Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "'Solution in search of a problem': Smerconish looks at Georgia election law" video.
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If voting by mail is good enough for Trump, it should be good enough for everyone.
Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Venezuela, Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and Turkey.
Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.
Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended, by political parties and organized citizens but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not..
This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the the private sector (or bullying them into silence) and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to ki// it.
Thanos: "I used the stones, to destroy the stones."
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