Stop Looking for Red Lines. You no Longer Live in a Full Democracy

It's going to be up to us to bring it back to life

People want to know when we have crossed the line from one state of existence to another. In watching our democracy die, many people are wondering when we will have crossed the line from life to death, from democracy to autocracy. They are looking for a particular moment when they will have to say that the normal rules of politics don’t apply and they will be compelled to change their behavior: stop confirming appointees, stop reporting on opposition to authoritarianism in terms of how it will affect the next election, stop associating with the regime at the White House picnics...

But stop looking for these “red lines”. Red lines may be helpful in negotiating or in deterrence, but they are not useful here because knowing that our democracy is breaking down is not a neat process of categorization. Humans want to categorize things because it's the way our minds work; it helps us to make sense of the world to know that we are in one state and not another. But nature and social processes are usually on a continuum.

Democracy, too, is on a continuum. Some countries have things that seem democratic, like legislatures, and elections, and opposition parties. Iran has these. Russia has these. But these things do not make these countries democracies in any practical sense; nobody would mistake them for full democracies just because they have these elements. Authoritarians often claim to be in a democracy because it is rhetorically useful for them to do so. As democracies die, nobody tells you that you are no longer in a democracy. Nobody comes and declares it dead. When Putin killed Russia’s nascent democracy, it’s not like he one day said, “we are no longer a democracy”. He still calls himself the President and is reelected every once in a while.

People want some dramatic event to know a democracy is dead and to be able to categorize it as such: some crossing of the Rubicon or crowning of the emperor. But you don’t need to wait for such an event: in the United States, we no longer live in a full democracy.

This is not a question about the future. Our rights are being violated right now. You are less free than you were five months ago. Dramatically so.

Speech has been coercively punished. The regime is lying to you on a daily basis and strong-arming the press into credulously reporting those lies. Law firms are being punished for protecting your constitutional rights. A secret police is disappearing legal residents off the streets. There are reports that they are beating them. Legal residents are being arrested for their speech. Congress is on the brink of passing laws to give more money to Trump’s secret police. Under blatantly false pretenses, the military has been deployed to stop peaceful protestors.

The Constitutional order, created to constrain the executive and empower the representatives of the people, has stopped working. Congress has abdicated all responsibility. Impeachment is the ultimate Congressional check on the executive, and that is 100% off the table because of partisan loyalty.

If there was any chance of Congress being a constraint through less dramatic means, it is being taken away by state violence and state-sanctioned threats of violence. Democratic members of Congress have been violently handcuffed and charged with crimes. Republicans are reportedly scared to oppose Trump because of threats from his violent supporters. This means that people elected to represent you are no longer doing their jobs in your interest, but under threat of coercion by a violent executive. This means the wheels of representative democracy are breaking down. Right now, at the federal level, I’d say these wheels are barely turning.

NBC News

Constraints on Trump’s authoritarianism won’t come from within the executive branch. The reason cabinet secretaries are constitutionally required to have congressional approval is that the founders intended for these secretaries to constrain the president through their control over the executive bureaucracy. But the Senate confirmed cabinet secretaries and law enforcement officials with no other qualifications than loyalty to Trump. The secretaries, people who command armies and paramilitary units, are not constraining Trump; they are only eager to please him, acting and sounding like sycophants.

Non-partisan watchdogs and bureaucrats like the FTC have been illegally removed. These systems, created by law to be free from pressure from the President and to guard the well-being of American citizens, are not constraining Trump.

We are now looking to other institutions to protect us. Americans are having conversations about whether the military would stop Trump by disobeying his illegal orders. But now we even worry about the professionalization of the military breaking down as Trump has started to treat it like a personalistic political force.

But take a step back now. We are having conversations about whether the military will save us from the actions of a dictator, for God’s sake. Just like the conversations we are having about whether the courts will save us, this is a sign that our constitutional order has broken down. At this point, when serious people are having these discussions, it is because we are already past the stage of a properly functioning democracy.

It is not clear that anything is currently constitutionally or legally constraining Trump, and, to the extent that you are comforted because you think checks like the judiciary (or the military) are still in place, there are very serious questions about whether they will remain independent in the future. They are already under attack now—lawyers are being punished, judges are living in a state of fear, generals are being removed and replaced to maximize loyalty to the regime—and so we must assume this is already limiting their effectiveness.

If you were hoping things would be stopped before it was too late, know that it is already too late. We are no longer operating by the rules we once took for granted. We no longer live in the democracy we once enjoyed.

The only thing currently constraining Trump’s attack on our liberties, and the thing with the most possibility of constraining Trump in the future, is American civil society, which draws on the traditions of American history and culture. It is Trump against 250 years of America. Some Americans have already shown what side they are on: willing to, for reasons of ideology or, more likely, comfort and ambition, to go along with this grotesque attack on our democracy. The rest of us must decide what we will do.

If you ever wondered what you would do if something awful happened to other people in your country, how you would behave when that historical moment came, when your country needed you, stop wondering. It is happening now. What you are doing is what you are doing. You are living in that moment.

The means of resistance are still present. Trump and the way he rules are very, very unpopular. Americans like American democracy and don’t want somebody destroying it. Yes, we elected him, but I can tell you, as a student of voting behavior, that there are all kinds of perfectly reasonable reasons that people didn’t understand what they were getting into. Did those who voted for him make a bad choice? Yes, of course. But now many of them are going to change their minds. Many have already changed their minds.

Now that the band-aid has been ripped off, his authoritarianism nakedly present, Trump will likely become even more unpopular. The only silver lining of where we find ourselves now, with the active duty military on the streets and the head of the secret police talking about “liberating” a city from their democratically elected leaders, is that we now have a focusing event to help people understand what is happening. Trump has been operating as an authoritarian virtually from the time he took the oath of office, but his coercive attacks on universities, the media, and law firms were relatively hard for the public to see as authoritarian. Now he is arresting politicians and putting the military on our streets, and there is no ambiguity about these actions.

Why does this matter? Because unpopular regimes are more likely to fail. When leaders are unpopular, when people protest and show their resistance, it gives strength to leaders who may oppose the regime. For America, those who will need this strength include politicians, the military personnel who will likely be asked to carry out illegal orders, and judges who will be under tremendous pressure, including threats of violence, not to constrain Trump. It is up to all of us to show these people that civil society is behind them.

So, what can we do? What can you do as one person? If you have a platform, now is the time to use it. When you built that platform, you probably thought it was because you wanted to make the world a better place. Use it now.

For those thinking that they don’t have a platform and wondering what can be done besides rage posting: first, remember that you do have a platform, however small, and you should use it whenever you can, and second, don’t forget the power of your body and your presence. The power of one body is amplified when it is combined with thousands and millions of others. Don’t forget the power of non-violence and the moral agency it provides.

Robert W. Klein/AP

Here is what Mario Savio said in 1964 at Berkeley as the Free Speech Movement changed our college campuses across the country:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!

That doesn't mean that you have to break anything. One thousand people sitting down some place, not letting anybody by, not [letting] anything happen, can stop any machine, including this machine! And it will stop!!

Be part of stopping the machine of authoritarianism in the United States. You can start with the No Kings protest tomorrow.