A welcome setback
By John Cassidy
January 30, 2017
“Americans severely misjudged the authoritarians .. But the authoritarians, it seems, also severely misjudged Americans” ...
As news broke of U.S. border agents detaining people — refugees who had worked for the U.S. military in Iraq; Ivy League academics returning to their jobs; other blameless individuals — thousands of people headed out to major airports ...
On Sunday, the demonstrations expanded to other cities and got larger. At New York’s Battery Park and in Boston’s Copley Square, tens of thousands gathered to protest against what they regarded as a ban on Muslims. By then, some of Trump’s lackeys had given weaselly statements in the press suggesting that some sort of modification was in the works ...
...it is worth pausing to consider what has happened. Autocrats subvert democracies by undermining the institutions that sustain them: legislatures; representative local governments; the judiciary; the media and other nongovernmental organizations, such as civil-rights groups; and, of course, an active citizenry. With the Senate and House of Representatives under the control of a Republican Party that has made a Faustian pact with Trump, it was never likely that they would rein him in. In this instance, though, the other institutions of civil society fulfilled their roles ...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/a-welcome-setback-for-donald-trump
