A few years after a mob egged on by the opposition ransacked the presidential palace of Madagascar and overthrew the government in 2009, Atlantic writer Brain Klaas travelled there and asked the new leaders – the guys who had incited the insurrection – how they were supposed to govern with any legitimacy after having seized power violently. One of the generals shot back at Klaas, asking “How can you Americans lecture us on democracy? Sometimes, the president who ends up in your White House isn’t even the person who got the most votes.”
“Our election system isn’t perfect. But, with all due respect, our politicians don’t incite violent mobs to take over the government when they haven’t won an election,” Klaas says he replied to the general back then, a scene he describes in the opener to his essay “How Democracy Dies in the 21st Century – The U.S. still has a chance to fix itself before 2024. But when democracies start dying – as ours already has – they usually don’t recover”, published in The Atlantic on Thursday.