This is not normal: Eroding checks and balances is step to authoritarianism
This opinion piece reflects the views of Warren Epstein only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin.
We go on with life.
It's what we do. We brush our teeth. We go to work. We play pickleball. We walk our dogs. We watch TV.
Normal stuff.
Even though, when we watch TV, we see that nothing is normal.
Nothing is normal.
Nothing is normal.
But our brain is a funny organ. It has this built-in adaptation mode called normalization. After two to six months of watching our country march toward tyranny, we can't help but move on with our lives.
We did it during Covid. How could we survive without plane travel? Masking up when going to the grocery store? Staying in our house for months at a time? Sheltering in place? Social distancing? We survived by normalizing, and while many suffered and many died during the pandemic, the rest of us came through OK and a few years later, thanks to effective vaccines, it was over (mostly).
But there seems to be no vaccine for Trump. He's turning our country into an autocracy, using the playbook of every other dictator.
He demonizes the politically weakest among us - immigrants and transgendered. He hasn't yet gone after the Jews. American Jews currently have too much power. In fact, he's used his bogus fight against anti-Semitism to snuff freedom of speech. But the "Jews will not replace us!" chants at Charlottesville reminded us that Jews never wander far from the hit list.
He demonizes and attacks all the cultural touchstones that push civil rights, including colleges, museums, libraries.
He demonizes the mainstream media, and even Fox News (when they insist on polling Trump's approval ratings)
The latest major step toward authoritarianism came with a recent Supreme Court decision that bars all lower courts from blocking Trump's orders simply because he's defying the Constitution.
A conservative friend cheered the decision, asking "Who do you want to run this country? The courts or the president?"
The answer, for those who didn't pay attention in civics and history classes, is both. And Congress. It's called the balance of powers.
The problem with the Constitutional division of three governmental branches is that it makes it hard for a rogue president to do things that are both unconstitutional and tremendously unpopular.
Like having masked goons grab random citizens from the street or the aisles of a Home Depot and sending them to secret prisons, where even our elected representatives are barred from entry.
This decision reminded me of a scene I recently wrote for our Arts Uprise production at The Millibo Art Theatre. In it, a law firm is under attack from Trump, and one of its senior directors leads an internal revolution.
"We are the last guardrails against tyranny," she said. "We're not even guardrails. We're just broken picket fences. But we're there. We are the last stop before this experiment is done."
With that last Supreme Court decision, the picket fence has been swept away.
What can we do? We get up and go about our day. Just like folks in Russia or Hungary or Chile or Peru or North Korea or China.
We normalize.
Until we find the only vaccine that works against dictators. Resistance.
