sued into passivity and subservience. Business is lured into backing the authoritarian project with the promise of huge financial windfalls (and crippling punishment of defection). Universities are threatened with financial ruin if they resist or protest. Think tanks and philanthropies are threatened with loss of their tax-exempt status and even prosecution if they speak up. Prominent critics and opposition voices, including former officeholders, fall silent for fear of retribution. Democracy dies, to use T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase from The Hollow Men, “not with a bang but with a whimper.”
This is the pathway by which democracy has died, at varying speeds, in Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, Serbia, and several other countries. It is the trajectory that India has been on under Narendra Modi, Slovakia under Robert Fico, and Poland under the Law and Justice Party—until it was defeated in national elections in October 2023. If this slide away from democracy is to be averted, we must learn the lessons of other countries. First, as a prominent Ukrainian democrat said to me, “The path from democracy is much shorter than the path to it.”
Assaults on democracy often gain momentum more rapidly than democrats can imagine in their glib self-confidence that “it can’t happen here.” Thus, early action is crucial. The earlier that countervailing pressure is mobilized, the more likely it is to succeed. Second, principled resistance must be mounted within the executive branch to defend constitutional norms and the rule of law. Third, checks and balances must be activated early on by Congress, the judiciary, and regulatory institutions to counter creeping authoritarianism and defend constitutional guardrails. Fourth, a smart political strategy, with effective messaging and a broad coalition, is needed to oppose authoritarian drift and ultimately to effect the surest means of halting authoritarian creep—defeating it at the polls. Finally, ordinary citizens must push back through mass mobilization and courageous individual action.
A National Strategy to Resist Creeping Authoritarianism
Defenders of democracy should not reflexively oppose every initiative of the Trump administration. Some of its policies—like trying to encourage investments in new manufacturing plants in the United States—may be positive and worth supporting. And if democracy defenders scream at equal volume over every harmful presidential move—without distinguishing between their varying levels of illegality, unconstitutionality, irrationality, and cruelty—people will stop listening. We need a strategy—particularly on the part of Democratic leaders in the Congress and state governments—to prioritize the most serious assaults on democracy, accountability, fairness, and human needs. However, there is no room for passivity or patience in the face of creeping authoritarianism. The worst course, even if only temporary, would be to (in James Carville’s words) “roll over and play dead.” Early action is critical to frustrating authoritarian ambitions, and it needs a strategy of escalating mobilization in response to escalating assaults.
Every actor inside and outside of government has a role to play in the defense of democracy. Let’s begin inside the belly of the beast: the executive branch of government. The career civil service is a crucial actor in serving the American public interest while observing merit-based principles of excellence, professionalism, and political neutrality. Career civil servants should be encouraged to hang on in the service of these principles as long as possible and to decline to comply with orders that violate laws or regulations. Trump derisively refers to this workforce as “the deep state,” but societies prosper when they have states with the depth of expertise, training, commitment, and autonomy to guard public health, provide veterans benefits, ensure water quality, develop rural communities, maintain national parks, expose corruption and fraud, and protect consumers from financial misconduct. These essential functions of government are now under assault as the DOGE chainsaw hacks away indiscriminately at the federal workforce. Fortunately, most federal workers declined Elon Musk’s legally dubious order to report their work to him or resign. But the Trump White House wants to purge the career civil service of anyone who hints at independence.
No federal worker should go quietly into that dark night. Every act of principled resistance, even if it comes at the price of termination for following the law, puts an obstacle on the authoritarian pathway. Recently, a former federal prosecutor, Brendan Ballou, described how Trump’s Muslim travel ban early in his first term was slowed and narrowed by low- and mid-level Justice Department officials who forthrightly “explained to those far above them why the ban was legally and operationally disastrous.”
The combination of internal resistance and public pressure proved particularly potent then. So can the combination of internal resistance and judicial action. In late January, Trump reached beyond his authority to fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, without cause. She was the first member of the NLRB removed by a U.S. president since its inception in 1935. But she did not go quietly into the night; she filed a lawsuit. In doing so, she defended not only her right but that of all members of federal boards and commissions to serve out their fixed terms. On March 6, a federal judge, Beryl A. Howell, ruled that Wilcox’s firing was “a blatant violation of the law” and ordered her reinstated, adding: “A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator’ … fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution.”
Wilcox has not been alone in standing up. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing more than 800,000 federal and D.C. government workers, has filed numerous lawsuits against DOGE’s illegal firings of and ultimatums to federal workers, and is challenging its mode of operation and its sweeping access to government data. Civil servants have also self-organized to secure their communications and protect their rights.
The Crucial Role of the Courts
Ultimately the NLRB court case, and many others opposing presidential power grabs, will be decided by the Supreme Court. In the United States—and in other countries in which overbearing executives have sought to aggrandize their power undemocratically—the judiciary is vital to the defense of democratic guardrails. It is where people turn for relief when their rights are violated. It is where organizations go to defend themselves when an autocratic Trump administration abuses its power by freezing their bank accounts and suggesting criminal fraud because of their receipt of environmental grants under the previous administration.
Since January 20, independent civil society organizations with legal expertise, such as Democracy Forward, Protect Democracy, Public Citizen, and the Brennan Center, have filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s overreach. By the count of The New York Times, “As of March 11, at least 44 [court] rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the president’s initiatives.” Among other things, these temporary orders have suspended the firing of some civil servants, the termination of birthright citizenship, the gutting of USAID, the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “the freezing of up to $3 trillion in federal funding to the states,” and immigration raids in houses of worships. Other cases are challenging numerous aspects of the Trump administration’s unremitting pursuit of the “unitary executive.”
Some courts have only been able to enforce limited halts in their geographic areas of jurisdiction. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will decide much of this. It might reverse many lower-court restraints on Trump’s imperial actions. But that is not a given. On March 5, the Supreme Court ruled against the administration’s freezing of billions of dollars in foreign aid appropriated by the Congress (though it allowed continued contestation of the issue in lower courts). The 5-4 decision, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Trump-appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberal justices, provoked outrage on the MAGA right. One crucial test will be whether it reconsiders (and if so how) the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. that the president does not have the power to fire a fixed-term member of a federal agency without cause. This historic decision, William Galston has explained, invoked a core restraint on the imperial presidency and an understanding of the separation of powers that dates back to Madison, Hamilton, and the founding of the American republic. Reversing this long-standing constitutional interpretation, writes Paul Verkuil, “has been in the conservative crosshairs for a long time,” and would accelerate the slide back to a 19th century spoils system of corrupt governance.
The gathering constitutional crisis will boil over if the Trump administration defies an explicit Supreme Court ruling, in line with Vice President J.D. Vance’s claim that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” The claim, of course, hangs on what is constitutionally “legitimate,” which only the federal courts can decide. This is why Vance’s statement provoked such outrage from legal scholars, particularly given his prior endorsement of the apocryphal quote from Andrew Jackson, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Already, the administration seems to have clearly violated a court order in deporting some 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. NYU legal scholars Trevor W. Morrison and Richard H. Pildes have detailed the numerous tools courts have to compel compliance with their rulings, including holding actors in criminal contempt and even ordering defiant officials jailed (though this would require cooperation from a U.S. Marshals Service). Even if those measures failed, the lawyers complicit in defiance could be disbarred, and the decimation of the rule of law would likely provoke an economic crisis. Or worse. As Jeff Bleich observed here last week, if Trump blatantly defied the Supreme Court, the resulting legitimacy crisis would likely provoke “prolonged … chaos, including mass protests, riots, collapsing financial markets, military stand-offs, and collapse in support of the leader.”
A Neutered Congress
In a presidential democracy, it falls heavily to the Congress to check presidential excess. But with Republicans holding narrow majorities in the House and Senate; with the bulk of them (particularly in the House) enthusiastically backing Trump’s agenda; and with the MAGA machine vowing to punish congressional defections with massively funded primary challenges, Congress has been missing in action.
The Trump White House is rapidly tilting the balance of power more and more radically from Congress to an imperial presidency. Carl Hulse and Catie Edmonson recently reported, “The Republican-led Congress isn’t just watching the Trump administration gobble up its constitutional powers. It is enthusiastically turning them over to the White House.” A crucial step along this path was the House Republicans’ adoption of a White House bill to keep the government funded for six months, averting a shutdown that would have come on March 15. The radical measure gives the president unprecedented discretion over the disbursement of federal funds. In a searing speech on the Senate floor, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, Patty Murray, condemned the Republicans’ surrender to a bill that “fails to include the typical, detailed spending directives—basic guardrails that Congress provides each year in our funding bills,” and that “turns many of our accounts into slush funds, [giving] the final say over what gets funding to two billionaires who don’t know the first thing about the needs of our working families.”
In a telling sign of the dire straits and deep divisions confronting congressional Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer felt compelled to back the stop-gap spending measure for fear that a government shutdown would give Trump and Musk even more sweeping power to eliminate large portions of the federal government. In the same bill, House Republicans also surrendered for the year their right to block Trump’s imposition of emergency tariffs, even though many House and Senate Republicans privately oppose them. Senate Republicans have also fallen in line to approve Cabinet nominations they knew were terrible (for example of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). And they have sheepishly stood by while Musk has been taking over the federal government. In embracing their institutional castration, Congressional Republicans have largely removed the legislative branch as a check on authoritarian drift, unless and until the balance of power shifts on Capitol Hill.
Presumably, the earliest that could happen would be in the next midterm elections, on November 3, 2026. With Democrats just a few seats away from a majority in the House, and with Trump’s tariffs and reckless management driving the economy toward inflation and recession, Democrats are well positioned to retake the House. That would not only give them the power to block Trump’s legislative and budget demands, but also to launch investigations, which no Republican-led Congressional committee dares consider, of the Trump administration’s booming corruption, conflicts of interest, and abuses of power. But the next Congress will not convene until January 2027, and that leaves Trump nearly two more years to run rampage over the Constitution and the rule of law.
Could something happen before then? Republicans last November won narrow majorities—220-215 in the House, and 53-47 in the Senate. (The current balance in the House is 218-213 due to several vacancies). It would only take a few Republicans in either body declaring their independence to change the political dynamic. And in most committees, it would take only a single Republican defection to block a bill or a confirmation or issue a subpoena to someone like Elon Musk.
The presumption is that any House or Senate Republican marching out of lockstep would be committing political suicide, with Musk and other rich MAGA loyalists ready to pour tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat them in a Republican primary. But what if a congressman or senator who saw the country approaching an authoritarian precipice refused to play that game and instead declared their willingness to run as an independent? Many of them come from red states or districts that Democrats have little chance of winning. In a straight contest between a Republican independent, conservative but principled, and a MAGA extremist, the principled conservative could well win by fashioning a coalition of concerned Republicans, independents, and Democrats. Such a strategy would test the Democrats’ capacity for strategic sophistication and discipline. That capacity might be bolstered by close study of other national experiences in reversing authoritarian drift, such as Poland, where the ability of parties to rise above narrow self-interest and form broad coalitions proved crucial to the defense and renewal of democracy.
Mass Political and Civic Action
In the end, there is no substitute for electoral victory. Authoritarian projects are halted most decisively when they lose at the ballot box. This will require a complex, multi-level, and coordinated electoral strategy from the Democrats, but it cannot wait until the next two federal elections. Democrats are sorely in need of more vigorous and coherent messaging to expose the corruption and self-interest behind the Trump agenda and the immense damage it is doing to the economy; to the well-being of ordinary Americans; to the faintest notion of a fair society; and—not least—to U.S. national security.
Elections are focal points of opposition. They give large groups a clear goal and ordinary citizens an opportunity to become involved—to donate to candidates and parties, knock on doors, write letters, make phone calls, host events, and speak their minds. This work will need to take place on a massive scale in the next two election cycles, but it must begin now. In the words of Senator Chris Murphy, Democrats must “build a movement all over this country” to systematically expose the “stunning rampage of open public corruption.” Democrats must relentlessly challenge Trump’s ruthless and destructive policies. They must also offer a more viable and humane alternative to the status quo. To recapture the middle and working classes, they need to reach humbly across social and cultural divides to offer new pathways to job creation, community revitalization, and technological innovation. They have to pitch a broad tent that welcomes diverse constituencies rather than subjecting them to cultural litmus tests.
Mass vigilance and mass action will need to come as well from outside the arena of electoral politics. Internal resistance and external mobilization work in tandem. In 2017, mid-career Justice Department officials took significant risks to oppose Trump’s first travel ban. “[P]ublic outrage gave us courage and the knowledge that we were in fact working in the public interest,” the former Justice Department lawyer Brendan Ballou recalled. “Advocacy on the outside made advocacy on the inside possible.”
Many members of Congress have already felt the heat from town hall meetings and office phone lines flooded with protests. “At events from Georgia and Wisconsin to Oklahoma and Oregon, House Republicans faced sometimes-hostile crowds furious about the sweeping budget cuts and mass firings of federal workers,” NBC reported in late February. We should expect large-scale demonstrations to come. But it is vitally important that they remain strictly nonviolent, civil in tone, and disciplined in resisting provocation, or Trump and his movement will seize upon them to discredit the opposition. Historically, global democratic movements (including the American civil rights movement) have made use of a wide variety of tactics of nonviolent civil resistance. These have included not just marches but strikes, consumer boycotts, and civil disobedience. To constrain or defeat authoritarian projects outside of elections, Hardy Merriman observes, citizens must withhold obedience, and to do so effectively, they must coordinate. Civil resistance movements succeed to the extent they muster unity, planning, and discipline on a large scale.
This point cannot be overestimated: Power requires obedience. The key to resisting authoritarian power is, to quote Timothy Snyder’s essay On Tyranny, “Do not obey in advance.” He warns from history: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” It was freely given when Washington Post publisher and mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos withdrew his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, and then more recently when he imposed unprecedented restrictions on the paper’s opinion page—ironically with the claim of focusing on “personal liberties.” It was freely given when social media plutocrat Mark Zuckerberg traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate after the election to pay obeisance with massive Facebook policy concessions, and further when he along with numerous other tech titans donated $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration fund. It was given when Senator Joni Ernst crumbled under pressure and withdrew her opposition to Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and when other Republican senators did the same for other Cabinet secretaries who they knew were unqualified and dangerous. It is given every day that institutions do not speak up in legitimate defense of their rights and interests.
Consider two examples. Universities are now paralyzed with fear as they grapple with disastrous cuts in federal funding for research and probably more aggressive assaults to come. The administration’s recent letter to Columbia University, demanding highly specific and invasive changes in university policy as a prerequisite to any consideration of lifting the cancellation of $400 million in federal government grants and contracts, has struck alarm in universities nationwide. This follows a stream of other administration actions zealously exceeding Supreme Court rulings to demand an end to all diversity-related programs; threatening Georgetown University’s law school with a federal jobs blacklist for its students if it doesn’t remove DEI elements from its curriculum; and apprehending for deportation a recent Columbia University graduate student from the Middle East, Mahmoud Khalil (a U.S. permanent resident), for his anti-Israel advocacy on campus.
Many universities have a lot of work to do (and Columbia more than most) to implement more serious policies and procedures to combat antisemitism, punish disruptions of academic life, and rein in runaway DEI programs that have lost perspective and undermined academic freedom and pluralism. And Khalil’s campaign to sever ties with Israel was in my view odious. But the administration presented no evidence that Khalil did anything criminal. Rather, David French argues, the arrest was drenched in malice and incompetence, with the goal of chilling free speech. “So far,” write Harvard political scientists Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky, “America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education” (though Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has been an exception). If that silence continues, higher education in America will suffer grievous damage to its ability to advance U.S. competitiveness and foster a marketplace of ideas and innovation. The dilemma universities now face calls to mind the quip often attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must all hang together, or … we shall all hang separately.”
The same goes for the country’s big law firms as they grapple with the consequences of Trump’s ferocious “retaliatory spree” against law firms that have been associated with the opposition party or with legal cases against Trump. Many individual lawyers at a host of top firms have signed an open letter condemning the president’s actions (which seek to cripple the firms by barring them from interaction with federal agencies), and the president of the American Bar Association has made a similar statement. “But Big Law leadership has not uttered a word to support its own, and that silence has not gone unnoticed,” reports The American Lawyer magazine. Once again, federal judge Beryl Howell blocked the administration from implementing a constitutionally dubious policy, claiming it was “viewpoint discrimination” that “runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protections.”
But the larger problem remains: a lack of courage. The point of these attacks, writes the historian and autocracy expert Anne Applebaum, is to intimidate the field, “to make every university afraid to offend the administration; to make academics self-censor; to make students wary too.” For the moment, intimidation is working. Every actor, every institution, is ducking for cover and hoping others will walk the plank for them. Universities, law firms, media enterprises—these are core institutions of a democratic civil society that autocrats target as they seek to amass unassailable power. If each of them cowers in fear, waiting for something to happen, by the time a critical mass of resolve emerges, it may be too late.
The American public simply does not realize how aggressive, ambitious, far-reaching, and extreme is the Trump administration’s assault on independent institutions. The defense of democracy requires persistent, principled, and coordinated action, and now is the time to organize it.
What Can One Citizen Do?
The most difficult question I and my analytic colleagues are asked is: What can one citizen do? In a speech marking the 55th anniversary of his “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march in Selma, Congressman John Lewis offered this answer: “Speak up. Speak out. Get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
American democracy is facing a rapidly gathering authoritarian challenge. The first imperative is: Do not stay silent. Do not be a bystander. Make your voice heard, in your organization, your local community, and beyond. Join with like-minded citizens to oppose the assault on democracy at any opportunity.
To do that effectively, first, keep informed. Read multiple sources of news and information, ideally with different editorial lines. Subscribe to the newsletters of organizations that are working to defend democracy. One source I’ve come to value is the Substack of Protect Democracy, “If You Can Keep It.” It’s full of timely, well researched, and detailed information, and also offers a lot of good advice, including an essay on “How *you* can protect democracy,” which has informed my thinking here. A larger vital source is The Bulwark. It began in 2019 as “a home for rational, principled, fact-based center-right voices who were not cowed by Trumpism,” but it can rightly claim to have “No tribal prejudices.” Of course, I also recommend the Substacks and platforms that are publishing this essay, and the analysis of magazines like The Atlantic and The Economist. And wherever possible, support independent local journalism.
Second, explore organizations that are doing good work to defend democracy and mobilize civil society, and if you like what you see, support them financially to the extent you can. I have already mentioned four that have been active in filing lawsuits: Protect Democracy, Democracy Forward, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Public Citizen. Democracy 2025 is a coalition of more than 400 organizations, coordinated by Democracy Forward, working to defend democracy and rights through legal action. The pro-democracy work of Common Cause dates all the way back to the Nixon era, while Renew Democracy Initiative is a newer effort aimed at defending democracy at home and abroad. Many good organizations are supported by Democracy Fund, a foundation created by philanthropist Pierre Omidyar. Among them is the States United Democracy Center, which focuses on securing free and fair elections. If you are worried about what the Trump administration is doing to ravage basic services and support for working families, check out the “Take Action” page of the million-member grassroots organization, MomsRising.
Third, find ways to strengthen democracy in your local community, for example by reinvigorating civic education (including teaching about the history and institutional design of American democracy) in our schools and universities and by organizing efforts that promote civic deliberation, collaboration, respectful dialogue, and social connection across partisan, racial, and religious divides. In a newly released survey, More in Common found that more than two-thirds of Americans feel a responsibility to engage across these differences.
Fourth, donate some of your time and skill to the cause of defending democracy and building civic solidarity. In these next few years, we are going to need a lot of lawyers to defend people who have been unjustly accused or legally harassed by incipient authoritarian actors. Others who are targeted may need psychological support. And a lot of federal workers who are being fired will need work. Some organizations will also benefit from students willing to volunteer their time as researchers. And in elections to come, we will continue to need civic-minded citizens to register voters and volunteer as election workers.
Fifth, form partnerships for action. Engage your family, friends, and community members in conversations about what you can do together to protest violations of democracy and make your collective voice heard by public officials. As protest scales up nationally in response to escalating abuses, think about forms of action you may be willing to take to resist creeping authoritarianism.
Sixth, participate actively in the electoral process. Donate time and money to candidates. Knock on doors. Attend rallies. Use social media creatively but wisely. Write postcards and make phone calls to voters in swing states. If you live in a deep red district or state and you are not a Republican, think about re-registering as one if that may help save a more independent-minded officeholder from Trumpian retribution in a Republican primary.
Seventh, be a democratically conscious consumer. Stop buying products from business oligarchs who are profiting from proximity to this authoritarian project. If you own stock in their businesses, think about selling it.
Eighth, resist apathy, resignation, and fear. Even in normal times, the power of the federal government is awesome; and it can seem terrifying when wielded by actors whose purpose is intimidation, retribution, and, ultimately, domination. The path ahead is going to be difficult and draining. But we have no choice.
It sounds so hackneyed to recall the ragged band of freezing revolutionaries at Valley Forge, the more than 600,000 dead in the American Civil War, the existential struggle against fascism in World War II, freedom’s close call during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, the brutalities endured by legions of African Americans and their partners who stood up, sat down, and marched for civil rights—and so much more. So many brave people, extraordinary and ordinary, of every color, ethnicity, status, and faith, have sacrificed so much to build this democracy. We have no right to throw it away now.
Hopefully, American school children are still taught the famous phrase from JFK’s inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” As our democracy is newly threatened from within and without, these words have renewed relevance today. President Kennedy rallied the country to meet an existential challenge, and to lean into it:
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.
We should do so now as well.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University.
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Mr Diamond starts with a false statement. "The assaults on democratic checks and balances have escalated. " Our Republic lost its constitutional checks and balances with the passage of the 17th amendment. Since then, we have been closer to the deeply flawed concept of democracy. Political; Pied Pipers ever since have been leading our "democracy" to the dismal swamp of dept and oppression. A democracy would have voted on say homosexual marriage or in the previous century on abortion rights. Or on say tax rates or immigration? If we had put closing on the border to a democratic vote, there is no question that it would have passed by a large majority. If we could put only two genders to a democratic vote it would pass overwhelmingly. The only check and balance against a democracy is a Senate of people elected by the legislatures of the States, and preferably an elected member of that sitting body to restore the better form of government, a republic. Without such a check and balance we are simply a form of mobocracy. Our democratic process elected Mr. Trump, in 2016 and then the unelected elite sabotaged his attempts to correct our governments flaws, playing by your rules. Now more strongly the people have democratically reelected Mr. Trump, with all his deep flaws, to break the plates of many undemocratically enacted policies. I wish him luck and am sure he will not destroy our deeply flawed democracy but maybe dent corrupt political control over its flawed process.
A long but important post. Thank you, Professor Diamond.
I already donate to some of the mentioned orgs defending democratic rights, but maybe I will add a few more.