The Washington Post: How you’ll know when the U.S. isn’t a democracy anymore

Jay OwenGlobal Citizen

The Washington Post: How you’ll know when the U.S. isn’t a democracy anymore

Here’s the funny thing about democracy: Sometimes, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

John Carey, a Dartmouth professor of government, would know. He has spent his career studying the erosion of democracy in Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Argentina. And time and again, he has seen the same thing. “It’s only in retrospect that you can point to the bright line,” a moment when a country’s democratic institutions stopped working, he told me. At the time, he said, there’s rarely consensus. Instead, Carey said, “there’s usually a debate about whether this is an advance or a setback.”

One example: In Latin America in the 1990s, democratically elected leaders often tried to seize power by trashing constitutional mandates against reelection. It’s a classic first move by heads of state interested in overstaying their welcome, perhaps indefinitely. In fact, those term limits were put in place because a century earlier, a rash of would-be authoritarians used presidential extensions to hang on to power well after their populations had turned against them.
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