America’s Zombie Democracy

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/america-authoritarian-regime-ai-suicide/684350/

We are living in an authoritarian state.

These are the features of the modern authoritarian state. Every one of them exists today in this country. Checks on President Donald Trump’s power, whether in the framework of law and constitutional government or in the broader society, have grown so weak that he can do pretty much what he wants. He sends masked police to pick people off the streets without probable cause for arrest, disappear them into secret prisons, and ship them off to random countries. He fires experienced, patriotic civil servants and replaces them with unqualified toadies. He takes open bribes from foreign countries and American business interests in the form of a luxury jet or a meme coin. He tells media companies to stop criticizing him, or else—and many of them do.

Yet the Founding Fathers warned over and over about the arrival of an authoritarian demagogue. They wrote a Constitution that they thought would be the best defense against one. In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln said that the republic would never be overthrown from abroad: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” How did it come to this? How have we let it come to this? Because it’s not just being done to us. We are doing it to ourselves.