Free Republic

The New York Times published a think piece last week strategizing how leftists might be able to thwart the will of American voters and rescue democracy from President Donald Trump should he win on Nov. 5. Using the term "democracy" euphemistically for a state of things in which Democrats or leftists of other stripes are in power, the authors — a pair of Harvard University professors hostile to Trump, the Constitution as written, and the Electoral College — recommended "societal mobilization" should the powers that be fail to get their way. Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky's call to action, which...

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt advised pushing a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term. "How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote....

Democratic self-rule contains a paradox. It is a system premised on openness and competition. Any ambitious party or politician should have a shot at running for office and winning. But what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system? America confronts this problem today. Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy. He was the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, and he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, on the brink of returning to the White House, Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol played out for the world to see, but the House committee investigating the attack believes a more chilling story has yet to be told -- about the president and the people whose actions put American democracy at risk. With personal accounts and gruesome videos the 1/6 committee expects Thursday’s prime-time hearing to begin to show that America’s tradition of a peaceful transfer of presidential power came close to slipping away. It will reconstruct how the president, Donald Trump, refused to concede the 2020 election, spread false claims of...

The few remaining viewers of CNN got a remarkable dose of news on Saturday. Just in time for Constitution Day, CNN’s dwindling audience learned that the Consitution of the United States — the oldest written government charter in the world and the document that gave birth to the nation that has spread democracy around the globe — has become so “outdated” that it’s actually a “threat to democracy.” Of course, that’s democracy as CNN’s scholars understand it. And you can’t spell ignorance without “C-N-N.” The word came on “Newsroom,” anchored by former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta. Acosta interviewed...

The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election. In 2018, when we wrote How Democracies Die, we knew that Donald Trump was an authoritarian figure, and we held the Republican Party responsible for abdicating its role as democratic gatekeeper. But we did not consider the GOP to be an antidemocratic...