Our Country Is Slipping Away, but It’s Easy to Miss

When most people think of the death of democracy, they think of a terrible coup led by a mob and finally supported by a perverted military. The unsuccessful insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, fits that image. The military never got involved, but an angry crowd, encouraged by political actors, did its best. 

However, many regimes transform quietly, almost imperceptibly. The institutions that we know are still all around us. Life doesn’t seem that different when we go to the store to buy groceries. But nothing is really the same. The regime changes before people realize it because the government seems the same.

Plato talked about the difference between government and regime. The government is the structure of political order and its institutions. But the regime (politeia) is the animating principle of the government, its soul, so to speak. 

In the United States, the government is defined by three branches of government — the executive, legislative and judiciary, a written constitution, and laws that define the powers exercised by the governing bodies. But the regime is the fundamental principle of democracy and the democratic way of life. What most people don’t understand is that the shell of the government can remain familiar while the regime slips away.

As Brian Klaas points out in his recent article in The Atlantic, “When democracies start to die, they usually don’t recover. Instead, they end up as authoritarian states with zombified democratic institutions: rigged elections in place of legitimate ones, corrupt courts rather than independent judges, and propagandists replacing the press.”

Smart authoritarians don’t seek an awkward insurrection or a risky military coup. Instead, they work tirelessly from the ground up to transform a country’s institutions while claiming that they are saving the country from internal and external enemies. They quietly change seemingly minor election laws so that elections can be controlled and political opponents marginalized.  And they work to elect loyal party members to positions of modest authority so that future elections can be manipulated without a messy controversy. And all of this is done in the name of protecting election integrity.

They pack the courts with partisan, political hacks. But the courts still operate.

Nothing looks amiss on the surface. If there was a move to close our courts, people might react negatively. Better to keep them open but make sure they are incapable of rendering unfriendly decisions. And the laws that used to protect us are one by one overturned.

And they attack educational institutions to create a platform for propaganda while claiming to be protecting the schools from being used for indoctrination. They censor books in the name of protecting decency and threaten teachers’ autonomy to control what is taught. Good, hardworking, principled teachers are fired or quit their jobs in disgust, and a new cadre of authoritarian teachers slowly takes their place. 

Our schools don’t disappear; they just cease to be educational institutions. We still drive down the street and see the same school buildings and school buses. But the animating principle of the schools has changed.

The legislature still acts and passes what looks like legislation, but it is no longer a check and balance on the president’s power. It does the bidding of the president. The political party becomes an extension of presidential ambitions and desires, and the legislature only exists to promote the president’s agenda. And the same happens to the bureaucracy.

And the press. It doesn’t go away, but the campaign to delegitimize freedom of the press pushes forward daily. The press is called “the enemy of the people,” and fact-checkers are accused of partisanship. New, shady groups are established that look like the old independent press, but they are owned and operated to promote authoritarian changes. People who look like network anchors or reporters begin to proliferate, but they are tools of the authoritarian movement, not a check or balance on it. The evening news still comes on. But those in authority call the shots.

So we must be vigilant. It is not enough to judge by appearances and be comforted by the fact that our political institutions seem intact. Our regime hasn’t been preserved just because we don’t have another January 6. Our governmental institutions may still seem to be operating. The question is this: Is the animating spirit behind the government democratic or authoritarian? 

We must not allow the incremental downfall of democracy, orchestrated by behind-the-scenes efforts of democracy’s enemies. This is a time to stand up, be counted and make our voices heard.