Competitive Authoritarianism

 Steady State, a group of former US intelligence and defense officials, has stated that America is moving towards "competitive authoritarianism." In this system, there are elections, but important democratic checks don't exist and power resides almost exclusively in the Executive. Hungary and Türkiye are prime examples of this. 

Perhaps the most important paragraph:

Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press and public trust.

Tell me what's inaccurate about that statement. 

For those of us who care about democracy and America, we have all looked towards the 2026 midterms as the critical moment for discovering (as opposed to deciding) whether of not we still live in a democracy. If elections return a Democratic Congress, then we can still claim to be a democracy. If voters prefer a Democratic Congress, but gerrymandering and the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act returns a Republican House, I can't help but wonder if that's just the end of the line for "America."

In her "Letter" today, Richardson talks about the sentiments of the Revolutionary generation regarding where true power should lie, and they placed it, very consciously, in the Legislative branch. Republicans in Congress have abandoned legislative prerogatives to placate the dictator in the White House. The Supreme Court - not the lower courts - have abandoned all principles to rule randomly in favor of Trump whenever possible. The American "Revolution" is more accurately understood as a secession movement within an imperial system that denied them representative government.

In the decade before the Civil War, Daniel Webster argued that - unlike in 1776 - secession made no geographic sense. The Atlantic separated the colonies from Britain, but as Webster put it, the mountains and rivers all run the wrong direction. Indeed, looking at the electoral map from 2020, trying to map out a country where Biden won more than 50% of the vote creates a very odd map.

From Maine to Virginia would be part of the new country, but we would have to merge with Canada, because Minnesota and Illinois would want in. What to do with the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is a big conundrum. Colorado and New Mexico are Blue, but Arizona is Purple, and that's the bridge to the Pacific Coast.

Drawing those lines would be hard, but I'm not sure why we should persist in the fiction of living in an America that is no longer recognizably American. We do however need to be having these discussions. The SCOTUS and Congressional Republicans cannot think there are no consequences to abandoning democracy.