The White House’s increasing inaccessibility to the press; the violence against lawmakers and journalists; the apparent ease with which Russia preyed on Americans’ deep political divisions and distrust of government; and the president’s efforts to delegitimize the media, his opponents, unfavorable court rulings, and independent investigations into his campaign’s ties with Moscow, have all contributed to a sense that American democracy is battered and besieged.
“America is no more immune from collapse than were some of history’s most stable and impressive consensual governments,” Victor Davis Hanson wrote last week in National Review. “Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence and Venice, and many of the elected governments of early 20th-century Western European states eventually destroyed themselves, went bankrupt, or were overrun by invaders.”
In May, amid the fallout from Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, the democracy-monitoring group Bright Line Watch polled more than 1,000 political scientists in the United States on whether America was adhering to a list of 29 democratic principles. What they found is that the vitality of American democracy depends on your definition of “democracy.” The U.S. performed well on measures of free expression but poorly on measures of political civility and equality, with the quality of elections and checks and balances on power earning mixed results.
A poll by another democracy-monitoring project, the Authoritarian Warning Survey, helps place America’s political problems in an international context. In May, 68 democracy scholars compared the behavior of American political leaders since January to the typical behavior of politicians in other mature democracies. On average, the United States was judged to be within the norm for “consolidated” democracies in terms of the rejection of political violence and the protection of civil liberties. It was considered to be just outside the norm when it comes to constraints on executive power, respect for an independent press, and commitment to free and fair elections in which political opponents are treated as legitimate. And, most remarkably, it was deemed significantly outside the norm on political rhetoric that honors democratic principles. When asked what recent development posed the greatest threat to American democracy, the most common response was Trump’s dismissal of Comey.
From just one of dozens of articles about our waning democracy.
And democracy's gradual dissolution globally.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/american-democracy-trump/530454/ Tyranny doesn't suddenly appear and take hold. It's a slow process.
But, Hillary.
