Democracy at Bay

A shockingly large percentage of the American electorate is receptive to authoritarian rule. A headline in a recent dispatch I received from the Atlantic stated: “America’s next authoritarian will be much more competent.  . .  It won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president.”

 Prominent Republican politicians who are very smart and highly educated but whose moral compass points in the same direction as a hyena’s  –– men like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley –– have surely been thinking: “If I had been in the White House, instead of Trump, by now I would be positioned to be president for life. 

 We need to strengthen the defenses of our democracy, and we may not have much time to do it.