Fight for democracy

To the editor:

Eric Meyer’s editorial Dec. 11 “With the world watching, will we save democracy?” was a master class in journalism. It reads like a college journalism lecture. (Hey, isn’t that what he did for many years?) He lays out his case, sprinkled with real-world examples and historic quotes.

The most stunning and most profound question he poses is “Are we witnessing the death of democracy in America?” The answer: sadly, probably yes, and the American voters are the ones who are cheering it on.

Don’t give me the line that the United States is not a democracy anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a representative democracy; a republic. The process is a democratically elected government.

Meyer focuses mostly on local issues. Most of us don’t think of democracy locally, and he alerted us to how that can be thwarted locally. Do our local officials listen to us? Of course, it is state and national, too.

The tragedy of this last presidential election is that 49.9% of the voters did not recognize the clear and present danger to the impending loss of democracy.

There are experts who study authoritarians and dictators for a living. Among them are Yale professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” and Harvard professors Steven Levisky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of “How Democracies Die.”

They have been studying dictatorships long before the president-elect appeared on the scene.

It is their clear assessment that the United States is on a direct path towards dictatorship, typical of what happened in other countries. And it doesn’t often happen in one violent action but a little bit at a time.

It’s the old “frog in slowly boiling water” example. You lose your democracy and freedom one piece at a time.

All the stars have aligned to make a “perfect storm” for us to lose democracy. It starts with attacks on journalists and the free press.

Spineless MAGA Congress members (there is no Republican Party anymore) have wilted under the president-elect’s bullying threats and do not hold him accountable.

The Supreme Court has bent over backwards, ignoring the 14th Amendment to throw out a Colorado case that should have disqualified the president-elect from the ballot after he led the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The day the United States died was July 1, 2024, when a case that had been laughed out of lower courts because it was so ridiculous was ruled that a president was immune to crimes committed while doing official acts of a president.

Now we have a king. We no longer can say no one is above the law. That greased the rails for the president-elect to be a dictator, which he said he wants to be on Day 1. It’s on videotape.

When one person has unchecked power, that’s when you have a dictatorship.

It moves on to death threats and attacks nationwide that have skyrocketed in the wake of the president-elect’s violent speech.

What kind of world do we have when the president-elect as a court defendant threatens the judge, the jury, the witnesses, the court reporter for Pete’s sake, and their families, and gets away with it, so that all those people just doing their daily jobs have to move and hide?

Is that democracy? Is that justice?

Wake up, voters. What soon will dawn on you is what you voted for. You asked for it, you got it, Toyota.

The tragedy that I still cannot understand is, every Memorial Day and Veterans Day, 400,000 soldiers who died in WWII are remembered for fighting against fascism. And now, we have a president-elect who was described by four-star generals as “fascist to the core.”

This ought to make us run screaming in the streets. And yet, voters voted for him anyway.

I agree with Eric Meyer that we need to be vigilant and fight for democracy at every level. Do not give up just because you are lazy. Democracy is fragile. If you don’t work for it, you will lose it.

Brian Stucky
Goessel