Taking Democracy for Granted

With one of the craziest elections ever making daily headlines, it may seem that democracy has never been stronger, but there's more to a strong democracy than voting. Voting is important, but lots of facist states hold elections too. Nazis, facists, anybody can hold a vote. But say if that vote can be ignore, or overruled by some one like a supreme court, what does it really mean?

I just finished a book titled, THE END OF AMERICA by Naomi Wolf. As the title might hint, she's a little screechy and militant, but she makes some good points about how it's easy for democracies to fall into a fascist state without even realizing it, something she calls a facist shift. She cites history (Hitler, Stalin Mussolini)to demonstrate that there are really 10 steps by which democracy shuts down and Junior has made facist advances in all these areas. Right now, I'm thinking back to Animal Farm by Orwell to mentalize how these steps work, but it's not hard to come up with several impeachable offenses from Junior that work as well.

The 10 Steps
1. Invoke an External and Internal Threat
2. Establish Secret Prisons
3. Develop a Paramilitary Force
4. Surveil Ordinary Citizens
5. Inflitate Citizens Groups
6. Arbitrarily Detain and Release Citizens
7. Target Key Individuals
8. Restrict the Press
9. Cast Criticism as "Espionage" and Dissent as "Treason.
10. Subvert the Rule of Law