The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has

  • The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has, By Jamelle Bouie

    The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign.

    It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants. (read more) [posted in Political/Democracy]

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