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Jump to:  2016;  2017;   2018;   2019;  

Note:
When it comes to "democracy", it's very difficult to get news links that are not of the commentary nature, so this section reads like mostly opinion and/or commentary.

-- 2016 --

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May 1: America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html?gtm=top&gtm=top

Winter 2016:
Exceptional Circumstances: Does Climate Change Trump Democracy?

Researchers who flirt with the idea that more authoritarian governance would help us address global warming are badly mistaken. What’s really needed is more democracy.
https://issues.org/exceptional-circumstances-does-climate-change-trump-democracy/

-- 2017 --

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Fall 2017:
What Compares to Trump

Reality in the United States has become surreal. Politics, with its influx of reality stars TV show hosts, musicians, maybe even professional wrestlers, has become harder to understand. To help in that problem, we asked five distinguished historians, among them Democracy board member Sean Wilentz, what to make of this current moment, and what past moment (if any) it compares to. The results were interesting, surprising—and, inasmuch as no one said the late 1850s, reassuring.

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/46/what-compares-to-trump/


October 18:
Why your alarmism over Trump is dangerous for democracy

We live in an era of alarmism. Everyone, or at least Trump opponents, seems alarmed nearly all the time. Even when we can’t quite summon the energy, we’re expected to be outraged. Our outrage is then presented as a badge of honor, evidence of virtue at a time of historic challenge to the Republic. But the nature of the outrage – overwrought before even Trump took office – has taken a new turn.

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We are confronted daily not simply with outrage, but a kind of end-of-worldism: America is on the brink of dictatorship; Trump is going start World War III; the president’s access to the nuclear codes might actually destroy the universe; if he manages to control his impulses, then his withdrawal from the Paris climate change accords will still destroy the universe, just a bit more slowly.

Nine months into Trump’s tenure, it could have been better, but it could just as well have been worse, perhaps much worse.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-your-alarmism-over-trump-is-dangerous-for-democracy

-- 2018 --

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January 18: How Democracies Die review – the secret of Trump’s success ... Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have written a fascinating – and alarming – account of how the US shook off its democratic safeguards and gave the world Donald Trump  [the editor of this website has not yet read this book but keeps hearing rave reviews of it]

History, the surprisingly fashionable Alexander Hamilton remarked in 1787, teaches that men who overthrow republics begin “by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues and ending tyrants”.

In other words, dictators do not always arrive at the head of columns of troops. When they seize the television stations, they do not send in soldiers but party loyalists who promise to end “fake news”. They do not need to imprison judges, just pack their courts and rewrite the constitution to make opposition impossible. They win democratic elections, then dismantle democracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/08/how-democracies-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt-review

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February 16: Trump, Democracy, and the Constitution

At the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, Elbridge Gerry, a delegate from Massachusetts, warned against too much democracy. The people, he stated, were “the dupes of pretended patriots” and were “daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.” Two hundred and thirty years later, Gerry’s concerns—which most of the framers shared—were vindicated: the American people elected a president who disdains basic tenets of democracy.

Democracy depends on norms, some written into the Constitution, others implicit in it. Donald Trump regularly disparages or repudiates at least ten of these norms:
http://www.processhistory.org/klarman-trump-democracy/

Spring 2018: Mass Psychology in the Age of Trump

Why is Trump driving liberals berserk? Is it him or us—or both?
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/48/mass-psychology-in-the-age-of-trump/

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March 25: Letting Trump Be Trump: A 'Good And Hard' Lesson In Democracy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2018/03/25/letting-trump-be-trump-a-good-and-hard-lesson-in-democracy/#470bc95662b6

October 1: Can U.S. Democracy Policy Survive Trump?

In President Donald Trump’s first year in office, U.S. policy relating to supporting democracy abroad became starkly divided. At the level of “high policy”—direct engagement and messaging by President Trump and his principal foreign policy advisers—the United States sharply downgraded its global pro-democratic posture. Trump’s praise of dictators, criticism of democratic allies, and anti-democratic actions at home recast the United States as at best an ambivalent actor on the global democratic stage. Yet at the same time, pro-democratic “low policy”—quiet but serious engagement by U.S. diplomats to counter democratic backsliding and support democratic advances overseas, and the extensive but generally low-profile domain of U.S. democracy assistance programs—largely carried on, making important contributions in many countries.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/10/01/can-u.s.-democracy-policy-survive-trump-pub-77381

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October 28: Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore

As participation in civic life has dwindled, so has public faith in the country’s system of government
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/losing-the-democratic-habit/568336/

November 10: If Donald Trump Is a Stress Test for Democracy, the Midterms Were Just a Warm Up Exercise

The 2018 election proved our system really is self-correcting, but the real referendum on the president's threat to democracy is two years away.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24894884/2018-midterm-elections-recap/
 
-- 2019 --

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February 18: Pres. Trump to say Venezuela's move to democracy is 'irreversible'

President Donald Trump will seek on Monday to rally support in the largest Venezuelan community in the U.S. for opposition leader Juan Guaido, saying Venezuela's "current path toward democracy is irreversible."

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Trump will express "strong support" for Guaido, whom the U.S. recognizes as the country's rightful president, and condemn President Nicolas Maduro's government and its socialist policies. As the monthslong political crisis continues, Trump is to make a public case to Venezuela's military, which could play a decisive role in the stalemate, to support Guaido's government. The Venezuelan military has largely remained loyal to Maduro.
https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pres-Trump-to-say-Venezuelas-move-to-democracy-is-irreversible-505994751.html

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February 21:
India Has a Lesson for Trump: National Emergencies Are a Disaster for Democracy

Indira Gandhi's Emergency damaged Indians' rights — and gave the opposition a cause to unify against.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/21/india-has-a-lesson-for-trump-national-emergencies-are-a-disaster-for-democracy/

February 20: Trump Calls the Democratic Party Socialist.

The White House has ramped up its message that the 2020 campaign is a choice between the whole of American history (as represented by Trump) and socialism — which it defines as Venezuelan-style government control combined with repression of dissent.

The Democratic Party is still not “socialist” in any meaningful sense of the term, and to the extent socialism has exerted any influence upon it, it is not of the Venezuelan variety.

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There is a bit more truth to the idea that the Democratic Party is moving left on economics. Still, the scale of the shift has been overplayed. Democrats may be moving left, but they remain to the right of most mainstream left parties in the world. News accounts have emphasized the trend rather than the level. The growing share of self-identified liberals within the party ranks has attracted far more attention than the fact that moderate and conservative Democrats still (slightly) outnumber liberals. Twitter battles pit leftists against liberals, but compared both to the Democratic Party’s elected officials and its voting basis, even the liberals occupy the left-of-center space.

Parties move slowly and tend to change their character over long periods of time. The entrance of far-left policy demanders in the Democratic Party is a very notable development that might lead to important changes over the long run. In the short run, the party is mostly the same. And Trump’s notion that his reelection is all that stands between the United States and socialism is nothing more than a paranoid fantasy.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/trump-calls-democrats-socialist-lying-bernie-sanders-2020.html

February 24: Trump Is the 'Greatest Threat' to Democracy, Constitution 'Since the Civil War,' Congressman Says
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-greatest-threat-democracy-civil-war-1341840

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