Incumbent leaders beware: voters have their eye on the escape hatch |
Effectively, until last week, American voters were co-conspirators in their own democratic enfeeblement.
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Historically, it felt irretrievable, not because of a single unfit president but because of the country's weak resistance, its apparent comfort with leaving democracy behind.
That equanimity persisted after Donald Trump's January 6 siege in 2021, enabling his reprise via a second-term landslide in 2024. And it appeared to survive a new war, his buddying up with dictators, unpopular data centres, his ICE deportations, and his boneheaded tariffs. Not to forget soliciting hundreds of millions in foreign gifts while attacking America's best friends.
Frustratingly, it was a period when Republicans, in thrall to an ego-driven dilettante, unburdened themselves from social, political and legal constraints. Science too was cut loose.
Self-describing "Reagan Republicans" cravenly assisted as executive power was expanded beyond congressional reach and the nation's highest office was monetised, privatised, and embarrassingly trivialised.
Equally frustrating was a new relativism of the public mind enabling almost daily assaults on decency and governing standards to accumulate - each new outrage helping to obscure the last - creating a glut of democratic abuses so commonplace as to become mere wallpaper.
Courts had been stacked and the Department of Justice, openly politicised. Enemies were prosecuted, the president's felonies ignored. Trump's delusional midnight utterances and memes depicted him as a healing Jesus. Meanwhile, his open threats of genocidal intent hardly troubled the headline writers.
A new "forever war" - something explicitly forsworn - kicked off with no plan, no end-point, and no recourse to Congress or the UN.
A vast paramilitary force, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was charged with raiding farms, factories and........