The Real Threat From Autocracy Is How We Deal With Democracy (continued)

Fareed Zakaria, Opinion Writer for the Washington Post, is an incisive commentator on global political, financial and economic affairs, and never more so then when he and I agree.

His article in the Post today, Democracy Is Decaying Worldwide: American Isn't Immune, echos what I wrote last week for The Hill, The Real Threat From Autocracy Is How We Deal With Democracy, about the erosion of principles and norms from within democracies, including the threat from the autocratic behavior of President Trump.

I had written that a functioning democracy can heal itself, unless a democracy had become neither free nor equitable.  There are palpable fears that the United States is slipping into autocracy...The resilience of democracy in America is being tested by an autocratic president who de-legitimizes ordinary civil discourse through misrepresentation and distortion, aided by complicit actors, such as Chairman Devin Nunes, (R-Calif.) of the House Intelligence Committee and his famously flawed memo on FBI surveillance...While the world's autocracies loom as a threat, the real threat to our welfare and to world peace is how we deal in the democracies with the erosion of basic civil liberties and the rise of domestic social and economic inequality.

In the same vein, Zakaria concludes, "Institutions are collections of rules and norms agreed upon by human beings. If leaders attack, denigrate and abuse them, they will be weakened, and this, in turn, will weaken the character and quality of democracy. The American system is stronger than most, but it is not immune to these forces of democratic decay."