En Route to Autocracy in America - OCTOBER 11, 2020
Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
Masha Gessen of the New Yorker concludes that United States is in the first stage of an autocratic transformation
https://prospect.org/politics/en-route-to-autocracy-in-america/
"Alexander Heffner: Masha, if the United States became an autocracy in recent years, when precisely do you think it happened?
Masha Gessen: Well, I don't think it did. In my book I use I use a taxonomy proposed by a Hungarian political scientist named Bálint Magyar, who has worked a lot on what has happened in Eastern Central Europe and developed an entire sort of set of terms and signs for understanding these autocratic transformations.
He proposes that there are three stages of an autocratic transformation: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. They're pretty self-explanatory, but the defining characteristic of an autocratic attempt, what distinguishes it from the later stages is that it's still possible to reverse it through electoral means. According to that model, which I think is extremely useful for understanding what's going on here, we're in the autocratic attempt stage, right? At least until November, at least theoretically.
..... If you look at the amount of damage that he has been able to do in the first 3-1/2 years, while having the threat, at least the potential threat of not being reelected, hanging over him, you can imagine how much, how to what extent he would be emboldened by reelection...."