Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.
Trump and his team have a series of proposals to crack down on dissent, including by remaking the Justice Department into a tool for jailing his enemies and sending troops to suppress protests.
They have extensive plans to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with ideologues and toadies, putting people ready and willing to undermine the rule of law in key positions to act on Trump’s dubious orders.
While a second Trump term is vanishingly unlikely to produce an openly fascist state — that’s not really how authoritarian takeovers of democracy work today — it’s quite plausible that they could do extensive, even fatal, damage to the American system by pulling the right policy levers.
The second is to argue that the end of American democracy is unthinkable: The United States government has so many veto points that even a competent and determined authoritarian would find themselves hampered by Congress, federalism, and the courts.
And though the United States is very different from both Hungary and Israel, we also have a long history of anti-democratic politics — one that the Republican Party has, in word and in deed, grown increasingly comfortable aping in recent years.
The original article contains 1,405 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.
Trump and his team have a series of proposals to crack down on dissent, including by remaking the Justice Department into a tool for jailing his enemies and sending troops to suppress protests.
They have extensive plans to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with ideologues and toadies, putting people ready and willing to undermine the rule of law in key positions to act on Trump’s dubious orders.
While a second Trump term is vanishingly unlikely to produce an openly fascist state — that’s not really how authoritarian takeovers of democracy work today — it’s quite plausible that they could do extensive, even fatal, damage to the American system by pulling the right policy levers.
The second is to argue that the end of American democracy is unthinkable: The United States government has so many veto points that even a competent and determined authoritarian would find themselves hampered by Congress, federalism, and the courts.
And though the United States is very different from both Hungary and Israel, we also have a long history of anti-democratic politics — one that the Republican Party has, in word and in deed, grown increasingly comfortable aping in recent years.
The original article contains 1,405 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!