Should we take comfort in the fact that the president has proved too stupid, lazy, and incompetent to effect the wholesale subversion of democracy? That he has nor actually imprisoned his rivals, executed whistleblowers, declared martial law or deployed mutant sharks with lasers?
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What if next time we face not a fake Mussolini, but a real Mussolini? What comfort is there in the fact that GOP officials even now, in the face of his insane, seditious, and paranoid ravings about the election, refuse to speak out and say, “Now you have gone too far?”
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The guardrails of democracy are not just laws, norms, and regulations—but public officials with a sense of courage and decency and higher commitment to principle than to their own power.
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Trump may have been defeated. But if this was a test of the system, we cannot imagine that we have passed with full marks. Until there is a “vaccination” against the authoritarian impulse, we await the next, and possibly fatal attack.
