Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt [are pushing for] a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term.
"How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote.
One of the ways they suggested limiting figures like Trump’s rise to power was a "militant or defensive democracy" which they described as a way authorities can restrict or outlaw speech against "antidemocratic forces."
And who will decide what particular speech is “antidemocratic” and therefore to be outlawed? Not the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory; more likely, the wise elders of the Harvard faculty lounge and the (gender-neutral) rest rooms of the New York Times.
"Born in West Germany as a response to Europe’s democratic failures in the 1930s, the militant democracy approach empowers public authorities to wield the rule of law against antidemocratic forces. Haunted by the experience of Hitler’s rise to power via the ballot box, West German constitutional designers created legal and administrative procedures that allowed the state to restrict and even outlaw ‘anti-constitutional’ speech, groups and parties," they wrote.
“Legal and administrative procedures” — a term that we have learned includes the weaponization of the police force of the state and state-supervised suppression of dissent by the social media giants like Google, FaceBook, China’s TikTok, and Instagram. We need only look to the persecution of Elon Musk and all of his enterprises to see what the administrative 4th branch can do to someone who dares break it’s information monopoly.
Though they acknowledged "significant drawbacks" that could be "easily abused" in this strategy by politicians, they argued how it may be better than simply relying on electoral competition or the "laissez-faire approach" to sort out bad ideas.
So, even though those new powers of the state to outlaw dissident groups can be (will be) abused, better that than leave the little people to sort out “bad ideas” on their own.
"Electoral competition is, of course, essential to democracy, but...”
There’s a universal rule: anything that comes before “but” is a lie. That’s true here.
Let’s continue:
But a laissez-faire approach has two important limitations. First, in the United States, competition is distorted by an 18th-century institution, the Electoral College, that allows election losers to win power. In one sense, the electoral marketplace worked in 2016 the way it is theoretically supposed to: More Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Mr. Trump. But the Electoral College permitted an authoritarian figure who won fewer votes to become president," they wrote. "In addition, history shows us that electoral competition alone is insufficient to fend off extremist threats. Good ideas don’t always win out. And candidates seeking to subvert democracy don’t always lose."
Don’t think this call for a dictatorship of Those Who Know Better™ is (just) the product of two deranged fools frothing at the mouth up in Cambridge. These professors, spawned in Berkeley and now busy indoctrinating the next generation of Leftist morons, are a significant part of the voice of the those who would rule. Their book, “How Democracies Die” published in 2018, was universally praised by the State’s media branch, from the Wall Street Journal to the NYT, to WaPo, NY Magazine, Atlantic, to The Guardian, and is now part of the official cannon (the Light Bringer has described it as “his favorite book”, Joe Biden’s handlers had him carry around a copy and, a la Tampon Tim and his favorite, Mao’s Little Red Book, read passages aloud to whoever would listen (and presumably, those who wouldn’t). That fact that the state’s loudest media arm, the New York Times, has published this latest iteration of the authors’ call to action one week one week before an election the state fears it will lose, gives a hint of the chaos that will be unleashed in two weeks should its puppet be defeated.
