by WILLIAM SALETAN FEBRUARY 7, 2022 5:30 AM
“Americans like to think our country is immune to authoritarianism. We have a culture of freedom, a tradition of elected government, and a Bill of Rights. We’re not like those European countries that fell into fascism. We’d never willingly abandon democracy, liberty, or the rule of law.
“But that’s not how authoritarianism would come to America. In fact, it’s not how authoritarianism has come to America. The movement to dismantle our democracy is thriving and growing, even after the failure of the January 6th coup attempt, because it isn’t spreading through overt rejection of our system of government. It’s spreading through lies.”
“All you have to do is believe lies: that real ballots are fake, that prosecutors are criminals, and that insurrectionists are political prisoners. Once you believe these things, you’re ready to disenfranchise your fellow citizens in the name of democracy. You’re ready to cover up crimes in the name of fighting corruption. You’re ready to liberate coup plotters in the name of justice.”
“And that’s where we are. Donald Trump and his party have sold these lies to more than 100 million Americans. He has built an army of authoritarian followers who think they’re saving the republic.”
-- William Saletan
I was a Jan. 6 juror. What I learned surprised me. Trump’s pardons of virtually all of the Jan. 6 rioters left me dejected. Am I safe? When the jury summons for federal criminal court arrived in my mailbox in November 2023, I knew I had to answer it. And not just because I had been deferring and deferring and now I was all out of deferments. I had to answer this one because in my gut I knew it wasn’t going to be just any old criminal case. I remember saying to my partner, “I bet you anything it’s a January 6 case.” Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter At that point, it had been more than two years since a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol in the city that has been my home for 16 years. But criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were still making their way through the federal court in D.C. at a pretty steady clip. At the time my summons arrived, roughly 1,200 Jan. 6 cases had already been adjudicated, and there were still many mor...
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