Historically, the erosion of American democracy has happened subtly. In a country where democracy is basically a civic religion, politicians generally don’t announce their intention to attack it when running for office. The past decade of voter suppression laws, state-level rules explicitly designed to limit access to the ballot box, have been sold as tools for combating voter fraud. Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.
Donald Trump is currently testing the limits of that unwritten rule by all but openly campaigning on a platform of tearing democracy down.
Perhaps the clearest sign came in a speech on Veterans Day where he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Calling one’s opponents subhuman and vowing aggressive action against them is a hallmark of classical fascist rhetoric, so much so that the Washington Post’s headline — on a news article, not an opinion piece — described it as “echoing Hitler [and] Mussolini.”
They’re not wrong: Anyone familiar with Nazi propaganda can tell you that it commonly dehumanized Jews by describing us as rats or diseases. Trump has used such language more than once: Just last month, he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
This incendiary language is backed by an incendiary policy agenda. Trump and his team have a series of proposals to crack down on dissent, including by remaking the Justice Department into a tool for jailing his enemies and sending troops to suppress anti-Trump protests. They aim to launch mass anti-immigrant raids and detain the people he rounds up in camps. They have extensive plans to replace as many as 50,000 career civil…
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