How Our Democracy Is Being Dismantled from Within

The Constitution has no plan for this.

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin (1924–1987)

In 1968, just three years after Bloody Sunday and one month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Black Americans in many Southern states were finally able to vote without fear of firebombs or billy clubs. That was less than a lifetime ago. Yet in those same states today, voters stand in line for hours, face surgical voter ID laws, or find themselves quietly purged from the rolls. The weapons have changed — paper instead of chains, laws instead of whips — but the impulse has not.

The United States oscillates between emancipation and exclusion, between the promise of liberty and the practice of control. But this latest swing isn’t natural. It is being pulled — by courts, legislators, billionaires, and ideologues.

And unless we confront that pull directly, democracy itself may not return to center.

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A Democracy Built on Exclusion

From its founding, the United States has been animated by a paradox: a republic committed to liberty and built on domination.

Nowhere was this contradiction more violently expressed than in the American South, where an economy of cotton and blood sustained a regime of total subjugation — economic, legal, and spiritual.

Enslaved Africans were denied not just freedom, but even personhood — defined legally as property and spiritually as cursed. The U.S. Constitution, for all its democratic pretensions, contained no affirmative right to vote. It still doesn’t. Voting was left to the states, many of which ensured that political power would remain white, male, and landed. Exclusion, in other words, was not a regional deviation. It was an architectural choice.

After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments promised something closer to full citizenship for the formerly enslaved. But rights enshrined in law required power to enforce them—and that power collapsed quickly. In 1877, as part of the infamous Compromise to resolve a disputed presidential election, Northern leaders withdrew federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. In exchange for executive power, they surrendered the project of Black citizenship. The Jim Crow order that followed was not a spontaneous backlash — it was a deliberate reassertion of racial control through literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and racial terror. The old slaveocracy had simply adapted to new constraints. It no longer needed chains. It had paperwork.

For nearly a century, democracy in the South was a mirage. Not until the passage—and federal enforcement — of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 did meaningful Black enfranchisement begin. And even then, it was incomplete. The Jim Crow order had not collapsed; it had simply rebranded.

Today, across many of the same states, polling places in Black communities are shuttered, voters are purged from rolls through “exact match” policies, and ID laws surgically target demographics unlikely to vote Republican. This is not a Southern betrayal. It is an American design flaw — rooted in the founding omission of a constitutional right to vote, and perfected through a century of practice. The form is democratic. The function remains exclusionary.

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Sectionalism Reborn

Today, the legal landscape of the United States is once again fracturing along sectional lines. In one state, abortion is a protected right; in another, it’s criminalized. In one, transgender youth can access affirming care; in another, their doctors face felony charges. This isn’t federalism in action — it’s the fracture of a shared constitutional identity. The ideal of “equal protection under law” no longer means what it once did. Some states, like California or New York, are expanding civil liberties. Others, like Texas or Florida, are engineering legal regimes to restrict them. Once again, as in the decades before the Civil War, the country is being pulled apart not only by policy differences, but by incompatible moral visions.

These disparities raise urgent questions about national coherence.

Why should states that expand rights be required to fund federal and state systems that entrench repression elsewhere — through tax dollars, military bases, or judicial appointments? What does “shared governance” mean when core values no longer intersect, and equal citizenship depends on geography? The Constitution may still bind the states together in law, but the cultural contract is fraying. Sectional resentment is no longer rhetorical; it’s becoming systemic. And unless it is directly confronted, it may erode not just federal cohesion, but the very idea of the Union itself.

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The Evangelical Tradition of Authoritarianism

Religion in America has rarely stood with the powerless. From the colonial pulpit to the plantation chapel, Christianity — especially in its fundamentalist strains — has served power more often than it has challenged it. Slaveholders drew on scripture to sanctify slavery. Southern pastors preached segregation as divine order. During the Civil Rights era, white congregations prayed for “peace” while opposing justice. This is not the exception — it is the tradition. The modern evangelical right does not represent a turn against liberty; it reflects a long history of aligning theology with authoritarianism. What has changed is not the impulse to dominate, but the political machinery now used to achieve it.

Over the past fifty years, the evangelical right has fused itself into the infrastructure of the Republican Party. It operates not just through churches, but through a coordinated ecosystem of law schools, media outlets, lobbying firms, and activist networks. Institutions like Liberty University and Focus on the Family have cultivated generations of ideologues — not to tolerate pluralism, but to undermine it. The result is a soft theocracy: a political project that writes laws to enforce doctrine, punishes dissent as deviance, and wraps authoritarianism in the language of faith. Its most visible victory came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), where the Court rescinded a constitutional right relied on by generations of women. But Dobbs was not a culmination. It was a starting gun.

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The Roberts Court and the Machinery of Retreat

No institution has done more to accelerate the retreat from democratic norms than the U.S. Supreme Court. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court has not acted as a check on power — but as its architect. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), it dismantled the Voting Rights Act’s core safeguards, unleashing a wave of voter suppression laws in jurisdictions with entrenched histories of racial exclusion. In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), it opened the floodgates to corporate money in politics, allowing billionaires and interest groups to drown out public will. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), it erased a constitutional right to bodily autonomy—demonstrating that no precedent, however long held, is safe.

In Trump v. United States (2024), decided just months before the presidential election, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority held that former presidents are entitled to presumptive criminal immunity for actions taken in their “official” capacity—and affirmed that the presidential pardon power, including the possibility of self-pardon, lies beyond the reach of judicial or congressional review.

Simultaneously, in Trump v. Anderson (2024), the Court unanimously reversed Colorado’s decision to bar Trump from the presidential ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite extensive evidence—testimony, video, and contemporaneous reporting—linking Trump to the January 6 insurrection, the justices held that Section 3 is not “self-executing.” In their view, only Congress can disqualify federal candidates, regardless of the evidence.

For a figure like Trump — convicted of 34 felonies — the ruling constructs a legal fortress.

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The American Duma

In Russia, the Duma functions as a rubber-stamp legislature — offering the appearance of oversight while executing the will of the autocrat. Increasingly, the U.S. Congress, under Republican control, has begun to mirror this model. Hearings have become spectacles of revenge rather than instruments of accountability. Investigations are weaponized against civil servants, not wrongdoing. The Senate confirms judges whose records drip with partisanship or deception. House committees elevate conspiracy over governance. This is not dysfunction. It is design.

Donald Trump has openly praised Vladimir Putin’s ability to kill opponents with impunity. He described the Tiananmen Square massacre as a show of “strength” by a “strong, powerful government.” These are not rhetorical slips — they are expressions of political admiration. Trump has reshaped the Republican Party into a vessel for personal power, and its legislative majorities into enablers. There is no low they will not defend. They protected him in the first impeachment. They protected him in the second, even after a violent mob hunted their colleagues. Senator Mitt Romney was nearly assaulted. Lawmakers barricaded themselves in chambers. Still, they acquitted him.

Days after the insurrection, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago — not to confront the insurrectionist, but to restore him. With that photo, McCarthy resurrected Trump’s political legitimacy. Since then, Republican leaders have refused to challenge Trump’s fawning praise of Vladimir Putin — an indicted war criminal. They stayed silent as Trump openly called to “terminate” the Constitution. The Republican Party is not merely deferential to authoritarianism — it is cultivating it.

The judiciary, though historically more insulated, is now under siege. Judge Aileen Cannon, overseeing Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents case, issued rulings so favorable they veered into sabotage — delaying proceedings, deploying procedural hurdles, and ultimately dismissing the case altogether, despite clear evidence that Trump unlawfully retained classified materials.

Meanwhile, Judge Emil Bove — recently confirmed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes jurisdiction over Trump’s Bedminster property — is a former Trump defense attorney whose elevation drew fierce objections from legal scholars, civil rights advocates, and whistleblowers.

He stands accused of misleading Congress and making false statements under oath. These are not impartial guardians of the law. They are instruments of a movement.

Meanwhile, Project 2025 — backed by the Heritage Foundation and the Trump-aligned right — aims to decimate the federal civil service, purge disloyal officials, and reclassify public servants into political operatives. It is a blueprint for one-man rule. It seeks to erase institutional memory, dismantle regulatory agencies, and concentrate executive authority in the hands of a single individual: Donald Trump, a 34-time convicted felon, found liable for sexual abuse, and fraud.

The Constitution has no defense mechanism for a political party that no longer believes in it. Congress no longer checks the president. The courts increasingly enable him. Trump has already attempted to overturn an election — and the system’s response has been to allow him another chance. There is no Duma in Washington. But there is deference. And deference, repeated long enough, becomes submission.

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An Authoritarian Past — and Present

To view today’s authoritarian drift as unprecedented is to forget America’s own history of repression. The Espionage Act of 1917 criminalized dissent against World War I, imprisoning figures like Eugene V. Debs for delivering antiwar speeches. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans — two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — with the full approval of the Supreme Court. During the COINTELPRO era, the FBI systematically infiltrated, surveilled, and sabotaged civil rights groups, Black leaders, and anti-war organizers — branding dissent as subversion. These were not historical aberrations. They were deliberate, state-sanctioned assaults on liberty — executed by presidents of both parties, upheld by the courts, and rationalized in the name of order.

What is new today is not authoritarianism itself — but its domestication. Governors threaten prosecutors. Legislatures entrench minority rule through gerrymandering. Courts greenlight voter suppression while telegraphing partisan allegiances. And millions of Americans — fatigued by crisis, distracted by spectacle, or seduced by grievance — look away. The authoritarian impulse has always simmered beneath America’s democratic myth. Now, it is boiling.

The question is no longer “Can it happen here?” The question is: “Now that it has, what will we do?”

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The Arc Isn’t Bending

The American civic faith once rested on a promise: that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. But arcs do not bend on their own. They are shaped — by action, by law, by sacrifice. And today, that arc is not bending. It is buckling.

The past decade has exposed a brutal truth: American institutions are not self-correcting. They are not incorruptible. They do not always protect the vulnerable or restrain the powerful. They are shaped by those who inhabit them — and too many now do so with contempt for the very principles they are sworn to uphold. Lawmakers campaign against democracy. Judges greenlight impunity. Journalists are harassed into silence, or forced into false balance. And voters, battered by chaos and disillusionment, are numbed into inaction.

This is not a drift. It is a design. A faction led by a convicted felon, steeped in authoritarian rhetoric and revenge politics, is laying the groundwork for permanent rule. They do not seek to win arguments. They seek to end them. Through voter suppression, legislative capture, judicial manipulation, and propaganda, they aim to convert a fragile republic into a stage-managed state — where outcomes are predetermined and power is unaccountable.

And yet, resistance persists.

Prosecutors have filed charges. Reporters have uncovered corruption. Some judges have upheld the law. Citizens still march, vote, organize. But the forces aligned against democracy have learned to endure losses strategically. They see time not as threat, but as terrain. Delay is a tactic. Exhaustion is a weapon. And unless the pro-democracy majority treats every moment as consequential, the authoritarian minority will seize what remains.

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What Comes Next Isn’t Inevitable

America is not fated to fall. But neither is it guaranteed to endure. Constitutional democracy is not self-sustaining. It decays through neglect, indifference, and the normalization of the unacceptable. What we face is not just a political crisis — it is a civic test: of memory, of courage, of collective will.

Donald Trump has already shown the nation who he is: a man who mocks verdicts, evades accountability, and promises vengeance. He does not hide his intentions. He declares them. ‘

He has vowed to weaponize the Department of Justice, to purge the civil service, to punish critics, and to bring independent agencies under personal control. Project 2025 is not a policy platform — it is a blueprint for autocratic rule. What follows won’t be a surprise. It will be a decision.

And yet, there is still time to decide otherwise. Time to reject the machinery of retreat. To restore the guardrails of oversight. To insist that institutions serve the public — not the powerful. But the window is closing. Each concession, each rationalization, each delay pushes the line of no return deeper into the past.

The myth of inevitability is autocracy’s ally. It tells us that resistance is futile. That momentum is irreversible. That we are too fractured, too tired, too late. But history says otherwise. It shows that civic courage can arrest decline. That public action can reverse erosion. That democracies rarely die overnight — they erode, until someone says: enough.

What comes next is not preordained. It will not be dictated by fate.

It will be chosen — by us. The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice — but only if we bend it.

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
― Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

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Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist. Read the original article here.