How America's Democracy Is "Ripe to be Exploited" (ProPublica)

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"Wealthy Americans... have to convince at least some nonwealthy Americans to support their platform...

"You do it with issues of identity, their sense of threat, their sense of fear, their sense of the world is changing and 'I’m being left behind.'”

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How America’s Democracy Is “Ripe to be Exploited”
Why are so many people now embracing demagogues? Barbara Walter, political scientist and author of “How Civil Wars Start,” tells ProPublica that the vital signs of healthy democracy are in decline...
2:42 PM · Sep 26, 2022

https://www.propublica.org/article/democracy-demagogues-fascism-elections-barbara-walter

Voters in Sweden this month gave a leading role to a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots. Italy is also on the cusp of putting a party in power that has fascist origins. And of course, in the United States, one party has increasingly embraced election denialism and attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process.

To try to understand what, exactly, is happening, I talked with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego who studies democracies across the world. Her book “How Civil Wars Start” has become a bestseller. Rather than talk about the prospects for political violence, we discussed why many democracies are retrenching and how the U.S. stands alone — and not in a good way.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you walk through the vital signs of democracy that you and other political scientists have been tracking and that are trending the wrong way in the U.S. and elsewhere?

So there are probably five big data sets that measure the quality of democracy and countries around the world. They all measure democracy slightly differently. But every single one of them has shown that democracies around the world are in decline. And not just the fledgling democracies, but sacrosanct liberal democracies in Sweden, the U.K. and the United States.

These indices are like vital signs, but instead of for your body, it’s for our body politic. What are the most important ones?

So, empirically, we can’t rank order them. But we know what the good things are, and if you start attacking them, you’re attacking the vital organs.

One is constraints on executive power. You want lots of checks and balances on the executive branch. Here in the United States, you want to make sure that the legislative branch is strong and independent and willing to check presidential power. You want to know that the judicial branch is the same. Another one would be rule of law. Is the rule of law actually respected? Is it uncorrupted? You don’t want a system where certain individuals are above the law. If you want to become, say, Orban 2.0, you place loyalists in the Justice Department who are beholden to you and not to the rule of law.

*snip*

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Racism/white supremacy is absolutely one of this country's biggest threats. K&R.

I don't mean Jan. 6 rioters or KKK members and so on. I mean the fact that everything in this country is built on racism and white supremacy.