The soft guardrails of democracy are no longer strong enough to stop our slow crawl toward autocracy.
When I started writing this early in the week, it was my intent to describe how Trump’s tenure as president would inevitably have consequences on our system of government, even long after his departure from the White House. What I didn’t anticipate was that we’d see those consequences much sooner and so viscerally.
It’s tempting to succumb to the eloquent speeches given by members of Congress just hours after a failed insurrection overran the seat of our federal government — that violence fails in the face of order, and that those who appease hostile forces will be met with unified opposition. It’s the duty of our representatives to instill hope, and they shouldn’t be faulted for that. But we shouldn’t be so naive as to believe this marks the end of a divisive, vitriolic era of politics. Those who stormed the Capitol may indeed be a minority, but it’s a minority that’s grown steadily over the past decade, fueled and fed by a toxic media environment and shameless politicians motivated by their own ambitions. Before Trump, before social media, they found their genesis in the early days of Tea Party protests, where the prevailing conspiracy theory of the day was that the nation’s first Black president was not a citizen, and they proudly touted violently racist signage at their…
