“The United States has survived the 2020 election and its seemingly never-ending and increasingly bizarre aftermath. Efforts by Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the courts met abject failure at almost every turn even as a number of Republican elected officials and Republican voters embraced them. The most apocalyptic scenarios that some scholars worried about before the election did not come to pass. But nothing that happened after November 3 can be considered normal – not the threats to election officials, not the concerted legal effort to invalidate millions of votes, and certainly not Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Some prominent academic figures who study how countries fall into dictatorships are deeply concerned about what would come next.”

“Daniel Ziblatt, a political science professor at Harvard and the co-author of How Democracies Die, told Intelligencer, ‘I think it’s pretty clear that there was a somewhat serious effort to steal this election. It’s not going to succeed. In that sense, the acute normative crisis has passed. It doesn’t mean our checks and balances have worked.’ He pointed to what he described as ‘a chronic slow burning problem’ within the American electorate, the “radicalization” within the Republican Party. ‘One can’t have a democracy where one of the two parties is not fully committed to democratic norms.’ Ziblatt described the current situation as an escalation of constitutional hardball, where political actors ‘sniff out weakness in constitutional structure,’ violating long-standing norms if not technically the law. He pointed to the Trump-led effort in 2020 to have Republican-controlled state legislatures pick their own electors to throw victory to the president, regardless of how their states voted” – New York Magazine.