American democracy nears tipping point as an authoritarian takeover accelerates
Good morning from Washington, where I’m trying to recover my voice after some challenging months dealing with family and medical issues.
I apologize for being out of touch with you here. Thank you for your notes and continuing to listen. I’ll have more to share and say in the days and weeks to come.
For now, I wanted to collect and share some public reflections on the historic moment we are in, in hopes that doing so would be useful to you and others. I’ve tried to organize this into easily scannable sections. As always, if you have comments, suggestions, tips, or other feedback, you can reach me at alex@governing.digital.
An inflection point looms
As long-time readers of mine know, I believe the U.S. has been in a governance crisis ever since Trump refused to concede in 2020, abused power to seek to retain power, conspired to overturn the election, & incited an insurrection with lies, but was not held accountable.
Trump was indicted but not tried after SCOTUS delayed & gave immunity that doesn’t exist in our Constitution, & DoJ decided it couldn’t keep prosecuting a President-elect.
The Biden administration both failed to resolve that crisis, & left us vulnerable.
Trump has now created a much worse constellation of governance crises with a series of authoritarian actions unprecedented in American history that have not been checked by Congress.
He has taken control of power agencies & has purged government specifically to prevent accountability for corruption, while pardoning over a dozen politicians convicted of corruption.
Pardons, weaponization of agencies, & purges are the direct result of a real governance crisis, not an imagined one.
When paired with a public health crisis & systemic info disorder that was been deliberately seeded with weapons of mass denial, doubt, & distraction in a nation with poor education system, we are now sliding towards conditions ripe for further autocratization.
What’s happened is a result of these governance crises, after institutions didn’t check & balance corruption & conspiracy, respond effectively in the pandemic, or create societal resilience against lies & propaganda — & elected Democrats didn’t prepare our nation after Election Day.
Folks who warned of risks from low trust, corruption, & creeping authoritarianism, advocating for government transparency & accountability as a bulwark against American fascism & illiberalism were frozen out by a Biden White House, which wanted to “move on” from a coup & pandemic.
They were wrong.
We now are livng through an epistemic crisis, worsened by cable news, talk radio, social media, poor educations, & decades of lies about fraud, & systemic delegitimization of the press.
But there’s also deeper a money in politics problem: legalized corruption, favoring corporations & oligarchs.
And Americans know it.
People across our country lived through 9/11, 2008 financial crisis, a pandemic, & spiraling costs of living, all while watching inequality grow, & rich & powerful people not be held accountable.
We wanted change.
But I don’t believe the changes we are seeing in an authoritarian takeover are what many Americans expected, including many Republicans & independents who dismissed dire warnings of fascism by Cassandras like me.
Rule by Christian ultranationalists hostile to liberal democracy is ugly, & undeniable to those directly affected.
It’s now far later than many Americans may realize, as we see militarized police & nationalized guard repress protests, & our allies abroad re-arm themselves.
Too many advocates keep referring to fascism in Europe, as if totalitarian apartheid states didn’t exist across our South, ruled by eugenicists.
I have little arrogance & ample humility after decades in journalism & good governance advocacy. Part of me died last November.
I don’t know if Americans can overcome distributed denial of democracy attacks by an entrenched regime that will see electoral loss as an existential risk.
But we must try.
Protests are not “rebellions“
Let’s start with first principles, responding to President Trump’s historic, unprecedented attempt to criminalize protest and mobilize the National Guard and now active duty Marines to quell civil unrest in California without a request from a governor.
When President Trump refers to “our country“ he is often referring to himself.
When he said people who “hate our county” will be met with force if they peaceably assemble in public and express dissent in our nation’s capitol, he is saying he won’t tolerate Americans protesting him.
It is as un-American a statement as any President has ever made — save Trump, when he called his fellow Americans vermin, scum, or enemies.
Peaceful protests are neither riots nor insurrections. Dissent is patriotic, & our constitutional right.
Assaulting police officers and arson are neither civil disobedience nor “legitimate political discourse.”
Riots over unconstitutional policing in 2020 were not insurrections nor rebelllions because there was no seditious intent.
Riots over deportations are neither a “rebellion” nor an “insurrection” that merits federal intervention without state & local request for assistance.
Assaulting federal police officers, threatening U.S. officials with lethal violence, & obstructing the transition of power was an insurrection.
Attempting to secede from the United States and making war upon the Union to try to keep the evil institution of chattel slavery was also an insurrection.
When Americans like MLK & John Lewis engaged in civil disobedience to protest segregation during the Civil Rights Movement, they were part of a long history or patriotic dissent in the USA.
Suffragists marching for the vote for decades also engaged in dissent, but they persisted.
It’s possible for a small minority of people to engage in property destruction & assault on cops — and for the vast majority of others to peacefully protest, as was the case in 2020. Both can be accurate without denying the facts of either, nor criminalizing dissent.
Evidence from the historical record around the world is clear : protests can “move votes, & they even dislodge dictators. Surprisingly, they are even more effective than armed revolution. But the details matter—not all protests are equal.”
Jonathan Stray
There are key criteria for successful protests, defined here as reversal of unpopular policy or change in leadership or government. A movement must be large (3.5% population), diverse, & sustained over time — not descend into chaos or resort to violence.
Hypothesis: Protests is the United States have not been big enough, diverse enough, or sustained enough to drive fundamental social change since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, from antiwar marches Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.
Research suggests a key tipping point is 3.5% of a population mobilized. In the USA, that would mean 12 million Americans continually mobilized without devolving into chaos or violence despite state repression, violence, & militia threats — or extrajudicial violence.
Unlike the #HandsOff protests I bore witness to in Washington in April, NoKingsDay this Saturday may reach that “energy of activation” across the United States, but sustaining mobilization and focus in the face of increasingly anger and repression would be another matter.
Crowdsourcing and AI add new friction to viral lies
A tweet on the Speaker of the House’s official, Verified™ account has a public Note showing his claims about a tax bill to be false.
“Grok” debunks hyperbolic & false claims by Trump.
Labels failed to check lies & misinformation on Twitter, but AI + @CommunityNotes are adding novel friction to X.
Facebook is next. It’s going to get verrry interesting on Meta platforms as Threads, Instagram, & Facebook integrate their own AI & their own version of collaborative, crowdsourced fact-checking into the platform.
The lived outcome may be more powerful and weird for the humans here than anyone is clearly thinking about right now, should synthetic personas, AI, & annotations become as integrated into other platforms as Grok is over on X/Twitter.
If mainstream adoption of Meta smartglasses results in more augmented reality and virtual reality experiences that bridge online interactions with offline experiences, watch out.
DC government’s failures on truancy are behind high youth crime rates
Brilliant reporting by Washington Post Investigations team shows how high truancy rates at DC schools that resulted from poor oversight & implementation have led to high youth crimes rates. Gift link: https://wapo.st/4432CV3
Mayor Bowser is singularly accountable for DC government & DCPS performance over the last decade, but provided no comment to the Post, belying her past rhetoric and commitments to open government.
Chairman Mendelson is also accountable, as are other Members of The Council of the District of Columbia, despite his effort to deny their crucial role in oversight to the Post — particularly in a one party town.
This investigation should lead to dismissals, hearings, & reforms. Our kids & city/state deserve much better.
Kudos to Washington Post staff for continuing to hold our government accountable with investigative journalism that uses public records to show Washingtonians how public services and public servants are failing our kids and communities.
Their methodology section is how we should expect news media to “show their work.”
Assaults on the press matter. Mad tweets, not so much.
News media directing public attention to what Terry Moran tweeted without acknowledging a decade of Trump and his partisans directing hate at journalists and seeking to delegitimize journalism is unethical — to say nothing of the obscenity of US officials seeking to chill the First Amendment rights of an American to espress dissent.
The record shows that Trump is leading a hate movement against immigrants & the press. Trump has incited violence against journalists by repeatedly calling them “enemies of the people.”
Moran accurately reported that truth, and lost his job.
Trump & his allies “are working to defund, defang and silence” independent journalism that holds his corrupt administration to account.
News media who omit that context are fanning the flames the arsonist of democracy lit.
Focus attention on what matters.
