There’s an unanswerable question behind all the discourse about the rapidly decaying condition of American democracy: Did we ever have it in the first place?

I don’t want to come off like a world-weary leftist lecturing the sheeple about how AmeriKKKa has always been a fascist nation and there’s nothing special or unusual about 2025. That’s unfair to the evident trauma of lived experience here and now, and it also isn’t true: Our society has been radically destabilized by the all-out assault on civil rights, the rule of law and basic human decency during the first year of the second Trump presidency.

The danger to civil society, to the constitutional order and to millions of people in America (citizens and otherwise) is all too real. If that danger hasn’t yet personally hit home for many

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