Debs speaking in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, being arrested for sedition shortly thereafter.

“I now think the United States may well be evolving,” Damon Linker writes at Persuasion, “to become a competitive authoritarian system in which free elections are still held but fall far short of fairness.”

While I often disagree with Linker — I’m a radical libertarian, he’s a conservative-leaning centrist, do the math — I also often agree with his criticisms of Donald Trump, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, and the faux “populism” they espouse.

But wow. I don’t know that I’ve ever resorted to the Britishism “gobsmacked” to describe my response to an op-ed before. In this........

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