authoritarianism 
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SOURCE: Jacobin
1/15/2021
Trump Is a Threat to Democracy. But That Doesn’t Mean He’s Winning
by Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis
Overreaction to the horror of January 6 risks giving license to a host of new internal security measures that will likely threaten democracy more than the misguided and futile efforts of Donald Trump and his followers to overturn the election.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/9/2021
Pre-Nazi Germany Tells us the Fight to Save American Democracy is Just Beginning
by Michael Brenner
German history highlights how the real risk to American democracy came hours after order had been restored in the U.S. Capitol when seven U.S. senators and 138 members of the House of Representatives voted to sustain an objection to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
1/14/2021
The Capitol Riot Revealed the Darkest Nightmares of White Evangelical America
by Matthew Avery Sutton
Many observers have speculated that American evangelicals have had a transactional relationship with Donald Trump. But his messages of "American carnage" and warnings of dire consequences if he is defeated mesh perfectly with their end-times outlook and have helped tie evangelicals to the far right coalition.
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1/14/2021
Donald Trump’s Situational Fascism
by Gavriel Rosenfeld
Rather than engage in an unproductive debate about whether Donald Trump is or is not a bona fide fascist, scholars should consider the events of January 6 (and Trump's role in inciting them) as emergent, contingent results of the interplay of factors latent in American liberal democracy.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/11/2021
Ex-Friends: Anne Applebaum and the Crisis of Centrist Politics
Critic David Klion considers the unexamined relationship between the late 20th Century rise of market-oriented liberalism and the 21st century rise of authoritarian nationalism (or, "why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to be fascists").
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SOURCE: Politico
1/11/2021
Yes, It Was a Coup. Here’s Why
Former Trump National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill says the events of January 6, in the context of Trump's refusal to accept the election results, meet the practical standard of a coup.
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SOURCE: PBS News Hour
1/10/2021
Don't Compare the Capitol Riot to the "Third World"
"Lucia Dammert, a Wilson Center Global Fellow and Professor at the University of Santiago of Chile objects to the comparison to the Global South -- adding that the U.S. has played a key role in sparking the turbulence, especially in Latin America."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/11/2021
Denial Is the Heartbeat of America
by Ibram X. Kendi
Claims that the Capitol riots were "not who we are" are rooted in denial of the long history of racist and antidemocratic politics in the United States.
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1/10/2020
Will the Republicans Take the Fascist Option?
by Kevin Matthews
Before this past week, too many in the GOP seemed too willing to choose the fascist option. Now they have seen what it looks like and where it leads. The question Republicans must answer is simple: Will they choose fascism anyway?
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SOURCE: Salon
1/7/2021
Some of us Saw this Coming — But we were Assured Donald Trump was No Big Deal
by Jim Sleeper
Trump's first act as President on Inauguration Day suggested his compulsion toward authoritarianism.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/4/2021
An Insurgency From Inside the Oval Office
“Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, and his pressure tactics to that end with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, are an example of how authoritarianism works in the 21st century,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.”
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/22/2020
Trump Didn’t Attempt a Coup. He Threw a Temper Tantrum that Never Had a Chance
by David Greenberg
Liberals fearing the collapse of democracy can exhale. In 1974 the Watergate scandal portended a similar constitutional crisis. The panic was the same then as now, and institutions that seemed fragile then as now survived.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
12/22/2020
Trump Loyalists Harboring Martial Law Fantasies Don’t Know Their History
by Gillian Brockell
Michael Flynn's casual mention that martial law has ben invoked "64 times" flagrantly ignores the context of those events. What he proposes for Trump to do is unprecedented.
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SOURCE: Democracy
12/22/2020
Cleansing Ourselves of Trumpism
by Jim Sleeper
Donald Trump's election revealed, rather than launched, the degradation of American political norms and institutions through decades of the Republicans' lurch to the right and the Democrats' abandonment of the common good.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
12/16/2020
North Carolina GOP Lawmaker Urges Trump to ‘Invoke the Insurrection Act’ over Election Results
A North Carolina State Senator suggested Trump would be justified in using the military to prevent the validation of Joe Biden's election.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/7/2020
‘This Must Be Your First’: Take Trump's Inept Coup Attempt Seriously
Atlantic writer Zeynep Tufekci argues that Americans should take no sense of security from the seeming collapse of Trump's efforts to stay in power; the next attempt may be competently managed.
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SOURCE: Daily Beast
12/4/2020
History Will Judge Trump but We’ve Got to Do It First
by David Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Medieval history gives insight into the way that history's judgment is far from automatic; powerful actors in their own time can prevent their deeds from being accurately assessed in the future by concealment, destruction of evidence, and a climate of elite impunity.
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SOURCE: ZNet
11/29/2020
Is the Nationalist Tide Receding?
by Lawrence Wittner
The author contends, with hope, that the Trump presidency was a brief blip in the long decline of nationalistic conflict that will allow international cooperation for global challenges.
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SOURCE: Salon
12/2/2020
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Trump's Coup Is Not Over; His Enablers Aren't Done
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat speaks with Salon's Dean Obeidallah and argues that the danger of a collapse of democracy is not over.
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SOURCE: WBUR
11/12/2020
What The 'Strongmen' Of History Reveal About Modern Politics
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat studies authoritarian regimes, like Italy under Mussolini. Can a democracy pry itself out of a strongman's grip?
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