There is a particular fatigue that settles in when one has spent a career studying democratic erosion in comparative perspective and then watches the precise mechanisms one has catalogued in distant countries assemble themselves at home, in real time, with the serial numbers still visible. I confess to feeling it now.
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsConsider the architecture. On a program called “Real America’s Voice,” a man named Wayne Allen Root suggested to the sitting president of the United States that he declare a national security emergency to impose photo ID requirements, proof-of-citizenship rules, and mail-in ballot restrictions by fiat, bypassing the Senate entirely. Root cited INS v. Chadha, the 1983 Supreme Court decision, as his legal authority, which is rather like citing the Geneva Conventions to justify a parking ticket. The president’s response was not dismissal, not discomfort, not even the perfunctory “we’ll look into it” that bureaucratic norms demand. “Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” Donald Trump said. “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”
Centre for Ageing Better / PexelsOne does not need a doctorate in political science to recognize what that formulation accomplishes. It neither commits nor forecloses. It normalizes the premise by refusing to reject it. This is, as the literature on democratic backsliding has exhaustively documented, how executive aggrandizement works: not through dramatic rupture but through the gradual accretion of normalized transgression, each instance slightly more audacious than the last, each met with insufficient institutional friction.
Bob Barr (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsWhich is why the Brennan Center’s work deserves more attention than it has received. In May and June of 2024, the organization convened five nonpartisan tabletop exercises premised on an authoritarian candidate winning the presidency. One hundred and seventy-five participants: Republicans, Democrats, independents, former governors, retired flag officers, labor leaders, C-suite executives. They simulated the antidemocratic executive actions Trump had publicly proposed and tested whether lawful institutions could check them. The Brennan Center is careful to note