Democrats Finally Wake Up to the Dangers of Illiberalism
Their concerns are welcome, but one wonders where they’ve been the past eight years.
By Charles C. W. Cooke — December 6, 2016
By a remarkable coincidence, on the same day that Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States, the progressive Left discovered a distaste for illiberalism. Writing on behalf of the “many scholars/journalists who study illiberal/authoritarian regimes” — all of whom are “deeply alarmed about [the] US right now” — Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan announced via Twitter that the twelve days since the 2016 election had been the “most alarming” of his “professional life.” The United States, Nyhan explained, was close to seeing a total collapse of the “norms of our democracy,” in part because “our institutions/elites keep accommodating illiberal behavior.” “Should democracy fail,” he warned, “there will be no one moment,” but rather a “slow descent into illiberalism.”
A “slow descent” that began on November 9, 2016, mind you. A “slow descent” that came ex nihilo. A “slow descent” that followed a perfectly flat plane, and for which the president-elect’s predecessor bears no responsibility. Intrigued, I asked Nyhan whether he would consider recent trends toward judicial imperialism, executive overreach, and the abandonment of due process as undermining the “norms of our democracy” – and, in concert, whether as a college professor in 2016 he might have any insight into which “institutions” or “elites” have been most aggressively “accommodating illiberal behavior.” His response? The problems to which I was pointing were “not the same thing.” “This is not an NRO culture-war thing,” Nyhan griped.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442786/print
