I WITNESS: Erasing democracy is easier than you think

As most of us have learned over the course of the past few weeks, democracy is a fragile form of government. It requires several key ingredients to flourish, chief among them the agreement that we are born equal, that we deserve access to equal opportunities, and that we are accorded equal rights under law. Democracies die in the absence of those core values.

Democracies require us to be tolerant of other human beings who are not like us. American democracy formerly required me to understand and accept that my Jewish faith is not any better or worse than anyone else’s religion; that my white skin is no better or worse than the color of someone else’s skin; that it is OK for me to be gay and OK for you to be something else; that there is a social contract our democracy requires us to observe, and the contract stipulates that I may not do exactly as I please if doing exactly as I please creates the risk of harm to the community in which I live, including harm to those with whom I disagree.

American democracy also requires me to accept the results of a free and fair election, even when my preferred candidate for office loses to a candidate whom I completely despise.

But in order for a democracy to survive and thrive, a majority of citizens, including our elected representatives, must subscribe to those same basic principles. When half the electorate decides that those principles are expendable, and co-equal branches of government decline to defend those principles, you may find yourself living in Victor Orban’s Hungary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jin Ping’s China, or Donald Trump’s America.

Most journalists, and the news organizations that employ them, screamed themselves blue in the face for close to a decade. They consistently did the work of describing, based on factual reporting, the danger that Donald Trump, his wealthy cronies, his congressional and judicial enablers, the Heritage Foundation, and his stable of paramilitary wingnuts posed to American democracy. I am an essayist, not a journalist, but I certainly did my fair share of screaming, too.

We may already have arrived at the point, only a few weeks into Donald Trump’s return to power, where at least a segment of those who voted for Trump are beginning to experience buyers’ remorse. I find it a little perplexing, frankly, that perfectly intelligent Americans did not understand, all along, that anyone who does business with Donald Trump gets burned. They get burned because he is a zero-sum kind of a guy. He only feels that he has won if everyone else loses, and in order for everyone to lose, they have to be destroyed. He has a zero-sum view of governing, as well. There can only be one winner, him, and those who are insufficiently subservient must also be destroyed.

And as half the electorate feared, he is destroying at lightning speed. He is hell-bent on killing democracy, and if ordinary citizens suffer, so be it.

Here is exactly how democracy gets erased, in 10 easy steps:

1. The worst people on the planet write a handbook for a dictatorship, and with some assistance, their designated strongman immediately implements it.
2. The strongman empties the prisons of violent criminals who have previously demonstrated their fealty to him and their willingness to violate the law on his behalf, while simultaneously installing military commanders who are willing to violate the rights of citizens in order to help him maintain power by force.
3. The strongman hollows out the government by persecuting those who are insufficiently loyal—say, career public servants who have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution—and replaces them, if he replaces them at all, with fawning, amoral toads.
4. The strongman places in positions of power loyalists who, instead of safeguarding the institutions that support a functioning democracy, intentionally corrupt and dismantle them.
5. The strongman removes his country from organizations and agreements designed to encourage and preserve democracies worldwide.
6. The strongman strangles the agencies that promote and defend democracy by withholding funding, locking workers out of their jobs, and engaging in mass firings.
7. The strongman moves swiftly to remove protections from historically marginalized communities, claiming that he believes in meritocracy, when most people understand that a lack of opportunity for education, training, and advancement simply consigns people with talent and promise to a permanent underclass. Instead of a meritocracy, this results in mediocracy.
8. The strongman obliterates actual history by removing portraits of predecessors from the walls of public buildings, erasing evidence of his own malfeasance, replacing truth with self-serving revision, and strangling public education.
9. The strongman silences the free press through threats, intimidation, and extreme financial pressure. He hands formerly independent news organizations to propaganda-spewing sycophants.
10. The strongman moves to corrupt or eliminate free and fair elections.

In three short weeks, Donald Trump has already begun to implement nine of the 10 steps that make democracy disappear. It will take some time for him to implement the 10th. In my opinion, the swiftest and surest avenue to establishing himself as a dictator is to foment a constitutional crisis and call in the military to suppress dissent by force.

I do not know if step 10 will occur immediately, but it is the final building block to unchecked power, and it shouldn’t take long. Nevertheless, we should resist the impulse to wring our hands in despair. For the moment, we are still a government of, by, and for the people, and to paraphrase Donald Trump, if we don’t fight like hell, we won’t have a democracy anymore.